Midnight Run by Lisa Marie Rice

Claire Parks has been very sick, but she's fine now—just fine—and ready to paint the town red. Well, pink. On her first excursion into the wild world of dating, she nets Bud, a tall, sexy, good-looking lumberjack. She won him fair and square, her prize for not dying. But after a weekend of wild sex, she discovers he's not what she thinks he is.

Undercover police officer Lieutenant Tyler "Bud" Morrison can't believe his eyes. What's a 'princess' doing in a dance club known for its rough trade? She needs rescuing, and rescuing women is what Bud does best. He saw Claire first—finders keepers. After a weekend of the hottest sex he's ever had, he's definitely keeping this one. When trouble comes her way, he pulls out all the stops to protect her. Except Claire doesn't want Bud at her back. She wants him in her bed.

Aggravating disappointment. Eons ago, when I first discovered Ellora’s Cave, I purchased Rice’s Midnight Man. I thought it a very good book. Well written, engaging characters and plot, sexy. It gave me hope for the publisher and the electronic format. Shortly thereafter, I read a blogger review of Midnight Run and, based on the reviewer’s gush, I put it on my TBR list.

Eons later, I used a B&N gift card to purchase it in print. I was that confident that I would like it. Well, first I ordered Midnight Man by mistake. Sent it back—a pain in the ass—and correctly ordered Midnight Run. Got it and hated it. A DNF. So some aggravation—my fault—and a huge disappointment.

Side by side, I’d swear two separate people wrote these two books. I can’t fathom how Rice produced a solid, well-written (key here) story in one and failed to even construct a believable tale, let alone a readable paragraph in the other. Midnight Run features a cop hero with no history of emotional commitment and a heroine who has spent her life up to this moment battling a life-threatening illness. He prefers marathon sex with experienced women that make no emotional demands. She is a virgin in both the physical sense and the emotional. IOW, she was too busy fighting for her life, sheltered by an overly protective father, to grow and mature much beyond girlhood. Rice brings them together the night they meet.

So, he doesn’t do virgins. But he does her the night they meet. His thoughts (of which we see too much of) keep flitting back to a waitress—with little going on upstairs—that will bang him without strings. But he bangs the virgin heroine, and falls for her, despite her own glaring immaturities. The heroine is desperate to take control of her own life, moving out from under her father’s stifling protectiveness. But what draws her to the hero is his protectiveness. Inconsistencies galore.

Add too much info dumping in the first 20 pages (including an entire history of his investigation into Russian mobsters that I had to reread eight times to understand), abrupt shifts in POV, far too much rambling internal thought and paper-thin characterization…and I just couldn’t finish it.

If I hadn’t spent so much energy just trying to get the book, I would have likely moved on without reviewing it. I rarely waste time reviewing (buzzing) a book that I don’t like. But in this case, I was aggravated enough to waste a few more minutes writing it up.

Will I try another Rice book? Guess there is a 50/50 chance. If you can recommend a good title, of Midnight Man’s caliber, I would welcome it.