Review: Dirty Trick
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 22, 2014
I love a good friends to lovers novel--especially when unrequited love is thrown into the mix--and while I was interested to read how the trope unfolds in DIRTY TRICK, I found that the story lacked the depth and fully formed plot of which I'd hoped.Patrick "Trick" Mathews has been in love with matchmaker Gracie Love since he first laid eyes on her. Interested in making her another notch on his bedpost, once he meets his new neighbor, he views her as more than just an object for his lust. For her part, Grace is equally attracted to Trick, but is fresh off a divorce from a similar playboy scoundrel and doesn't think her SWAT officer best friend would be interested in more than one night. Trick, figuring that there has to be a way to get his Gracie to see that his feelings are real and that they'd be perfect for one another, uses the talk-of-the-town Halloween party (and a mask) as his means for seduction. Gracie and "Catman" become an explosive item while Trick and Grace are left grappling with their relationship.Again, I was all for the plot, but the execution wasn't my cup-of-tea. The writing wasn't horrendous, but both the prose and dialogue between the characters seemed elementary. In some of the scenes, I felt like this was how the author "thought" men spoke to one another, which made the characters sound like high schoolers trying to be cool. Same for the conversations between the female characters. I found myself skipping paragraphs that were unnecessary, but there to pad the story so that it wouldn't only consist of a few pages of nothing. I didn't feel any sense of anything between any of the characters or have any interest in their relationships. The whole story was "meh," but that's only my perspective.