Red Wine for Breakfast / Raven West

Reviewed by: BigAl

Genre: Romantic Suspense

Approximate word count: 75-80,000 words

Availability
Kindle US: YES UK: YES Nook: YES Smashwords: YES Paper: YES
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Author:

Raven West is the author of another novel, First Class Male. Under the pen name Firebird, she also has a collection of erotica short stories, Journey to Dimension Nine. For more, visit West’s website.

Description:

Jenny Reed has it all. She is the DJ on the top rated morning radio show in Los Angeles. Brian, her boss, is also her lover and has a wife that prevents him from getting too serious – exactly the way Jenny wants it. A strong willed native of New York, Jenny has the left coast under control. At least she does until the day Johnny King enters her life. Johnny is going to be her co-host, which is bad enough, but he’s also the brother of Brian’s wife. That is only the beginning.

Appraisal:

I liked Jenny, the lead character in Red Wine for Breakfast, although at first I questioned the affair she was having with her boss. Other than this, she seemed like a strong woman and, with a top rated radio show, appeared to be in control. As another character tells her in the book, “How fifties, Jen. Hasn’t the feminist movement taught you girls anything? You don’t have to sleep with the boss anymore.” But as I got to know Jenny more this became less of a sticking point. The setting and story, at least at a high level, was good. The suspense in this romantic suspense, which comes from a few happenings at the station, which I won’t spoil, fit the story well. The romance is well done. At a high level, everything worked.

But the devil is in the details, and this book fell short in that area. A large number of typo and proofreading errors, each minor but in large numbers, were a problem. There were also issues of continuity and consistency. For example, two characters are sitting at the bar in the watering hole across from the radio station. Another character comes in the door and walks up to their table. How they moved from the bar to a table is unclear and doesn’t fit what was happening.

Another example is that one character who had appeared to be sensitive and caring turned into a grade-A asshole. Although there had been a change in his situation, this was too drastic a change in too short a time to be credible.

At another point, there was talk of the Los Angeles radio market as if there were many larger markets, saying other station owners had tempted Jenny, “with bigger salary, bigger markets, better benefits.” This struck me as strange at the time, thinking there couldn’t be many “bigger markets” with which they could tempt her. It turns out New York is the only one.

Over the course of eighty thousand words, the little things added up to a big problem.

FYI:

Some adult themes and language.

Format/Typo Issues:

There were formatting issues, with fonts changing for no apparent reason and missing spaces between words and sentences. The latter, while possibly a typo, is often related to a problem in the conversion process from a word processing document to an e-book. My review copy was from Smashwords, which might not be representative of what would be found at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

In addition to the formatting issues, there were a large number of typos and proofreading issues, the most common being missing words, typically articles and prepositions.

Rating: ** Two star