Take Me For A Ride, by Karen Kendall

This month’s SuperWendy’s TBRChallenge theme is “flirting with danger”, which in my world almost always means romantic suspense. As this cover fairly screams “running from the bad guys”, and since this book has been sitting in my print TBR cordillera of doom since RWA in DC (in 2009, mind), it seemed like it was all going to work beautifully.

Unfortunately, it didn’t.

Take Me For A Ride, by Karen Kendall

Published in 2009, this is the third novel in the ARTemis, Inc trilogy, and my first novel by the author (who seems to no longer be writing, or at least not under this name).

The writing is competent, and the set up was vaguely interesting at first: a family heirloom lost during WWII (of course) suddenly resurfaces, and now Natalie’s grandmother refuses to return it. The ‘legal’ owner, a Nazi who stole it from the family in the course of committing murder, hires ARTemis to recover it (presumably because that poses less danger for him than calling the authorities, for whichever value of “authorities” may apply here).

Here’s the blurb:

Art restorer Natalie Rosen is a true romantic, inspired by the world’s treasures—and nothing incites her passion more than the legendary St. George necklace, a lost family heirloom believed to originate from Catherine the Great. But when against all odds, the necklace turns up in her office before it goes to auction, Natalie takes drastic measures to keep it in the family.
 
Hard-living recovery agent Eric McDougal is no gentleman, but then, he’s never advertised himself as one. He thrives on chasing women—and stolen art. Now he gets a dream assignment to do both. He thinks it’ll be a cinch, but he doesn’t count on his high-octane attraction to Natalie, or that she’ll unwittingly lead them both into a dangerous underworld where falling in love is as part of the game as staying alive.

The problem is that I never got lost in the story enough to not care about all the red flags and other irritants–of which there are many. To wit:

• The hero sleeps with women the same way other people use paper napkins: because women, by and large, are disposable means to his ends.
• But it’s not his fault, it’s in his genes, because his father was a cheater who made his mother miserable and then drank ‘out of guilt’.
• That’s why now he doesn’t have ‘girlfriends’, he just gets women drunk, naked, fucked, and then moves on–but at least he “doesn’t break any promises”. (Bonus if they have something he wants that he can take from them in the process.)
• But wait! after getting our heroine drunk (and finding out everything he needs for this assignment in less than two hours), he’s convinced that she’s “not like all the other women”. She’s “too innocent” (read: too ‘good’)
• He still takes her to his hotel, where nothing happens because she passes out and he’s at least decent enough to prefer some level of consciousness when he fucks a woman over.

And as our “hero” is getting Natalie drunk in New York, per his standard operating procedure, we have two chapters from the point of view of two other characters, on the other side of the world, who have a whole-ass complicated backstory (some searching tells me they’re the protagonists of the first book in the trilogy), whose plot thread seems to start in the middle, with no clear connection to whatever is going on in *this* novel.

All of the above was enough to have my back up, but then, THEN! when Natalie wakes up in the morning, the first words out of her mouth are, “I guess I’ve racked up some big ‘ho points”.

And I’m entirely over it, at page 47 (of 326 in my print copy).

Take Me For A Ride is a DNF

* * * *

It certainly can be argued that I didn’t try enough with this book (aka, failed at the TBRChallenge). I know I’ve read and enjoyed plenty of books with even less likable leads–off the top of my head, the Tara Janzen Steele books with the crazy covers of the mid-aughts, had male leads who were more Neanderthal than this one, and I inhaled those back in the day.

But it’s not 2005 anymore; I’m a lot older, and have a lot less energy to slog through something that’s already making me angry at fewer than 50 full pages.

With any luck, the next thing I pick up will engage rather than enrage me.