Review: A tale of friendship, love and deception
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 6, 2011
3.5 STARSWhile on a working vacation, Dr. Sarah Wright-Rosen and her husband Dan make the gruesome discovery of Sarah's boss Bobbi's body. Distraught over the discovery, Sarah is determined to prove that Bobbi did not die while riding drunk on a jet ski, as the official ruling states, but that foul play was involved. Dan is not thrilled with Sarah's determination. He is busy with his own problems at the hospital where he is a doctor, and can't be bothered to help with the investigation.  Back at her job teaching at Baltimore Metropolitan University, Sarah pursues her investigation, all the while dealing with her problems getting pregnant and leaning on her best friend and fellow teacher Izzy Ramirez.Izzy Ramirez has an agenda of her own, sexy and irreverent, she is the daughter of a South American mafia boss, mother of three children, has an active sex life with her husband and a boy toy grad student on the side.  What Izzy wants, Izzy gets, and no one stands in her way, not her husband, best friend, father, children, or lover.Sarah and Izzy's worlds collide taking them both in directions that neither would have anticipated and leading them into paths far from what they are comfortable with.Desire and Deception is a mystery, wrapped in erotica, all the while dealing with the everyday hopes, dreams and problems of two women who are friends but different as black and white.  Sarah is strong in her beliefs of right and wrong, a bit wimpy when it comes to her life with Dan, and nave beyond belief. Izzy has no beliefs in right and wrong, to her it's simple, she is what is most important, and will do whatever it takes to make sure everyone around her is on board with that thought. Sarah's husband is at times overbearing and arrogant, at other times loving and supportive, hard to get to know and even harder to like.  Izzy's husband is your typical Latin lover, sexy and strong except when it comes to dealing with Izzy, also hard to get to know and hard to like.  There are a number of supporting cast of characters; we don't get to know much about them other than how they relate to our two heroines. The story moves in and out of the mystery of Bobbi's death, Dan and Sarah's lives, Izzy and Tomas' lives and a few side trips to the seedy world of human trafficking.While the blurb for this book says it's a mystery and sort of discovery of themselves for Sarah and Izzy, make no mistake, Desire and Deception is thinly disguised erotica. There are many different plot lines going on at one time, too many to try to keep up with and you tend to just get lost in the business of it all.  There is no mention in any of the blurbs that you are about to read a book that is heavy on the erotica, this is quickly discovered not 3 or 4 pages into the book with an extremely graphic sex scene. Don't get me wrong, I read and enjoy erotica, I just didn't know that was what I was about to read. I suppose you cannot technically call this erotica; there is a plot line and an attempt at getting to know the characters outside of the bed. There was a decent mystery going on with Bobbi's death, but there was so much else going on to get into it, and just when you seemed to be settling down to the story, there would be a random sex scene thrown in. I actually had to put this book down twice and walk away to read something else, because I was just so overwhelmed with all that was going on I couldn't get into the rhythm of it. I think two decent books could have come out of this, one erotica, one a suspense thriller, but trying to combine the two just didn't work for me.  If you enjoy some steamy erotica, this is the book for you.Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team