Dear Readers: Please help me welcome my friend Maggi, who brings you today’s review of…
Spirit of SeductionAuthor: Olivia Quincy
Release Date: July 5, 2011
Publisher: NAL Publishing
ISBN: #978-0451233332
Genre: paranormal romance
Format(s): paperback (304 pgs), e-book
I received a copy of this book from the PUBLISHER for the purposes of an honest review.
From GoodReads website:
When Zoe Bell was young, every summer would bring the promise of spending two weeks in Cape Cod, where she was fascinated and awed by the big, rambling house on Chapin Point. Now, the entrepreneurial Zoe has the money and means to buy Chapin House. But the house already has a resident-a long-suffering entity that has connected with Zoe in a way she never dreamed anyone would in this life, let alone the next.
What Maggi is talking about:
Zoe Bell has just bought the house of her childhood dreams after the multi-million dollar sale of her homegrown seed business. While Zoe pursues plans to refurbish the turn of the century Chapin House she unwittingly becomes entangled in a double murder mystery. The ghost of Robert Chapin, which resides at Chapin House and the cantankerous Curtis Nickerson, the last torchbearer of the unrelenting Nickerson-Chapin feud.
I am a big fan of paranormal romance and this is the first novel I’ve read that incorporates an entity/human romance. The idea of it sounds intriguing to me and I enjoy wildly imaginative storylines. However, I was disappointed in Spirit of Seduction. The storyline bounces around too much and lacks focus. It bounces from one sex scene to another with a weak story in between. The relationships are unbelievable because of the sheer number of people Zoe has sexual encounters with. She is clearly confused and so in turn, so is the reader. If that isn’t confusing enough, there is the relationship between Curtis’ widow, Lorraine and her current boyfriend. Their chemistry is strange and even stranger when we add Lorraine’s lawyer to the mix. It’s a confusing whose-boots-are-under-the-bed debacle.
When Zoe starts to come into her own, the story deviates from the plot and just falls apart. The focus is supposed to be around Zoe’s erotic encounters with the ghost of Robert Chapin and her journey to find the truth about his murder. Through there relationship we learn all of the dark secrets of Chapins and Nickersons past. Then, the storyline deviates and their relationship is completely abandoned. We are left to believe that Robert just disappeared after haunting his family’s home for over 30 years. It left me wondering, “What was the point?”
There are a lot of sex scenes in this book and they are graphic. Graphic doesn’t bother me but I don’t care for graphic scenes that have no bearing on the story being told. Call me old fashioned, but I am a sucker for the building of tension between characters that lead to those deliciously sexy scenes. In this case, quality was trumped by quantity.
Spirit of Seduction was a disappointment. I really wanted to like this book, the idea was clever and I thought it had great potential. Unfortunately, the potential was never quite realized.
Maggi’s Rating:
Wasn’t a big fan (D)