Some books just cry out for an editor. This first of the Bad Boys of Red Hook series cried out so loudly it’s amazing no one at Signet publishing heard or heeded the call.

When bar owner and former Brooklyn cop Pete has quadruple bypass surgery, Bree, who runs the Crow’s Nest Bar in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn with him, asks for help. She can’t do her job and take care of Pete’s youngest adopted child, Nikki, a ten-year-old fifth grader. Although she calls Pete’s adopted son Logan who tends a vineyard nearby, Logan calls another adopted son, Storm, who flies in from Auckland, New Zealand, where he designs yachts.

Storm and Bree have a history: He ran out before deflowering her years ago. The first third of the book consists of them sniping at each other while ostensibly watching Nikki. Storm says he’s capable of looking after his little sister even though he teaches the ten-year-old to drive and helps her register a stray dog she picks up in an alley, a dog Bree says Nikki shouldn’t adopt.

As Pete gets out of the hospital and returns to his apartment across the hall from Bree over the bar, Bree changes her tune and says she’s willing to have attachment-free sex while Storm is in town. Storm, who previously wanted just that, turns her down because he knows she’s not that kind of girl and it’s best that they hold off. Instead Storm decides to wine and dine her, borrowing a yacht he designed and taking Bree out for a sail then having a catered dinner brought in when they get back to port and finally spending the night with her — oh, yes, and having sex.

Meanwhile, readers find out Pete has taken Nikki in because her mother said one of his adopted sons is Nikki’s father, but the mother won’t say which one. Pete thinks it might be Storm because of the way he left so unexpectedly ten years before.

Another subplot finds Bree engaged in making the Red Hook neighborhood safe, just as her killed-in-action cop father always wanted. She’s working with a shady developer who would like to be her lover.

Inconsistent Bree and cliché-ridden Storm are exactly what non-romance readers expect in romances. The overblown spiteful sniping between Bree and Storm that turns into doing “what’s best” for Bree and then their reversal into sexual passion are ludicrous given that Bree is twenty-eight and runs a bar while Storm is a little older and an award-winning designer with his own business.

Given all its flaws, however, the novel does have a glimmer of an interesting plot and potentially intriguing peripheral characters. But before these can emerge, a skillful editor would have to work some magic.