Review: Bodyguard, by Suzanne Brockmann

   

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YOU CAN LOOK . . .
Threatened by underworld boss Michael Trotta, Alessandra Lamont is nearly blown to pieces in a mob hit. The last thing she wants is to put what's left of her life into the hands of the sexy, loose-cannon federal agent who seems to look right through her yet won't let her out of his sight.

BUT YOU BETTER NOT TOUCH . . .
FBI agent Harry O'Dell's ex-wife and son were tragic casualties in his ongoing war against organized crime. He'll do whatever it takes to bring Trotta down--even if it means sticking like glue to this blonde bombshell who unwittingly married into the mob. She needs him if she wants to stay alive. But staying alive is nothing next to the explosive attraction that threatens to consume them both--and puts them into the greatest danger of all . . . falling in love.

Genre: romantic suspense

Publishing date: December 1999 (February 2014 for the Kindle Edition)

Offensive content: mild violence and a few sex scenes, all towards the end of the book. Totally in context and not excessively graphic, but be warned

Review:

This was a OK book. Just Ok, which is kind of sad, because it could have been way, way better.

The plot was good and kept me interested until the end. The characters? Not so much. Both main characters were inconsistent and incredibly annoying.

Right from the beginning, Alessandra seemed to alternate between believing she was God's gift to men and being a concerned woman focused on adopting a disabled baby. I got tired of hearing about her sheer physical perfection and of having her more concerned with her clothes than with the fact that there's a prize on her head. I had trouble reconciling this woman with the one that shows up later in the book, which is capable of courage and hope.

 And I didn't like Harry either, I couldn't decide whether he was handsome or not, because in soma pages he's described as looking like a bum and on other he's the sexiest man Alessandra has even seen.

At the beginning of the book Harry repeats so much that Alessandra is smarter than she looks, that I was halfway expecting him to start making dumb blond jokes at any time. Oddly, after Alessandra dyes her hair brown, he doesn't think about it any more, so maybe the author actually believes hair color actually had some impact on her brain cells. And I hated Harry for the way he treated his kids. Even though that was an integral part of the story, it still irked me to have a main character setting such a bad example.

There are also other minor inconsistencies, such as when Harry and Alessandra are driving towards the nearest FBI office and expect to get there in under three hours. Fast forward a couple of lines and they are only fourteen miles from their destination.

The sex scenes are just OK too. Except for the first one, which takes about four pages and has the characters discussing almost their entire life. After a while I actually wanted to shout at them to just shut up and do the deed!

The secondary story between George (Harry's partner), his ex-wife(and boss at the FBI) and a stripper named Kim also fell kind of flat. The only character I really liked was Shaun, Harry's teenage son.

On a more positive note, even though it's an older book, it's not outdated in any way as far as I could tell.

Anyway, it's not a too bad book and I'm sure half the inconsistencies don't bother other readers (the 4.1 stars on Amazon cannot be a fluke), but it would still not be my first choice unless I had a lot of time on my hands and not much else to read.