“The answer lies beneath the…..DEEP BLUE!”

Missie:


For my inaugural book review, I chose Kat Martin’s Deep Blue. It is the story of a spunky reporter, Hope Sinclair, who gets too close to a story in NYC so her boss reassigns her to cover the recovery of a sunken treasure off the coast of Jamaica to get her out of town. I soooo related to that, because every time one of my bosses didn’t want me to continue on a project, I always got reassigned to an exotic locale and met a hunky ex-Navy SEAL who wanted to have a hot fling with me, and….oh, wait. That has never actually happened to me. Sorry. I have a two-month old baby and don’t get enough sleep so sometimes fantasy and reality blur together and I can’t tell what’s what and then my husband starts looking like George Clooney and I think my life is really an exciting whirlwind revolving around the poshest cities in the world instead of mounds of poopy diapers…..but I digress. (You will find that a lot on this site…we be lovin’ to digress…) Back to the review.

Before I start commenting on this story, I have to say I really like Kat Martin. I have read a few of her other books and found them to be interesting stories with characters I could actually give a flying flip about. That is also true for Deep Blue. Her characters are well-rounded, and by that, I mean she stays true to the traits she set up for them in the beginning and fleshes them out very well. I don’t mean well-rounded in that the characters are perfectly normal people who may have had a hard past but are open to love. Because we ABSOLUTELY CANNOT have heroes and heroines who are looking for love. Nooooo, must fight love at all costs. Parts of this story are utterly guessable (another one of my terms, get over it) and the conclusion is a, well, foregone conclusion, but if you like your romance with a dose of treasure from a Spanish galleon, then you will like Deep Blue.

And now something that really has nothing to do with anything (I am also good at that, just ask Robyn):

I used to work in an office where one particular lady, I will call her Ruth, would use a certain unusual word several times a day. This word was cornucopia. Sometimes she would combine it with its trusty partner, veritable, and we would be forced to listen her expound on the veritable cornucopia of offerings for our potluck, or just the plain ole cornucopia of ways this project could be done. The Pilgrims didn’t use the word as much as she did. I took you on that walk down Memory Lane with me for a reason. Kat Martin has a love of a particular word, and it’s “sinews”. Now, we all find that word at one time or another in just about every romance novel out there, but it must hold a special place in Ms. Martin’s heart because I counted five uses of the word before page 97 in Deep Blue. FIVE! I don’t know that in the course of my thirty-cough, cough years I have even heard that word spoken five times. I quit counting at page 97 because it just depressed me too much. I got the point about the first 3 times she used it. The hero, Conner Reese, is buff. He’s handsome. He’s everything any red-blooded female would want. He’s a Greek god come to life. He’s SINEWY! Enough already with the sinews. That’s just my two cents. And since I am an unpublished wannabe author who hasn’t even finished a manuscript ever, I am sure Ms. Martin will read my recommendation and thank me for it.


Most Improbable Situation:

Conner and Hope are diving for the treasure and run across (or should I say swim across…get it, swim across? Because they’re diving and not running and…never mind. Refer to above paragraph about 2 month old baby and no sleep) some bad guy divers who want the treasure for themselves. Bad Guy #1 shoots Conn with a spear gun, and the spear goes through his body! I’m talking in one side, out the other. He’s bleeding like a stuck pig and Hope has to help him get to the surface, but oh no! there’s sharks circling because they smelled the blood, and ohmygoodness, will he make it??? Of course he does, but that’s not the improbable moment. No, no, this week’s improbable comes the day after he is discharged from the hospital. He only stays overnight, because after all, he’s an ex-SEAL and no little spear gun’s gonna keep him from his treasure. They’re back on the boat, and what does he wanna do? Have tea and crumpets. I kid you not. Spear makes a new highway through his innards, and the man wants some hanky-panky. Unbelievable. My husband is a guy’s guy, hunts, fishes, likes to get greasy and sweaty, etc. But no way on God’s green Earth would my husband be saying, “How you doin?” after he was kabobbed by a bad guy. But that’s just my man. Yours may differ.