Gwyn Cready, who usually writes time-travel, switches to contemporary romance here and ends up preaching to the choir as her literary critic heroine delves into the murky waters of romance and finds out (gasp!) literary merit can be found there.

Vanity Place critic Ellery Sharpe has just written a piece savaging romance novels in general and popular hit Vamp in particular. Unfortunately, the publisher of the mega-selling vampire novel is the paramour of the Vanity Place publisher, Ellery’s boss.

Threatening to end their sexual liaison, she demands that Ellery write a retraction. Instead, her boss tells Ellery to write a puff piece about romances featuring Vamp, its publisher, and the entire line. Oh, yes, and Ellery should take photographer Axel Mackenzie with her as she researches the piece.

Once hard-living and even harder-partying Axel, who’s previously had a relationship with Ellery that she abruptly broke off without telling him why, desperately wants this assignment to succeed since he’s a little short of cash to buy a brewery where he wants to become a brew master. To help Ellery, he buys three romances, two recommended by one of his older sisters, and gives them to her.

As they head to Pittsburgh, scene of their broken affair and also setting of the popular vampire novel and its fan bar with appropriately titled drinks, Ellery sulks about having to write the romance novel piece and refuses to read such trash, only reluctantly delving into it. Readers will recognize Vamp as a pastiche of Twilight, just as they will also know Cready’s references to Kiltlander as not very heavily disguised plot points from Outlander by Diana Gabaldon.

It’s not until she and Axel travel to Scotland, to the place where Kiltlander takes place that Ellery starts to understand the literary worth of romances. She’s especially impressed by the women and men in a romance reading group, and a noted German scholar, none of whom to her dismay will tell her how Kiltlander ends.

The scholar, Dr. Albrecht, gets the dubious pleasure of being the one to question Ellery’s unfounded beliefs about romances and also preach to the choir. Since readers are already reading a romance (and probably read others as well) why does Cready go into such a long discussion proving that romances are not only a viable type of reading, but also in some instances, literary? We’ve already worked out what she’s saying for ourselves, so we don’t need such a long, drawn out explanation. We are the believers. And this interlude breaks up the narrative so much as to become hopelessly didactic.

As they say in the late night television ads, but wait, there’s more. As Axel and Ellery work out their personal problems and become closer, the book’s tone begins to edge closer to Cready’s home ground of time travel romance. In fact, when Axel and Ellery have sex on a mound where Kiltlander is said to have taken place, readers will almost expect one or the other of the characters to zip into the past.

While much of the book is funny and the basic story between Axel and Ellery is poignant, the problems I’ve described in the last two paragraphs are enough to keep the book from being near the Outlander class. Unfortunately, it isn’t the right book to give non-romance readers either.