With Her Last Breath
Grade : D

With Her Last Breath is a book I'd never have finished had I not been required to in order to write this review. After the first few chapters, I would have gladly set it aside - okay, hurled it in disgust - and moved on to something else. The beginning of the book is, quite simply, terrible, overwrought, badly written and full of clunky exposition. It gradually gets a little better and winds up being - well, not good, but not terrible either. Okay - not as terrible.

We open with Maggie Chantel trying to coax an abused dog to come with her. The dog belongs to Brent Templeton, the man who destroyed her sister. Don't worry about forgetting that little fact, because Maggie thinks to herself how he "destroyed her sister" about twenty million times in the first few chapters. It seems Templeton became obsessed with Maggie, and when she didn't respond to his overtures, he seduced her sister Glenda, got her hooked on drugs, destroyed her marriage and then killed her. Having used up Glenda and spit her out, he's still focused on Maggie. See, he's a bad, bad man. He even abused his dog, just in case you had any doubt just how baaaaad he is. Maggie, on the other hand stopped in the middle of running for her life to save his dog, so we know she is Good. Maggie explains all this by telling it to the dog in the prologue. Nothing like lazy exposition to get the book off to a bad start.

Next we meet Nick Alessandro, who is running "from the past, from his guilt and his dead dreams. Yet they tangled in the late April air and caught him." No, he really is running, literally. Nick blames himself for failing to force his wife to wear a helmet while riding on his motorcycle. Naturally, mother and unborn child were killed in an accident as a result. Sad? Sure. Until we learn this happened twelve years ago. And he's still self-flagellating, having not gotten over it one bit. Twelve years? Man, move on already. Meanwhile, as Nick is running, Maggie comes driving up in her van and, admiring his fine male behind, decides to tail him for a while. No, really. He's jogging and she's slowly following him in her van. Is that not creepy? In between the long passages where she's ogling his body, there's another brief reference to "the powerful man who had caused her sister's ruin and death," just in case the reader managed to forget it in the three pages since the prologue ended.

Nick and Maggie eventually meet, and he recognizes her as the woman who intruded on his torment that morning. He sets her up with a room above his parents' restaurant, his parents being the usual sweetly overbearing Italian mama and papa, who are at least a nice alternative to mopey Maggie and Nick. Maggie finds work as a personal trainer and tries to feel safe, knowing that Templeton is still in pursuit. Meanwhile, Celeste, the local pyschic of Blanchfleur, Michigan, senses that Maggie will bring death to to the town.

AAR's review of London's first romantic suspense (When Night Falls) describes that book as having too much plot. If anything, this book doesn't have nearly enough to sustain its length. For more than the first half of the book, London shows the villain seething and simmering with rage back in California. And seething. And simmering. And doing nothing but seething and simmering. Every fifteen pages or so we see Templeton thinking about how he's going to get Maggie. He's going to make her say she loves him with her last breath before he kills her. Boy howdy, he's going to get her. And you know what? He's going to get her. You know what else? Oooooh, he's going to get her. Meanwhile, he gets nowhere in actually, oh, getting her. He makes no progress, yet he's not about to let us forget that, yes, he is going to get her. These scenes were likely meant to create tension, but they're merely repetitive, pointless and grating. I didn't care whether or not he did. I just wanted him to stop thinking about already.

While the story is slow and repetitive, the latter half is less aggravating. Nick and Maggie settle into the usual tentative romance between tortured characters. The suspense plot is so ridiculously protracted that there's plenty of time for the love story to develop. Those readers who don't mind if the suspense is drawn out as long as there are plenty of character scenes may have more patience with this story than I did. It does have a few nice moments, and the story works far better as a romance than it does as suspense. While the characters aren't totally unsympathetic - Maggie in particular has been through torment of practically biblical proportions that it's hard not to feel some pity - both are so tortured they're almost aggressively abrasive and unlikable. The most sympathetic character in the book is Celeste, whose premonitions of death lead her to a course of action that only she thinks is right. The plot gradually, very gradually, picks up some momentum, but this is still one of those books where the villain spends too much time skulking needlessly instead of getting down to business, even once he's found her. There are a few thinly developed characters that seem like filler, including one London inexplicably keeps telling us is not really bad despite one scene after another wherein the person is as hateful as possible. Are we supposed to really care whether this person is finally redeemed in one short scene after being horrible for the rest of the book?

With Her Last Breath isn't as terrible as its beginning, which isn't saying much. Anyone who can make it past the opening chapters may be rewarded with a somewhat moving romance, but this one remains a lump of coal rather than a diamond in the rough.

Reviewed by Leigh Thomas
Grade : D

Sensuality: Warm

Review Date : July 9, 2003

Publication Date: 2003

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