StMargarets's Reviews > Desperado

2.5 stars rounded up. Triggers: pedophilia, sex trafficking, children in danger, domestic violence.

Another LLT story that is imported from the Hutton&Co series.

The H/h were foster brother and sister. Heroine has been in love with the hero since she was 8 and hero was sixteen. Heroine was sexually abused as a child and doesn’t trust men. The hero lost his family in a fire and fears intimacy because he could feel that pain of loss again. That didn’t stop him from marrying a woman he didn’t love so he would stop obsessing about the heroine. His wife committed suicide and hero still feels guilty about it.

Hero is a mercenary who owns a ranch outside of Jacobsville. He was a cop and then FBI and I don’t know what else – he knows all of the other DP cop heroes. Heroine is a financial advisor and has just given up her job in Houston for a job in the Middle East because she realizes she needs to get away from the hero for good.

H/h had a one night stand the night of their foster mother’s funeral. Heroine was a virgin. Hero was so disgusted with himself for deflowering her that he was cruel and acted like *she* was disgusting, triggering heroine’s trauma from her childhood. Hero left for a mission somewhere. Heroine married an older man when she found out she was pregnant. Older man was an abusive alcoholic who beat her and caused her to miscarry. Then he wrapped his car around a tree and died. Heroine gave her inheritance to his two crippled ex-wives.

When the story opens heroine’s ex-fiance (hero of another book and married to someone else) calls to tell her that the hero was blinded while detonating a bomb and has been asking for the heroine. Heroine spends 36 hours in travel to rush back to Texas only to find he’s angry that she didn’t rush to his side four days ago when the accident happened. Oh, and he’s not blind. He kicks the heroine out. She starts walking down the long road to the main highway until she’s picked up by the foreman who takes her to Houston.

The foreman then tells the hero that the heroine had been in Morocco and hero realizes he was wrong. He tracks her down and says sorry, but they don’t resolve anything. Heroine is determined to get out of the hero’s life. Hero warns her that he is on the tail of a human trafficker and that she might be in danger.

She takes a job in Houston in the building that houses a private investigative firm owned by the H/h of yet another DP novel. The wife befriends the heroine and the heroine helps her get a photo of some bad guys – putting her in danger.

The hero swoops in and brings her to his ranch for protection. He shows her to her a room – a room he had decorated for her years ago but has never shown her?

Reviewers note: none of this made sense. He loves/hates her. She loves him. But they “don’t know each other,” because they each have dark secrets. Then they can read each other’s expressions because they know each other so well. The heroine is victim who dresses dowdily and shies from men, but she’s been married and engaged before, can shoot a gun and wants to go on adventures. The whiplash is intense in this one.

While living in his home for protection, the hero begins to put the moves on the heroine – talking to her about the beauty of sex, breasts, and hairy chests. The usual drill.

They decide to chase the bad guys – first to Spain and then to Holland - breaking so many laws and defying common sense that it made my head spin. How they got guns across borders, or how the hero disguised himself and went through passport control as an old man is beyond me. I won’t even go into the computer hacking, the bugging of offices, the tampering with evidence, the boneheaded moves of putting themselves and others in danger.

They manage to have sex several times in the middle of all of this – without benefit of clergy and with the H/h both hot to get pregnant. The times are changing in DPlandia.

The side characters, the adventures with bullets flying, the mystery, the tsking about human trafficking took up a lot of page space and I skimmed and skimmed and skimmed.

The H/h are married off page and there is the cutesy detail about the heroine going 85 mph in her excitement to tell the hero about her pregnancy. The cops let her go because they recognize her from the news after they captured the bad guys.

I won’t do a DP checklist because this didn’t really take place in Jacobsville.

But I just wanted to leave these direct quotes without comment so you can soak up the absurdity of this story:

*anti-terrorism school in Jacobsville.

* Later, Cord would explain that Rodrigo was adept at Plains Indian sign talk, and had taught Cord once on a surveillance mission.

*Cord, surprising Maggie, switched immediately to Dutch.

*Maggie turned in a novel about international espionage to an editor in New York who’d read the earlier draft and contracted to publish it.

LOL *slightly hysterically* My brain will NOT be broken by this extravaganza of implausibility. It is forged steel, hardening in the fires of crazy.