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Mary Jo Putney, Twist of Fate. Spoilers follow.
She's a repressed but passionate (you can tell because she's red-haired and curvy) corporate lawyer who yearns to make a difference, and has Daddy and commitmtent issues. He's a former marine, former high-tech CEO, current carpenter and graffiti-remover who turned in his brother for being an eco-terrorist and murderer, and was wounded by the fallout. They fight for the life of her paralegal's old boyfriend, on death row these 18 years for a cop-killing he didn't commit.
Mary Jo Putney is a good writer. But this book has some major flaws to me. Is is so very PC. Yes, it's nice to read a romance novel in which there are actual black people, and little details like the ER doctor in an urban hospital being a South Asian woman actually ring true to life. But the only villains who appear in the piece are dead; everyone else is noble, or at worst weak and misguided. I felt like Putney, having decided to make large numbers of her characters non-white, then had to make sure that all of them were good people. The man on death row is saintly and accepting of his inevitable death. His son is at the Aoir Force academy. The paralegal is a self-made woman. But it ended up as bland and generic to me. In fact, the whole book was bland and generic. I thought for a minute she was actually going to execute the man on death row, as we were about 20 pages from the end - but no, definitive new evidence discovered at the last minute saved him. It would have been a better book if he'd died.
She's a repressed but passionate (you can tell because she's red-haired and curvy) corporate lawyer who yearns to make a difference, and has Daddy and commitmtent issues. He's a former marine, former high-tech CEO, current carpenter and graffiti-remover who turned in his brother for being an eco-terrorist and murderer, and was wounded by the fallout. They fight for the life of her paralegal's old boyfriend, on death row these 18 years for a cop-killing he didn't commit.
Mary Jo Putney is a good writer. But this book has some major flaws to me. Is is so very PC. Yes, it's nice to read a romance novel in which there are actual black people, and little details like the ER doctor in an urban hospital being a South Asian woman actually ring true to life. But the only villains who appear in the piece are dead; everyone else is noble, or at worst weak and misguided. I felt like Putney, having decided to make large numbers of her characters non-white, then had to make sure that all of them were good people. The man on death row is saintly and accepting of his inevitable death. His son is at the Aoir Force academy. The paralegal is a self-made woman. But it ended up as bland and generic to me. In fact, the whole book was bland and generic. I thought for a minute she was actually going to execute the man on death row, as we were about 20 pages from the end - but no, definitive new evidence discovered at the last minute saved him. It would have been a better book if he'd died.