This is the first book in the Fortune Hunters series.
Brandi Michaels has just graduated from law school and moved to Chicago to be with her fiancée and start a job with one of the city’s most prestigious law firms. She hasn’t even started unpacking her boxes when her fiancée calls from Vegas to inform her that he just married his girlfriend because she’s pregnant, and by the way he needs Brandi’s engagement ring back so he can give it to the new Mrs. Brandi hangs up on him and decides to wash that scumbag out of her hair by buying a killer dress and shoes and picking up a hot guy at the charity party she’s scheduled to attend. There she meets the perfect one night stand, an incredibly sexy Italian count named Roberto. She goes back to his hotel and has such a wonderful time that she ends up spending the weekend. She goes home Sunday night thinking that Roberto was an enjoyable interlude and she’ll never see him again. Unfortunately for her, when she arrives at her new job she discovers that Roberto is a client. He’s accused of committing a number of high profile thefts and she’s been assigned to the group working on his defense.
Brandi knows that she should tell her boss that she can’t work on Roberto’s case, but she doesn’t want to admit that she slept with him without really knowing who he was. She’s very aware that people at the firm believe she only got her job because the senior partner is an old family friend and she doesn’t want to give them more reason to doubt her intelligence and skill as a lawyer. Roberto wants to be near her so he encourages her not to say anything and Brandi decides to throw ethics to the wind and to keep quiet about their association, even though she knows it will cost her her career if anyone finds out. She ends up not only working on the case, but assigned to babysit him 24/7, which results in Brandi being drawn into Roberto’s rather mysterious behavior. Is he guilty? Once Brandi starts falling in love, does she really even care?
I really wanted to like this book, but just couldn’t. There were simply far too many problems problems both of the main characters and the plot.
Thanks to her emotionally abusive father, Brandi is rather insecure about her intelligence and she’s anxious to be taken seriously for her legal skills, but she constantly behaves in an incredibly unprofessional manner. She knows that her colleagues have serious questions about how she got her job and that they’ll be attending the charity party, but she still decides that it makes perfect sense to use the party as a place to pick up a hot guy. That’s like hooking up at the company Christmas party---not a good idea. If that was the worst thing she did I probably wouldn’t have minded, but it wasn’t.
Someone breaks into her apartment the night before her first day at her job. As a result of dealing with the police and trying to clean up, she has trouble getting it together in the morning. She's not dead, so she really should still have been on time for her first day. Instead she arrives late and full of excuses. She then gets snippy with her new coworkers at her very first meeting and commits the aforementioned major ethical breech within a half hour of her tardy arrival. She totally blows her first assignment and then instead of letting her boss know what happened she goes to lunch with Roberto without bothering to call the office. In other words, she simply disappears for hours on her first day of work.
At lunch she orders garlic kielbasa with onions & sauerkraut so that her breath will be so bad that Roberto won’t hit on her and tempt her back into bed with him. Again, this is the middle of her first day at a new job. Presumably she is planning to return to the office for the afternoon where she will once again be in contact with the coworkers who already dislike her. Under those circumstances stinking up the joint is not a smart move and she needed to find another way to control her hormones.
When her boss calls her and expresses his displeasure with Brandi’s performance and disappearance she responds by going off on him. Instead of apologizing for being 4 hours late getting back to the office she acts like she’s doing the firm a favor by working at all because her apartment was broken into the night before and she really needs to be home cleaning. She also throws in the fact that she’s upset because her fiancée dumped her. Way to set the cause of workplace equality back about 30 years. After all, who could possibly expect a woman to be professional and responsible on her first day at a new job when she could be cleaning and crying over a man? When her boss reacts poorly to Brandi’s insubordination she threatens him with a gender based discrimination suit. Because that doesn’t trivialize the real discrimination faced by women, at all.
At that point I would normally have simply tossed the book aside and given it a hearty DNF. Unfortunately, the promised snow had arrived and I was stuck in the house and desperate for reading material, so I forged ahead. Things did not improve.
Roberto’s dialogue was so riddled with clichés that I spent most of the book thinking that he was putting people on by acting like a stereotypical snotty, titled European. Sadly, that was not the case and he really did talk and act that way. That’s definitely not my idea of hero material. Things got worse when he took it upon himself to chide Brandi about her relationship with her mother. Roberto barely knew Brandi, he didn’t know her mother at all and he knew nothing about their history and yet he felt perfectly entitled to chastise Brandi like child. Brandi did have things to work out with her mom, but it was not Roberto’s place to stick his nose in, especially in such a condescending way There is no amount of sexy that can make up for that.
The plot wasn’t any better than the characters. Nothing about Roberto’s case made any sense. People kept talking about the fact that the CIA was after him. He was accused of stealing jewels, not spying or industrial espionage. Unless the items stolen are state secrets, theft is not the CIA’s bailiwick, so the repeated mentions of Agency involvement made me highly doubtful about the quality of Ms Dodd’s research. Of course that was nothing compared to the ridiculous circumstances that lead to Brandi being placed in charge of Roberto. That plot point was nothing more than a cheap way to force them to spend more time together so that Brandi could get involved with Robert’s Mysterious Secret and meet his grandfather.
To say one positive thing about the book, the 20 or so pages involving the grandfather were sort of charming. Not exactly original, but charming. If the whole book had had the same tone as that chapter this review would be going much better. Oh well.
The book left no cliché unused, including the tango scene and the sex in an elevator scene (which doubled as the “sex because they think they’re about to die” scene). The truth about Roberto’s Mysterious Secret was exactly what you would expect it to be. Naturally Brandi had no clue right up until the big reveal and then got very angry at Roberto for not telling her before. The method that Roberto used to beg for Brandi’s forgiveness was incredibly dumb. It involved him showing up at her office in the middle of a work day in a ridiculous costume and getting her coworkers in help him propose to her. The happy couple then celebrated their engagement by locking themselves in the conference room and having sex, proving that getting her HEA in no way improved Brandi’s standards of professional conduct.
A plot point about Roberto’s biological father was introduced during the big reveal and ties this book to the rest of the series. By then I was far too annoyed to be intrigued.
Grade: D
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