Dee James, $2.99, ISBN 979-8215144251
Contemporary Romance, 2023

In Dee James’s Spicy Love, we have Maya Roy, a hot shot entrepreneur and la-di-da, and she is pursued by Rishabh Khanna, the owner of the new restaurant across the office block in which her office is.

Don’t ask me the name of the restaurant, as I think it’s not important. Otherwise, I’m sure the author would have called it something else than “new restaurant” when describing it.

Oh yes, this story is set in Hyderabad, India and I have to wonder: does the guy on the cover look like someone whose name is Risabh Khanna? Is this one of those cases with weirdo Americans deciding to identify as some other race because that will get them more attention on social media?

Why set the story in India when the cover looks like any other generic white people billionaire romance? I don’t get it.

Because of this, I find myself scouring the text carefully for physical descriptions of Richard Kenneth here, only to be frustrated by how vague the guy is said to look like. Why have a hero with that name, in a story set in India, without letting that guy be the hottest specimen of Indian masculinity ever? Come on, Indian men can be sexy too, no?

Plus, Richard Kenneth here is much older than Maya, with the most explicit description of his physical attributes being his silver and pepper hair, so hello, why not have him channel Amitabh Bachchan realness?

The story reads more easily than the previous entry in the author’s Curvy & Decadent series, because the sentences flow far more smoothly and there is a much better balance of showing and telling.

However, the entire story is just Maya running away from Richard like some offended maiden aghast at the rude sight of a penis, and the whole thing becomes repetitive very fast.

It also makes Maya appear dense because come on, look at that man. Rich, gorgeous, horny for her… and he is capable of and talented enough to cook yummy foods. In a sea of hot rich billionaires in this genre, that yummy food part makes him a rare unicorn worth putting out at least ten times for.

It is late in the story when Maya begins telling the reader why she is so afraid to put out to—let me repeat his list of qualities—a patient, attentive, wealthy, and attractive man that can cook very well, and it’s basically the same old story about how no one hugged her enough she was a kid. Hence, any reader patient around to linger that long will find the payoff a most anticlimactic bore.

Furthermore, it can be hard to empathize with Maya because what she is rarely fits what the author claims she is. Maya is supposed to be a very capable and brilliant technopreneur… but she spends a bulk of this story being frustrated because some guy she wants to sell her app to keeps ghosting her. She is supposed to be emotionally strong and tough… and she spends her entire time reeling and lurching like a panicked doe because a guy calls her hot and wags his horny tongue at her… in a very gentlemanly manner, of course.

Just like in many Asian countries with strong patriarchal cultures, a career woman in India that has it made and be at the pinnacle of her industry, like Maya is said to be, tends to be tougher and more cutthroat than the basic Western business lady running around looking for a billionaire to shag them. Yet, Maya acts and thinks more like a very middling office executive than the lady boss.

Because of all this disconnect, Maya never seems like a real character, much less an actual girlboss, so it’s hard to care about her increasingly silly and whiny antics as the story progresses. God knows what Richard Kenneth sees in her aside from her curvy and big physical assets.

Anyway, this one boasts much improved writing, but story-wise, it’s still a meh kind of below average.

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