Wednesday, March 2, 2016

BOOK REVIEW: My Dirty Detour by Grace Risata

3.75  Stars

Violet McFadden, 34, lives a pretty ordinary life. That is until a little detour while running an errand one evening places her at the Grim Rock Distillery and into the sights of Sergio and Rocky.  But Violet is looking for a little adventure and excitement, and Rocky Duncan, 29, is looking for a book keeper at his not so friendly business. An exchange of self-defense lessons for some secretarial work puts them both on a new road.
“He was either going to murder me or bury my body or we’d have a lovely moonlit evening. Fingers crossed for the latter!”
Rocky is a bit anti-social, guarded, and intimating. He’s the type of guy you don’t mess with, built and emanating an air of danger.

Violet isn’t exactly your typical heroine. Quirky is probably the best way to describe her. While she’s always been the wallflower and had a limited social life, she’s far from bland or mousey.  At times she’s a ball of contradictions, a bit of a plain Jane who knows cars and guns as well as a germophobe who shops at thrift store. A reader herself, she has no tolerance for BS misunderstandings in romance novels, and I liked that about her. 
“‘Grow up, fake book people!’”
But while Violet is pretty vocal and thus there is thankfully no BS misunderstanding break ups here, Violet could, however, stand to grow up a bit. She didn’t always act her age, and while sometimes I found her humorous, other times I just wanted to tape her mouth shut.

Told via Violet’s 1st person POV but with the occasional 3rd person sections for Rocky, the story is pretty long and a thorough edit would make it more manageable as there were places I skimmed on descriptions. Also Violet repeats everything that happens to her best friend and mother and not only was it repetitive, but it also made Violet seem really immature.  After a while her mother and friend began to drive me nuts with how nosey and meddlesome they were.  Rocky’s friends were far more interesting and made an entertaining addition to the story.

All in all, the story has a lot of potential, but could benefit from some tweaking in certain aspects. My Dirty Detour is an original standalone romantic-comedy-suspense.  


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