Tall, Dark and Off-Limits suffers from Harlequin Syndrome. You have your big, burly alpha man who avoids feelings and yells at Our Heroine until he wants to kiss her. You have your stubbornly feisty heroine who gets herself into deeper trouble because she wants to take care of her own problems or doesn’t trust him for outré reasons. No one communicates – everyone creases the sheets.  All those tropes means that you can see where this book’s going, and you may want to give the hero a wet willy.  But McKenna’s talents keep the home fires burning, making this a C instead of a D.

Ava Maddox, sister of Zack Austin’s best friend Drew Maddox (hero of book one in the series), works at her brother’s company as a PR consultant and social media manager while trying to launch her own boutique branding and marketing company, Blason. But what she really wants to do is direct and produce online video documentaries, and her channel has become successful and somewhat influential doing just that. No stranger to negative feedback, her social media was recently hacked, and she’s being swarmed by trolls. Normally she’d brush it off as yet more negativity.  But things have escalated, and now someone has figured out her home address and painted slut in giant red letters on the side of her garage after years of her company address being passed around in various internet backchannels. That’s enough to finally leave Ava feeling spooked and worried that she’s being stalked.

She needs help – the woman doesn’t even have security cameras on her property.  For his part, Zack is mad she didn’t come to him earlier; after all, he’s a professional security expert who works for her brother’s company, Maddox Hill, too, for heaven’s sake.  He worked his way up from his blue-collar roots thanks to a friendship spawned in the military with Drew, and is good at what he does.

Ava has a good idea of who her attackers might be – fans of former celebrity Colby Hoyt, who falsely accused his girlfriend of pushing him down the stairs and ended up in jail for abusing her and lying about his accident.  Ava made a documentary about Colby’s case and helped free his girlfriend, so his fanbase do not like her.  At all. That said, she has no proof to back up her suspicions.

Zack – angry at the people attacking Ava and still protective of her – decides Ava needs full-time protection. And who better to look out for her than himself?  So Ava and Zack head off to a trade fair together for a weekend with clients of hers. There’s one problem with that, of course – his long-simmering attraction to her.  Ava has always been an unobtainable sort of angel to him, the class difference between them too big.  He doesn’t know that Ava’s had a crush on him for years too.  But with their quarters being so close and the possibility of Ava’s stalker killing her looming over them, will they be able to translate tension and sex into true love?

Tall, Dark and Off Limits is a triumph of the author’s talent over some weak plotting choices.  I liked Zack, whose anger is driven by his protectiveness of Ava but who is otherwise very orderly and controlled and yet sweetly fond of her.  I liked Ava’s general sense of smarts and her determination to bring the truth to light and her sense of wry cheer.  Yet her stubbornness and his overprotectiveness made me weary. They’re both imperfect and vulnerable at moments that nearly make up for this. Most of their arguments feel intelligent and sensible, and their connection is tender and nice.  But they suck badly at communicating and make the worst possible presumptions about one another.

The stalker plot is just an excuse for Ava and Zack to get together, talk out their troubles and get horizontal. There’s no real sense of urgency about it after the first seventy pages.  A lot of time is spent on Zack’s jealousy over Ava’s long-term friendship with her ex, Craig.  There’s also Ava’s protective family, who frown on Zack’s designs for Ava. She, meanwhile, is experiencing deep trauma over the plane crash that killed her parents, which has left her with recurring nightmares and bouts of depression that cause her to pull away from Zack.

With all of this going on there’s little time for the stalking plot, and it generally ends up in the background for the bulk of the book only to resurface toward the end to provide a convenient fourth act breakup plot that really causes our hero and heroine to turn their brains off (incredibly ludicrously). The end result is that they both look painfully dumb. Guys, Ava is being stalked and her clients are being trolled the same way she is, why does Zack think she’s posting videos of the two of you getting intimate to the world wide web? Nothing about Ava’s character suggests she’d be into such manipulation, so why is Zack so dumb to think she would be?  Also, if one makes documentaries about dangerous people and you’re as rich as Ava, the least one can do is buy a RingCam.

These two plot points mar the logic of the book something fierce.  And it’s a shame, because the romance is good and the stalking story generally mysterious with a nice small surprise twist. McKenna is great at romantic suspense and her talent for characters and creating good is amazing.  But Tall, Dark and Off-Limits desperately needed a fourth act worthy of its characters to reach a recommendation.

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