First of all, let me just say that Linda Howard is always an auto buy for me and while I might not necessarily always ‘love the latest book to bits’ I always love the craftsmanship she displays with her choice of words, how she shows us the developing relationship between her hero and heroine and how she develops a sense of place and time.
I would strongly recommend that if you read the back cover blurb you go no further than the first two paragraphs, which read:
No sooner has Bailey Wingate buried her wealthy older husband than she learns that he has left the bulk of his estate to her–and not to his scheming grown-up children. A short time later, whilst flying from Seattle to Denver in a small plane, Bailey nearly dies herself when the engine sputters–and then fails…
Luckily, Cam Justice, a sexy Texan pilot, manages to safely crash-land the aircraft. Stranded in the wilderness–and struggling to control her feelings for the ruggedly handsome man by her side–Bailey begins to wonder whether the crash was really just an accident.
Okay? Read no further in the back cover blurb because if you do it will thoroughly put you on the wrong expectation track as a reader. I can only imagine that whoever wrote the backcover blurb did so in a rush and perhaps off a synopsis that changed during the actual writing process of the full manuscript. Either that, or the balance of the story was cut from the manuscript and it was decided to end it (and, in my opinion, in a bit of a rush) when the two crash survivors return to civilisation.
I’ve read a few reviews of this book where the readers were disappointed in the story, but I reckon a lot of that disappointment stemmed from an expectation, created by the last paragraph in the back cover blurb, that there were a great many twists and turns still to come in the story.
I have to say, that having read the full back cover blurb, I had those same expectations too. I really enjoyed reading the book, though. Loved the character depictions, all of them, and loved the survival story too–and I would have been completely happy with just that if that’s all I was expecting. However, I was almost at the end of the book when I started to wonder ‘hey…what about the rest?’
Right, so here’s the misleading part of the back cover blurb. The bit that changes the story altogether into something else:
Sure enough, upon her return to civilisation, the body count starts to mount, along with Bailey’s suspicions: who tampered with their plane? Who is behind the string of murders? Trusting her life–and heart–to Cam, Bailey must outwit a killer who will stop at nothing to finish the job.
I think you can see a reader’s dilemma here. This last spurious paragraph leads you to believe there is so much more to the story than the crash, the survival, the rescue, the whodunnit. It implies there are murders, suspense, danger and probably a heart-racing finish to safety at the end.
The thing is, for me at least, this book didn’t need the murders, suspense, danger and heart-racing finish, although I would have liked the eventual discovery of whodunnit to have been a little more suspenseful (but that’s just the way I like it.) For me, UP CLOSE AND DANGEROUS, stands alone very well as a story between two people who had no reason to like each other much but who learn to depend upon one another and fall in love under very extreme circumstances. I still enjoyed the read, as I believe I’ll always enjoy anything written by Ms Howard, although I’m tempted to go with some form of block out tape through the bookstores to cover up the misleading paragraph in the back cover blurb.
Have you ever read a book before where the blurb was nothing like the story? How did it make you feel?
