Review: Dream Shadow by Mary Wine

Title: Dream Shadow
Author: Mary Wine
Genre: Erotic paranormal romantic Suspense
Grade: C-
Reason for Reading: I read a short story by Wine a few months back in an otherwise mediocre anthology. It was the one that gave me the most fits that I actually finished, and I was curious to see if a full-length novel would be better. It really, really wasn’t.

Synopsis:

Desperation can have you turning the most unlikely corner—and once you encounter what lies around the bend, your life will never be the same…
Sheriff Brice Campbell didn’t put much stock in psychics, but that all changes when he meets Grace. The Army’s best psychic tracker, Grace always finds her target. And when a child goes missing, she’s on the case. Only this time, her focus slightly wavers. The cause—Brice.

Desire blazes between Grace and Brice, sending them both up in a firestorm of passion. But even though Grace has amazing extrasensory talents, when it comes to matters of the heart she is a novice.
Brice is more than willing to teach Grace what it means to love, emotionally and physically, but first he must convince her that he has not been preying on the children. Then they must find the madman who has.

Plot Summary: A little girl goes missing in Benton County, and Brice, the county’s sheriff, is desperate enough to hire a unit of army rangers including their pet psychic. He discovers that Grace is amazingly good at her job, but in the vein of any female who is good at anything in romancelandia, she is a bitch and a half for no discernible reason whatsoever. Anyway, Brice decides that he wants Grace, and basically wears her down until together they live happily ever after.

My Thoughts: Karen Scott had a post the other day about heroines in books who are supposed to be kick-ass but aren’t. A few readers in the comments felt like the kick-ass heroine had basically immasculated their heroes, which is a whole other discussion.

Grace is supposed to be a kick-ass heroine. Not only is she part of an elite unit of the U.S. army (well, we do have S.E.A.L.’s, so I guess the other branches of the military need some love, too.) She’s also a brilliant psychic who can find anyone she is working for. But apparently, the army works her to death, a fact she doesn’t realize until she comes into contact with Brice’s mighty Staff of Power. For most of the book, needless to say, I did not like Grace. I didn’t understand how come, if she were approaching burnout like she’s supposed to be at the beginning of the book, nobody seems to know what to do. It also seemed to me that Jacobs, Grace’s commander who apparently has millions of siblings and relatives who will feature in other books, kept her on an extremely short leash. Jacobs is the only one, incidentally, who doesn’t think of Grace as some kind of witch (at least until Brice shows up) If Grace needed to get laid so badly, and he was supposed to be her friend, why didn’t he, you know, hook her up with someone else? In fact, I found the whole Grace/Jacobs dynamic a bit distracting in the fact that it made no sense to me at all.

As for Brice… Well… He’s an Alpha Man. A Man’s Man. I do admit that I thought he was hot, but honestly, if a guy like that were interested in me, I’d probably run the other way. I also thought that the author cheated a bit in order to give Brice a suitable background to make him worthy of being with Grace. He’s not just a sheriff–he’s also retired from active duty and outranks Jacobs, and appears to be able to read Grace like a book, even when it would make no sense for him to do so.

There were things I did like about this book. I liked the sex scenes, although they would have been a lot more interesting if the characters behind them hadn’t been a mess of cliches. I also liked the paranormal element here, mostly because it didn’t involve vampires, werewolves or whatever, and it was handled fairly deftly.

I also believe that there are some books that are just the equivalent of buying a tub of whipped cream just to eat it directly out of the tub with a spoon. This book was a total whipped cream book for me. It was bad in parts, kind of offensive in others, and lame in still others, but like all guilty pleasures, I gobbled it up.