Any love story that begins with the hero and heroine having sex – after knowing each other for only two hours – lowers my expectations by about 90%. For me, that’s a major Big Ick. Then, when these two same people end up working together as partner cops, I’m down another 5%. That’s a Compound Ick. When the hero turns out to be a genuine male chauvinist with a badge, there goes another 4% – and I’m still in Chapter One. And that’s a Big Compound Triple Salcow Ick.

Kelli Hatfield and David McCoy (the Hatfields and the McCoys – get it?), begin their relationship by having a one-night-stand. The feuding begins when they go to work the next day to find they’re partners (David’s last partner, a female, ended up in the hospital). The cover blurb touts David as a maverick cop and precinct Casanova but he turns out to be a dumb cop who will indiscriminately boink anything in skirts. Kelli just wanted to throw caution to the wind and not be herself for one night, so she slept with David and now never wants to see him again.

David, who breaks every Police Force rule and is never suspended, wants to have sex with Kelli again, but he can’t get her to talk to him. He shows up at her place, they argue, then have another night of sex. Kelli is determined to prove she’s a good cop, so she volunteers for a special task force to go undercover to find the D.C. Executioner (he started out just being the D.C. Degenerate, but when he started killing women, he got better billing). Also on her mind is solving the eighteen year old mystery of who murdered her mother. Her father is a D.C. police chief, but he never solved the crime.

We know little of David, except he seems to have no ambition in the police force except to have sex with Kelli as often as he can. His father and brothers are all in some form of police work. He is the youngest of many hunky brothers, all of whom have their own stories told as part of the Magnificent McCoy Men series. I’ve not read any of the other books and probably won’t based on my experience here..

The only time You Only Love Once gets interesting is when Kelli is researching her mother’s death. Other than that, there’s not much here. The serial killer is mentioned a couple of times, but crack detective work doesn’t nail him because there isn’t any (crack police work). David and Kelli could be accountants or fandango dancers for all the difference it makes. A police procedural, this is not.

The humor is meager and contrived. The prose is often purple:

“Then Kelli cried out and that peace imploded, like a window bowing inward, then cracking and scattering into crystalline pieces on the other side. Pieces that swirled up and up until they were out of sight in the dark night sky.”

Geez, somebody get a broom; my orgasm made a real mess in here.

The mystery, such as it is, is tied up far too neatly and too quickly. The things I look for in a good book are just not here, but if you don’t care about a mystery and enjoy plastic people who rarely have a truly intimate conversation, and if you don’t care whether a man and woman care about each other when they have sex, then You Only Love Once is your ticket. Except for a sweet dog named Kojak, this one’s a miss.