Review: Where was the story?
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 24, 2014
I started out thinking this wouldn't be a bad tale -- not that it was a terribly original premise, that early on, but at least it was a plot that I hadn't come across in the past fortnight.  Which is not something I can say for a lot of books these days, particularly in the romance sector.Then I realised that there was absolutely no mystery or question to the whole thing.  There was absolutely nothing stringing me on from page to page except a kind of "well, I started this, so I'm damned well going to finish it".  One could suggest that the question you're trying to answer goes something like, "What is Thomas' big secret?"  Except it's not a big secret at all, and if you have any brains you'll know both the question AND the answer after the first night they spend together.Which means that Thomas comes off as overly paranoid and melodramatic, traits that drastically hack to pieces the image he's meant to project of a successful, intriguing, charismatic man.  Who'd want a man so wrapped up in his own ego and the extraordinary weight of his inability to move on that he plays stupid, infantile head games all the time?  A man who apparently prizes Angel's honesty but doesn't practice it himself?For her part, Angel is thoroughly one-dimensional.  She's been plucked from the streets and thrown into a life of wealth and luxury, and ... that's about where it ends.  She doesn't develop.  She doesn't help Thomas develop.  There isn't any complexity to her at all, nor to how she affects her surroundings.  She's the least interesting female heroine I've read about in a LONG time.I'm sorry, but no, there isn't "more to Thomas" at all, and there wasn't much to Angel to begin with.On the plus side, the writing wasn't terrible -- at least, not consistently.  There were a couple of genuinely beautiful lines which led me to hope that I'd at least be reading something lovely in a linguistic sense, but unfortunately that hope was sabotaged over and over by the ridiculous plot, and some really BAD lines as counterweight.