Romantic Suspense Annotation

Ladies’ Night 

by Mary Kay Andrews

Publication Date:  2013

Number of Pages:  464

Setting:  Florida

Time Period: Contemporary

SYNOPSIS
Grace Stanton is living the perfect life.  As a professional lifestyle blogger, Grace and her husband are able to live more-than-comfortably off of the money her blog is bringing in.  Grace has it all:  the handsome husband, the growing business, the dream house, and an assistant that lives right over their garage.  The only thing that would make it all complete is a baby, but even that is in the works.

Then, Grace wakes up in the middle of the night and catches her husband and assistant in his brand new sports car.  After sinking the cheater’s car in the pool, Grace decides to leave and go back to her mom and her childhood home over her family’s bar.  As if a divorce isn’t bad enough, she soon finds herself locked out of her former successful life and assigned to the area’s biggest misogynist judge. 

It’s only as Grace begins to know the other members of her divorce-recovery group (including good-looking dad and fellow divorcee Wyatt) that she is forced to attend and explores the world in and around her mother’s bar that she begins to find herself again.  But finding herself might not be enough.  Her divorce therapist acts weirder and weirder each session and her fellow group members soon begin to realize that there is something mysterious going on, all seeming to point back to the judge.  Knowing that the truth could potentially help all of them with their cases, the ladies (and Wyatt) use their “Ladies’ Night” sessions at the bar to uncover the truth while trying to stay one step ahead of getting caught.

ELEMENTS OF ROMANTIC SUSPENSE:

“Romantic Suspense is a genre with roots in both the Romance and Suspense genres.  Elements from Mystery, Espionage Thrillers, and specially Suspense combine with Romance to create a story that does not fit comfortably in any of the genres it draws from” (Saricks 35).

Pacing

The pacing is fast.  Even in moments that are not filled with chases and violence, issues come up one right after the other, keeping the reader drawn into and invested in the story to find out what is going to happen next.  Plot twists are numerous.

Setting

A large percentage of romantic suspense titles are set in present day.  Settings can range from the domestic to elaborate, detailed exotic locales.  A small portion of romantic suspense titles have a historical, western, or science fiction twist.  Other romantic suspense titles cross over into paranormal territory.

Point of View

The reader journeys through the story from the heroine’s point of view.  By using the first person point of view, the reader is only given as much information as the heroine.  This allows for the set-up of unexpected plot twists and the development of a personal connection with the heroine.

Sense of Uneasiness

The author prepares the reader to expect the unexpected with every turn of the page.  Even when things don’t go wrong, the reader is prepared for something to go wrong.

Language

Language is usually sharp.  Oftentimes, humor is infused into the storyline, especially with the relationship between the heroine and any potential sidekick.  As Saricks notes, “Strong language and explicit sexual descriptions are also common” (37).


READ-A-LIKES:

Antiques mystery series by Barbara Allan

Callahan Garrity series by Mary Kay Andrews (written as Kathy Hogan Trocheck)

Murder 101 series by Maggie Barbieri

Hannah Swensen series by Joanne Fluke

Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich (One for the Dough, Two to Get Deadly…)

MY THOUGHTS

Romantic suspense is my favorite genre to read. I had not read any books by Mary Kay Andrews nor any of her books that she wrote under the pseudonym Kathy Hogan Trocheck previously and I am always looking for new authors in this genre.  I actually read the book Strange Brew by Trocheck first and I enjoyed it, but didn’t want to review it as it is the 6^th book in her Callahan Garrity series.  I instead opted for the stand-alone title Ladies’ Night. 

Overall, I felt that the book had all of the elements of a typical romantic suspense.  At times, especially in the beginning, I felt that the heroine, Grace, was actually too weak and too naïve; however, as I progressed through the story I realized that this was probably a deliberate choice to show just how much Grace grows throughout the story.   It frustrated me that Grace didn’t even have enough business savvy to register her blog under her name (her husband had it all registered under his name), but I was able to suspend my disbelief because otherwise Grace wouldn’t have had the intense money struggle she needed to endure to remember the simpler things in life.  I also felt that this was more of a romance story than a mystery.  The sense of unease throughout the story was not related so much to the mystery that Grace and the other members of the therapy group found themselves in, but rather how and when Grace’s ex-husband and his new girlfriend were going to sabotage her little successes.

Overall, this was a quick read and it left enough questions unanswered at the end of each chapter to keep me turning the page.  The best part of the entire story was actually the romance storyline because Andrews did such a good job at fleshing out the character of Wyatt.  Unlike other romantic suspense stories, the reader gets a few chapters where we see things from Wyatt’s point of view.  While this is unusual, it is necessary for the ending to work and to keep the suspense at a maximum until the very end.

4 out of 5 stars.