Dark of the Night by Dee Davis works as a satisfyingly engaging mystery/thriller but sadly, despite the gratuitous number of graphic sex scenes, remains a rather tepid romance. Riley O’Brien is the daughter of Senator Carter O’Brien, a Clinton-esque presidential candidate from Atlanta. Riley’s mother and sister died tragically almost twenty years earlier, and so the burden of supporting her father’s ambition and acting the perfect daughter falls solely on Riley’s shoulders.

Jake Mahoney is an investigative reporter who has been on the case of an apparent trial-tampering scandal which seems to have led to the deaths of Atlanta’s ADA and Chief of Police. Jake meets Riley when he agrees to cover a political rally at an abortion clinic for a friend. Not only do the sparks fly, but Jake saves Riley from a car bomb. Was the bomb aimed at Riley for political reasons, or was it aimed at Jake to keep him from investigating further? Ah, the mystery begins.

For Jake and Riley it’s lust at first sight, but as a senator’s daughter Riley isn’t free to have an indiscriminate affair with a local reporter. However, even though her father’s chief aide tries to keep Jake from seeing Riley because of the upcoming presidential election, Riley decides from out of the blue that now is the time to live her own life and make her own choices. Jake and Riley begin to suspect that Jake’s investigation is somehow linked with Riley’s tragic past. The question of what really went on twenty years ago, and how it is connected to Riley’s family and the Chief of Police, is an enjoyable puzzle. Identifying the villains is not very difficult; more intriguing is the mystery of exactly what evil things were done and why. Since this is a suspense-thriller, more people die before we finally get to the bottom of the mystery.

If this book were marketed as just a mystery, I’d have given it a higher grade. But it’s not. The spine reads “Contemporary Romance” and thus I was hoping to see some relationship development. Nada. The only apparent reason for Jake and Riley to get together is to advance the plot. To demonstrate the romance, Jake and Riley have hormonally-charged arguments and make-up sex at least three times, in increasingly implausible times and places. For a reporter and a politician’s daughter, their irresponsible behavior seems ridiculously out of character. Their overblown dialogue and overly melodramatic internal musings on the state of their relationship don’t make sense considering they’ve known each other less than a month. The sex scenes are hot, but with no emotional connection to the characters I found myself skimming them to get back to the mystery plot. While I did ultimately enjoy Dark of the Night, it was mostly despite the main characters, and definitely not as a romance.