TRUE LIES
JACI BURTON
ISBN # 9781419913778
October 3 2007
Ellora’s Cave Romantica Publishing
www.ellorascave.com/
E-Book
$4.45
109 Pages
Shape-shifter / Futuristic
Rating: 2 Cups

UlRic Lor (Ric) is an enforcement officer and an alien shape-shifter. He works with humans in tracking down rebel warriors from his home planet.

Mia Logan is a human hypnotist, a mental enforcer who controls both human and alien prisoners, as well as extracting confessions from them.

Mia and Ric are forced to work together as they hunt for a mutant killer from Ric’s home planet. As implied in the title, the lies and deceit start almost immediately. When Ric and Mia are traveling to Ric’s home planet, he rids Mia of ‘some of that bitchiness she carried around so proudly’ by performing a sexual act on her while she is unconscious, this despite his repeatedly stated dislike of Earth women. Mia repays the favor soon after, when she hypnotizes Ric and then uses him for sex. Of course, Ric is only pretending, as he cannot be hypnotized, and so the deceit continues to spiral out of control. Somehow by the end of the book, all this deceit and sex translates into a happily ever after, as Ric and Mia profess their love for each other.

The sex scenes are engaging and well written but the simplistic assumption that great sex conquers all wears thin. The shape-shifting aspect starts well, with Ric in a formless liquid body. Unfortunately, it quickly devolves into the banal cliché of a man with two penises, one of which can perform anything from clitoral massage to anal penetration. The characters are weak and flat, only seeming to come to life while having sex. When combined with constantly shifting points-of-view and distasteful misogynistic undercurrents, this book loses much of the cohesion needed in a good story. In the end, it fails to move beyond a series of sexual encounters more suited to prepubescent teenagers than to mature adults.

Alex
Reviewer for Coffee Time Romance
Reviewer for Karen Find Out About New Books