Bea Reviews Curved Lines by Jodi Redford, Merryn Dexter, et al

Publisher: Jodi Redford
Source: the publisher in exchange for an honest review
Release Date: July 22, 2016
Buying Links: Amazon* | ARe* |  iTunes* | Barnes & Noble
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Blurb from goodreads:

Get k(ink)y with ten sizzling hot book boyfriends! These sexy, curve-loving, tattooed bad boys will steal your hearts and more in this all-new novella collection brought to you by USA Today and bestselling authors.

Acquired Taste – Dee Carney
When celebrity chef August Jaeger mixes it up with a curvy food blogger, they both realize what they want isn’t on any menu.

Dirty Deeds – Allie Cooke
Four days, a million dollars, the performance of a lifetime…but what happens when they stop faking it? Dirty Deeds ain't always dirt cheap.

Scorched Desire -- Lexxie Couper
When a Harley-riding hunk literally sweeps her off her feet, Jilly Parker finds herself transported to a world of dragon shifters,
carnal lust, and fated love.

Pretty In Ink – Merryn Dexter
Sexy, sweet Aubrey Jensen is everything a semi-reformed bad boy could want – but sometimes getting what you want doesn’t give you what you need.

Hot Tamale – Tilly Greene
Derek Schrizer is a retired Marine looking to get a new tattoo, not reconnect with his first love, the curvy sexy Cat.

Waking Up – Kathryn Lively
A chance encounter forces a plus-sized woman with dormant dreams to wake up and find her own Happily Ever After.

Marked By Ice – Dawn Montgomery
His only job is to protect her at all costs, but who will protect the big bad wolf’s heart once he gets a taste of her sweet lips?

Like a Boss – Quinn
Proving she’s more than a smart mouth and sexy curves would be a hell of a lot easier if she wasn’t so distracted by her sexy new boss.

Kinky Curves – Jodi Redford
The queen of dirty talk. The king of grind. Love is about to get real filthy.

Another Man’s Treasure – Dee Tenorio
A widowed actor and single dad pulls out all the stops to show a single mom just how well a woman can be treasured.

Review: Hunger Aroused by Dee Carney

Book Blurb:  Jasmine is sick in bed when a sexy stranger breaks in and reveals she's suffering an irreversible case of vampirism. And because her turning wasn't approved by the Council, he must kill her once the transition is complete. In the meantime, the executioner offers to ease her torment with chocolate, hot peppers or sexual release. Fortunately for them both, Jasmine's kitchen is bare...

Corin's honor demands he do his duty, but he cannot execute the lovely woman while any part of her humanity remains. He must also find-and kill-her sire. Jasmine denies ever having contact with a vampire, causing Corin to question the justice of his orders. Sensing his hesitation, the Council dispatches another executioner, forcing the pair to make a run for it. 

Every hour they spend together-every sensual encounter they share-finds them growing closer. Now Corin will have to choose: kill the woman he loves, or go against everything he believes to set her free.

My thoughts: The first paragraph of the book blurb caught me eye and had me laughing out loud in the library. I knew I had to read this story. Unfortunately, the story did not meet my expectations. The blurb starts out humorous and then gets serious. The book starts out serious and stays there. There is little humor in the story; the story itself does progress in the fashion described by the blurb so that was accurate but I expected humor and also heat.  I got neither.

I have to say that Carney's writing style really put me off. It's choppy, full of sentence fragements. One paragraph will consist of nothing but one sentence fragment after another, making it difficult, for me anyway, to read and to follow. It really disrupted the flow of the story; I would find myself mentally re-writing fragments or whole paragraphs into something that made sense. Then there would be passages that were grammatically fine but just didn't hold my attention. Over the course of five days, I would constantly pick it up and put it down; finishing the story was a struggle for me. The last quarter of the story, approximately, was when I got involved and I finished that in one sitting.

That last bit is when the excrement hits the fan and the action really begins. Up until then, I was having a hard time really caring what happened, if Jasmine lived, if they had a HEA, etc. I liked the ending, it was a mix of predictable and surprising.

We get several scenes of Corin in the past, before and after he becomes a vampire. I liked him in those scenes and I felt for him but whenever the action shifted back to the present, he became stiff, a cardboard character. Jasmine seems like she could be your next door neighbor, she comes across as likable but I could never quite connect to her. I think the story length was part of the problem; Carney needed more time to develop the characters and make them less cardboard.  Instead, they are stock characters - Jasmine is the workaholic adult orphan too busy to make friends or have a life, and that hasn't changed by story's end. Corin is the brooding, alpha male scarred by his past. We do see some slight change in him, but not enough. In addition, it wasn't explained to my satisfaction why Jasmine needed to be executed simply because she was turned vampire without the ruling council's permission. I understood going after her sire, the vampire who turned her, but no reasonable explanation was given for the council's decree to kill the innocent progeny.

I mentioned earlier that I never felt the heat between Jasmine and Corin. They have plenty of scenes where they make out or have sex but to me, it was all insert Tab A into Slot B. The erotic scenes just didn't feel erotic to me, and that's a fairly large component of the novella.

The story has promise but Carney fails to deliver.

Publisher: Carina Press

Release Date: Nov. 8th, 2010

This review was first published at Book Lovers Inc. I received this as an e-galley from NetGalley.