Flynn Daly is the oh so adorably inept heroine of Crazy In Love. She is so silly and immature, I’m surprised she knows how to breathe. However, the hero Jake Tucker is a wonderfully nice guy and deserves a better match than Little Miss Doofus.

Mr. Daly is a hard working real estate tycoon. His daughter Freya works 24/7 and lives on nicotine and caffeine. His other daughter Flynn, though, did not inherit the family work ethic. Flynn is about to turn thirty and as the story begins, she has quit her umpteenth job and is living in a slum neighborhood in South Boston. While they love her, her father and sister are fed up with her feckless ways and so they give her a job to do.

Great Aunt Esther owned an inn, The Goodhouse Arms, in Scheintown, New York. Esther recently died and left the inn to Mr. Daly, but since he is too busy to go there himself, he wants Flynn to go to Scheintown and determine the inn’s condition, how profitable it is, etc. Flynn doesn’t want to go. She hates small towns, she hates nature, and she doesn’t know anything about profit and loss – she really doesn’t know much about anything – but she has no choice, so off she goes.

The Goodhouse Arms turns out to be a beautiful, well run inn just dripping with history and ambiance, and it boasts a chef who is so wonderful that she could make Wolfgang Puck hang up his saucier. The inn also comes with a hot and sexy bartender, Jake Tucker, and a ghost. Yep, Aunt Esther is haunting the place and doing her best to communicate with Flynn.

Jake, who used to be a policeman, thought the world of Aunt Esther and believes there was something unnatural about her death. Jake suspects local businessman Gordon Chase. Jake has issues with Chase and so did Esther. There is evidence that Chase was into some very shady financial doings and Esther found out. But finding proof of Chase’s shady doings is going to be difficult. Let’s face it – Flynn isn’t a whole lot of help.

When the plot was focused on the mystery behind Esther’s death and the death of another secondary character, I zipped through it happily enough. However, when Flynn made her way on stage, I couldn’t help but groan. What a total ditz she was (she’s in insult to all the ditzes in the world! Other ditzes are brainiacs in comparison to Flynn. I guess we were supposed to find her cute and winsome – Jake did (and I still can’t figure out why). But I never succumbed to her charms. The author threw in some babble about Flynn never having gotten over her mother’s death, but it didn’t soften my bad opinion of her. If ever anyone needed a life coach, Flynn did. She was terminally dense.

For me to enjoy it, romantic comedy must be at least somewhat grounded in reality. Jennifer Greene is the best in the business at writing ditz heroines who, despite their outward kookiness, can function in the world. When I read one of Jennifer Greene’s books, I end up laughing with the character. Flynn was so silly that all through Crazy In Love, I kept laughing at her. In the last chapter Flynn showed some signs of growing up, but it was far too late for me. And I just can’t stand cute ghosts in stories (I’m sure Esther was a nice lady when she was alive, but she was a darn annoying ghost). If you can tolerate ditz heroines and kooky ghosts, you may like this book better than I did. If not, though, you might get as grumpy as I did as a result of reading it.