It must be difficult to write a romantic suspense novel. I base this statement on how very few good ones there are out there. California Moon by Catherine Lanigan is not one of the good ones.

Shannon Riley is a lonely woman who lives in abnormal isolation and who dedicates her every waking moment to her job as a nurse. One day a man is brought in to the Louisiana hospital who was beaten so badly, he is in a coma. The patient, whose identity is unknown, is suspected of murder. Shannon cares for the man, while an unusually efficient (or so we are told) rookie cop named Ben Richards guards the door.

Shannon grows strangely close to the unconscious man. She talks to him, tells him all her dreams, promises that they’ll spend Christmas together, refers to him as “my special guy,” and even kisses him. Meanwhile, and this is one of many incomprehensible things that occur in this story, Ben falls in love with Shannon.

Christmas arrives. The patient comes to, leaps to his feet, seizes a hypodermic syringe, and threatens to inject air into Shannon’s jugular if she doesn’t do what she’s told. His name is Gabe Turner and he’s fleeing from a Colombian drug cartel and its various minions, which is to say almost everyone else in the book. He escapes from the hospital, easily eluding Ben and taking Shannon with him as hostage. Ben, who is actually a federal agent investigating the police department’s connections with that very same drug cartel, hunts for them.

There are so many things wrong with this book that I hardly know where to begin. For one thing, all three main characters – Shannon, Gabe, and Ben – have secret pasts. This makes the character development mighty sketchy. In fact, I never got to know who any of these people are. Then there’s Shannon’s weird obsessive attachment to the her patient: would a normal woman really find an incontinent, catheterized, droolingly comatose man attractive? Okay, almost everyone has fantasized about nursing a wounded hero back to health, but this guy is in a coma. She’s rolling his unresponsive body over to change the sheets. It isn’t romantic.

Nor is it romantic the way Shannon and Gabe’s relationship suddenly goes from fear-and-loathing to violently-in-love. This happens so abruptly and inexplicably that I actually flipped back and re-read the preceding chapters to see if I’d missed something. Not really. They were sort of growing to trust one another and Shannon had passed up an opportunity or two to escape, but that’s not much build up for true love. There is as much chemistry between these characters as there is between two paper dolls.

And then there’s all those Things That Don’t Make Sense that masquerade as pivotal plot points. A few examples out of many: I’ll bet it’s not that easy to inject an air bubble into the jugular vein of a struggling, screaming victim. Especially if you’ve been in a coma for over a month. The man shouldn’t have been able to get out of bed, much less escape with a strong, healthy, and reluctant hostage. Shannon and Gabe, as they travel across the country dodging Colombian assassins, corrupt policemen and good old Ben, leave a trail that a blind imbecile could follow. And the truth behind Shannon’s secret past is like icing on a rotten cake. I think Danielle Steel used this one – or one close to it – twenty years ago.

To sum up: the romance here is not romantic. The suspense isn’t suspenseful. The characters never rise above the level of cardboard cut-outs and the plot is a mess. The nicest thing I can say about California Moon is that it isn’t unreadably awful. And that was a pretty close call.