So, here I am, still doggedly plowing through my ever-increasing hoard of books to be read. Some of those books are surprisingly good. Some of them are horrifyingly bad. And some of them fall somewhere squarely in the middle.
Sullivan's Last Stand is one of those middle-of-the-road books.
The plot is this: Bailey Flowers (I swear, that's her name) is a private investigator. She's taken over the Acme Detective Agency, and is running her own show. When her sister, Angelica, the spoiled and pampered little sister, turns up missing, Bailey goes to her old flame, Terrence Patrick Sullivan, also a private eye with his own firm.
It turns out that one of Sullivan's men, Hank Jackson, was working on a case Angelica brought to him. After a frantic answering machine message from Angelica, Bailey's sure Hank screwed something up, and she's coming to see Sullivan to get things straightened out.
And to try to figure out why their romance from last year ended so spectacularly. Why Sullivan insisted on shoving Bailey away, and completely withdrawing. Bailey wants to either be over him, or start over, and she's not really sure which.
Sullivan is a mercenary, or rather ex-mercenary, who's about to go back on the job. He botched a job years ago that got a woman killed. He holds himself personally responsible and intends to set things right. That means there can be no attachment to Bailey, whom he loves desperately, to distract him.
That's underneath. On top of this is the actual Intrigue of the Harlequin Intrigue line. Hank Jackson is also missing. His apartment's trashed. His report is missing photos, and there's a bottle of alcohol that the recovering alcoholic couldn't have had even if he'd fallen off the wagon, due to an allergy. It just gets more cliched from there, including the torrid plot-to-frame-people between Angelica's older, wealthy husband and his illegitimate daughter.
I was really rooting for Bailey and Sullivan, though. I admit it, I'm a sucker for a tortured hero, and Sullivan's about as tortured as they come. He also seems like a genuinely decent guy, and Bailey, despite the unfortunate name, is a decent woman.
It's a shame that these two characters were stuck in an overdone plot. It's a shame that the author used a means of getting them back together that made my threatening tears dry up in a gape of disbelief. It's as if an editor tapped the author on the shoulder and said, 'Happy ending, remember?'
It's a shame.
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