Good Girls Don’t reminded me a bit of Sex In the City. As I’m not a fan of the show, I didn’t warm up to St. John’s lead characters. Call me old-fashioned, but I think that there needs to be something more to a relationship than good looks and great sex, plus the heroine’s job was a major turn off for me.

Colette (Lettie) Campbell works for a company called My Alibi, which is in business to provide cover stories for its clients. For example, one of her clients is a salesman who has a fondness for strippers. When he’s supposed to be at a sales convention, Lettie pretends to be an employee at the convention center and she lies to his wife for him. Lettie works for My Alibi so she can save up for what she really wants – her own lingerie store. This put me off right from the beginning because it’s not as though she lives in a small town and has to work over the phone because there are no other jobs. Lettie lives in Atlanta; she is smart, attractive and well educated. Surely she could find a less distasteful, well-paying job in such a big city. And there are such things as business loans.

The story begins when Lettie’s sister Amy (who designs sex toys) asks her to lie for her friend Erika. Erika is supposed to be in training for her summer job, but she’s really vacationing at the beach with her boyfriend and needs someone to lie to her uncle, also her guardian. The uncle turns out to be Bill Brannon, who was Lettie’s best and virtually only friend in high school. Bill is happy to see Lettie again and asks her out. Lettie is also happy to see Bill and puts on her best and skimpiest dress. It only takes him a few miles and he has her breasts out, her panties off and he’s giving her an orgasm on the interstate. Thank goodness for cruise control. The date consists of them going to Bill’s place and having wild sex.

In the meantime, Amy (who needs men when your job is testing sex toys?) is out at a bar where she runs into a co-worker, Landon Brooks, a handsome Texan. Relationship-phobic Amy finds herself mightily attracted to Landon but she thinks it’s because of the nature of his work (he develops pheromones for the company). When he and Amy have a contest as to who is best at tying knots in cherry stems with their tongues and he teaches her how to dance, she starts to re-think her ideas about the merits of men vs. sex toys.

Meanwhile back at the beach, Erika is finding out that Butch, her hottie biker boyfriend, is no prince in leather. He’s more interested in biking with his buddies than spending time with her and is a lousy lay to boot. While Butch is off biking one day, Erika runs into a really nice young college guy and kisses him a party.

If you like the Harlequin Blaze line, and if you like Sex In the City, I suspect you will love this book. I didn’t. I can’t bond with characters whose only thought is how to get a bigger, better orgasm. Amy and Lettie both began as very shallow characters only thinking of themselves and their own pleasure. If a man didn’t measure up, he was out. They did grow up and change during the book and finally realized that there’s more to a relationship than the physical. Amy especially changes and becomes a moe giving woman. But my first impression of Lettie didn’t change much. There’s some hint that their mother was distant and promiscuous and their life with her shaped their perception of the male sex, but it’s only a hint. I wish that the author had expanded on this.

There are a lot of love scenes in this book, most of them are nothing new, but I do have to mention the one between Amy and Landon. For most of the book Amy is hip, flip and brittle. You’d think she needs no one and wants no one. But when she finally gets intimate with Landon, she lets down her guard and becomes real and vulnerable. We see how she is simultaneously yearning for intimacy and fearful of it. When she makes love with Landon, he turns out to be a dream lover and a good man. It’s a sweet and hot scene.

But as I said, I never warmed up to Lettie (Bill was a sweetie though). The whole My Alibi was not only distasteful, but felt as though it was used to force a conflict between Lettie and Bill when he found out about it. She found another job very easily and I couldn’t help but wonder why she stuck with My Alibi for so long.

Had the emphasis been more on Amy and less on Lettie, no doubt I would have liked Good Girls Don’t much better. I wish Erika had been given more space as well. Fans of the modern, urban romance should enjoy this book, but I am more of a fan of “small is beautiful.”