Heart of Brass (Kate Cross) Chapters 7-11

The story-line continues to be very original and intriguing.  But there is a somewhat jarring dissonance in the seemingly dual character of the genre – the spy novel vs. the romance novel.  The author sometimes seems to have difficulty making up her mind which kind of book she’s writing and who her audience is.  Sometimes she seems to be writing for reasonably sophisticated adults who don’t mind a little sexual content mixed in; other times she seems to be writing for the stereotypically sex-starved romance reader; and occasionally she seems to be writing for a trashier, less mature reader.

“Arden arched from the waist, reaching for the lever that would free him to do whatever he wanted to her.  She was so eager for him that she didn’t even mind if he killed her, as long as he made her come first.”  Okay.  So, this is possibly common fare for a romance novel, but in a book that otherwise shows a lot of integrity, this seems to signal either that the author has suddenly lost respect for the reader, or that the reader should abandon respect for the character.  “Every inch of her wanted him desperately – to the point that she was ready to throw caution and caring to the wind.  But after seven years without her husband’s touch, it would not be making love if she took advantage of his immobility without trusting him completely; it would be what was so crudely referred to as ‘f***ing,’ and that was not how she wanted it to be between them…”  So now we’re phasing in and out of crudeness and respectability at random, it seems.

I’m no prude - it’s not the crudeness that bothers me.  It’s the inconsistency from one chapter to the next, from one page to the next, even from one paragraph to the next.  Again, maybe to a reader that is more familiar with the Romance genre, this doesn’t seem unusual; I don’t know.  “He remembered the noises she had made in the bath, and how he had wanted to climb into the tub with her and give her something to really moan about.”  Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.  Who’s the audience here?  Teenage boys?  Beer-swilling construction workers?  I’m putting WAY too much emphasis on this point.  It really takes up relatively little space in the narrative.  But it just seems so out of character with the rest of the book that it’s like finding a pubic hair in your ice cream!

So we have a top agent who was captured and brainwashed by the enemy to work for them, and has now been re-captured and “de-brainwashed” while extracting valuable information from him about the enemy.  He’s still not completely trusted, but the head of the Good Guys decides to let him go anyway, because he is now the best line of defense for his wife, also a top agent.  And the husband’s best friend, who is in love with the wife and apparently lives in the same mansion as the husband/wife spy team, is also an agent and is charged with helping to keep them both safer from the retaliation that is sure to come from the Bad Guys when they discover that the husband has been released.  All this is fine – good situational spy stuff – and presented in a fairly believable, suspense-building manner.

And yet …  “Will it take too much effort for you to pull your head out of your own arse long enough to protect the man who has been your longtime friend, and the woman for whom you have long carried a torch?”  This, coming from the head of the W.O.R.  This word “arse” as a substitute for “ass” has always grated on me, and it usually gets overused, most definitely in this book.  Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that it is commonly used in Great Britain, but I still get the impression that it is used with a childish giggle at its triteness.  Aren’t we cute.  Still, I would let the first one go by with no comment, and even the second one with a grimace.  But after that, any triteness overused is a flaw in an otherwise well-written story.  God, I’m turning into a grumpy, curmudgeonly old literature-snob!

Next Week:  Chapters 12-16
Week 4:  Chapters 17-End