Nothing to Fear

Karen Rose

I can't remember what it was, a few months ago, that had me champing at the bit to read this book as soon as it came out. Must have been a really good press release. In any case, it spun around the back corners of my mind until it finally came out, and a copy showed up for me at the library not long after. I'd completely forgotten it was a romance. No, excuse me, a novel a romantic suspense.

I'm not terribly sure what defines "romantic suspense" any more, but I'm guessing it's changed a whole lot from the days when Barbara Michaels laid Prince of Darkness on us all those years ago (and Dean Koontz was still writing gothics under a pen name). Nothing to Fear reads far more like a suspense thriller than it does a romance novel, unless you're in the middle of a sex scene. And even then, the writing has a far more distinct odor of an overly explicit Raymond Chandler than it does of dear, departed Dame Barbara. In fact, were I the acquisitions director at my library, I'd have dispensed with the idea of shelving this in romance altogether and found space for it wherever one keeps one's Rex Miller books.

The premise here is the kind of thing I've always halfway wondered if we'd get a Lifetime Original Move about-- woman kidnaps deaf child from rich parents and, thanks to some duplicity, manages to hide in the best place one could under the circumstances-- a shelter for battered women. The very political incorrectness of the idea is shocking. I love it. Enter romantic hero, a ruggedly handsome security consultant who's pressed into service as an amateur PI because he served with the kid's dad's late brother in Afghanistan. There's a lot more to it than that, but you know enough to know that tensions are strained. You've got your basic plethora of cops, lawyers, accomplices, distraught parents, and dead bodies. Yep, if it walks like a mystery, eats like a mystery, and showers like a mystery...

Even better, there's a decided lack of the kind of formulaic writing one finds in romance novels. It's been replaced with some of the formulaic writing one finds in genre mysteries, but you can't have everything. About the only vestige of the romance novel, aside from the sex scenes (which, I should note in passing, are certainly adequate enough to pass muster), is the frustrating inability of the hero and heroine to even think about communicating a couple of small points that would have made the book roughly half its size. One of these days, someone will write a love story about two people capable of talking to one another. It will be the best, and thinnest, romance ever written. Until then, you could do a lot worse then reading Karen Rose.