Bloodlust by Sandra Brown

I won’t lie, I was sucked in. Read this in about 24 hours. Brown knows how to keep the pace fast and the tension high. But if you’ve read Brown’s work before, you’ll find this is pretty much cut and paste.

• cardboard heroine damsel who pretends not to be a doormat but is
• arrogant, entitled hero whose toxicity is romanticized
• holing up somewhere off the grid
• one dimensional big bad
• it was all an act

Mitch wasn’t the biggest asshole hero Brown’s written, but I think he disturbed me more because he didn’t seem to consider himself an asshole. He joked about being a prick and was fully aware when he was out of line—but he always did it anyway. Because the end justifies the means. It’s okay to break rules and cross lines when you’re The Hero trying to defeat The Villain and woo The Damsel. It’s so much easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, especially when you’re handsome, charming, and in a position of authority or power.

The way he treated Dylan was not okay. In real life, he’d be a major creep, if not a convicted criminal. He sexually assaulted her, stalked her, harassed her, abducted her, tried to coerce her to commit crimes for him, lied to her by omission, and just generally wouldn’t take no for an answer. The sheer scale of emotional and psychological manipulation he was capable of made me uncomfortable.

Dylan wasn’t a threat to the big bad until Mitch involved her in the situation, without her consent, purely to try to wheedle information out of her he knew she couldn’t legally give him. In other words, her role in the story was entirely contrived. I didn’t believe for a second that Malone, a sociopath, voluntarily saw a therapist, or that he didn’t do or say anything that would alarm a therapist. Brown didn’t develop his character well enough to make that plausible—rather, she developed Malone in a way that made that implausible. His religious concerns felt silly, too. I acknowledge her attempt to make that baddie more complex, but it didn’t work.

Dylan wasn’t a character, her purpose was plot device and blow-up doll. An (unnecessary) obstacle Mitch had to overcome to reach his goal, and a plaything for his entitled amusement so the narrative had the vestige of a romantic subplot. She was professional, she was self-righteous, and she was beautiful. That was her entire personality. There was some irrelevant drivel about her being stiff and closed-up due to past trauma—but of course Mitch’s charm and animal magnetism (inside joke) was the cure.

It’s so hard for me to believe no one who worked on this novel realized how badly Mitch comes across. Did it not ring any alarm bells when he drew a straight line between showering with his 2 yo son and having shower sex? Please god, let that have been edited out of the final.

Two last points:

How Mitch realized who the big bad was. Give me a break. I’m assuming Brown couldn’t think of a way for him to find solid evidence, and she needed to give Dylan something to do, so Dylan helped Mitch access a memory of an irrelevant meeting and he just took his own general advice? And that gave him a specific answer that he was 100% convinced was right? So contrived.

Dylan deciding to go to her office. This is where I decided she wasn’t just a damsel, she was too stupid to live. It’d already been established that the big bad was looking for her and that he would prefer her dead, so of course it made absolute sense for her to leave safety and go where she’s most likely to be found, by so doing making a heavily pregnant woman and small child more vulnerable as well. All to look for unnecessary information. I was shocked Mitch and John weren’t angrier with her.

So Brown’s writing style might be compelling, but the narrative was lazy and the characters disgusting.

Note also that this novel shares characters with her last novel, Blood Moon. I labeled Blood Moon as read but I remember none of it. The characters weren’t familiar, the setting wasn’t familiar, and the only part of the plot I recall was the blood moon because title. I revisited my last few reviews for her books and couldn’t recall squat from those books, either. Guarantee you I also won’t remember this one, except perhaps for how bad it was.