Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86348-8
Contemporary Romance, 2014

Night Games is the last Kimani story by Lisa Marie Perry that I review here, what with the line no longer being around, and of course it has to be the author’s first Kimani title. This is what I get for letting this book slip so deep into the pile of unread books that I only managed to pull it out from that mountain recently.

This one is also the first entry into the The Blue Dynasty series, but given that I have reviewed this thing completely out of order and can still follow things just fine, I think the order in which one reads the series probably doesn’t matter much.

So, the Las Vegas Slayers has been sold to new owners, the Blue clan, and just like David Zaslav, the new owners are firing people left and right while restructuring the whole team from top down. Can’t blame them, really, as the football team had fallen into disrepute when the new owners took over, and it would take a gigantic broom to make sweeping changes around here.

Our Hero Nate Franco disagrees. His father used to own the club, but the old man had to sell it because he was too busy marrying and divorcing and generally making merry. However, the way our hero sees it, the Blues have stolen his family birthright. The club is worth millions, millions that belong to his older brother, so he is going to get it back!

Instead of filing lawsuits or what not, he decides to woo the resident Blue family black sheep Charlotte Blue and sabotage her efforts to introduce reforms to the club.

Now, this one is remarkable for two things that subvert usual romance genre tropes.

One, the heroine’s bad girl reputation tends to be overblown and exaggerated—it is very rare for a heroine to be a genuine happy promiscuous person, after all. However, while Charlotte’s bad girl reputation is exaggerated, she knows it and isn’t afraid to point out that she’s not going to be ashamed by things that are blown out of proportion, My favorite scene is her throwing back at her usual prune-faced hag stereotype of a mother that her “sexy” pics are no more suggestive that the swimsuit stuff her mother used to pose for during the woman’s pageant days. Basically, our heroine only gives an eff when it is warranted, and everything and everyone else can go kiss her sexy derriere.

This one also has another rarity: it dares to allow the hero to be wrong, absolutely and completely wrong. Normally, cynical old me will open a romance novel, see a conflict, and go, “Oh, the heroine will end up in the wrong, because that’s how it always goes in these things!” Here, though, Nate is the doofus, and the author doesn’t sugar-coat that at all. How nice.

This does lead to the biggest issue I have with this story, though. It is one thing for the hero to be wrong, but the author also made him out to have all the brainpower of a sack of turnips.

Let’s see. He doesn’t actually talk to his father or his brother about whether they even want the club back. He just goes ahead with what he does because he just thinks the club should be theirs.

It gets better. He has nothing good to say about his father’s new fiancée (she’s the quintessential Kimani-esque gold-digging ho cliché)… so he works alongside her to get the plan going. Seriously, dude? Of all the people he could have worked with, he decides to go with her? It makes no sense, unless I were to be cynical and say the author needs this to happen so that the ho can pull off an even worse stunt later on and make the hero look good in comparison.

Oh, and yes, the ho is a mean slag, and the hero is the only one taken aback by this.

Real talk: is it the author’s intention to make me think of the hero as some kind of shambling potato head, or is this a miscalculation on her part?

The hero being a dumbass can be a pretty big hurdle to overcome, as a big part of this story is about those two falling for one another even as he stumbles and shambles in his hilariously inept idea of a coup in the making.

Still, this does demonstrate one thing: dumb romance heroes are almost as bad as dumb romance heroines, so I suppose there is some kind of statement to be made here about stupidity being almost the great equalizers among the sexes.

Almost, that is, because even the dumbest hero tends to be still loaded with billions, while a dumb heroine is also invariably broke and hence absolutely worthless in every way.

The rest of the story is readable, although some of the dialogues feel too much like the end result of a sitcom writer trying too hard. Still, it’s okay.

In fact, it’s surprisingly readable for a story with a plot that calls for the hero to be the dumbest tool in the whole neighborhood—a testament to the author’s potential, no doubt.

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