See, there’s a rich guy who runs a company that builds airplane engines. His company hires a beautiful marketing director who’s been badly burned in the past. They would fit nicely together if it weren’t for a bitchy ex-girlfriend, a nasty uncle, and industrial spying/rumor-mongering.

Sounds like an interesting plot, doesn’t it? Well – it’s not. Why is the ex-girlfriend in romance so often a conniving, evil bitch? What does that say about the hero other than that he is a poor judge of character and is often not so nice himself?

Leaving the bitch aside for the moment, what do we have left? Ah, the nasty uncle trying to wrest away the company with a proxy fight. Well, this makes for a sound premise, if you want to read a general fiction piece centered on business. That’s not why I choose romance.

Okay, let’s get rid of all the extraneous stuff. What’s left? Not terribly much. Lots and lots of hot looks and missed opportunities. Psychological profiling of why the hero is the way he is. Much suffering by the heroine before her entire life seems destroyed. She goes from hot-shot marketing director to unemployed woman who has to sell her car to buy a train ticket out of town.

The “stuff” this book relies on to build suspense and capture the interest of the reader seems melodramatic in this day and age. By writing the heroine as highly educated and a high-level professional, the author seems to be trying to cloak the dated problems with political correctness in an effort to make it a ’90’s kind of story.

Do men really have official “mistresses” these days, especially when they are unmarried? Is an inter-organizational relationship between two high-level executives really going to destroy a company (okay, so this could be problematical) or prevent a bid in the political arena? Would anyone agree to be “engaged” to prevent a scandal that isn’t a scandal? The obvious answer is no, no, no!

Should you read this book? The obvious answer, is no, no, no!