Review: Loved the premise, strong beginning, middle, weak ending.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 16, 2014
Scarlett is a young successful woman that makes her living 'cleaning up' messed up rock stars. Ones that are drinking, doing drugs, sleeping around, not making music, not showing up - generally, just messed up.Her newest client is Tarin, a young successful musician that desperately needs help as he is spiraling out of control.Scarlett is great. She is smart, beautiful, strong, independent, perceptive, etc.Tarin is also great for a messed up guy. He is talented, gorgeous, perceptive, remorseful, quick to understand his problems and wants to fix them.The whole process of Scarlett working to get Tarin back on track is written in great detail and fun to follow. She is a kick-butt kind of woman, and it works.The side characters are also interesting, they provide great background and make the whole story interesting.Then about 73% into the book, the story takes a bit of a dive.Some secrets are revealed that (surprisingly) causes Scar to spiral. I understand the author's need to make Scar vulnerable and create a need for her to be 'taken care of' and to shake her out of her need to keep from falling in love again.But the circumstances of her downward spiral isn't spiral-worthy. For a woman who takes no crap from anyone, rebounds from bruised ribs with aplomb, and can talk 250 pound men into puddles - it just didn't make any sense at all. She makes a total 180 degree switch over something that truly didn't seem to be such a horrible secret.Then after that weird situation, Tarin makes a huge life altering decision that I am not sure why it was necessary to create such a set up in this book. I think they have enough issues in their lives, and didn't need to add more 'stuff' to it. But I guess the author thought it would endear us to Tarin - I just the situation contrived and unnecessary.I thought the epilogue could have been more about them being together on the road, how she continues her job, but in a different capacity. I thought that it was totally unrealistic what happens with Scott - he is WAY to young.This book has a couple of hot love scenes.No cliffhanger.It's a standalone.A HEA.No major angst, nor major villains that go around killing or kidnapping people.What was strong about this book?- for the most part of the book, the characters. Even though Tarin was so messed up, he worked really hard to turn his life around- humor: there are so laugh out loud parts of this book. Mostly due to Scar and Scott's interaction (Scott is her assistant/pseudo little brother)- premise. I loved the premise. It was a great idea. Plausible too.- dialogue is great. Like to hear characters interact and not read about how they did. Play it out for us. Way more enjoyable- love that this is a standalone book! Amen!!! No part 2, part 3, etc.- HEAWhat was a bit weak about this book?- the ending piece. Scar falls apart towards the end and it did not make sense.- the characters' attraction builds up pretty quickly. Since it was written in Scar's POV, it was a bit difficult to understand where the attraction from Tarin was coming from and so fast- Tarin big decision at the end. This book didn't need it- Would have loved a bit more description of Taring writing songs, or performingSo 4+ stars for the first 73% of the book, 2 1/2 stars for the rest.