SASSY

Author: Gloria Mallette ISBN: 9780967878935 5/2009 SUSPENSE Publisher: GEMINI PRESS

The murder of two women in New York City has Detective Frank Keifer looking for a vicious killer while Sassy Davenport, a popular romance novelist, has finally met the man of her dreams. When architect Norris Yoshito, on a whim, steps off the street into one of Sassy's book signings, he is instantly smitten and Sassy is curiously intrigued. A passionate relationship develops, but when key people associated with Norris are brutally murdered, Sassy is thrust into a world of uncertainty and doubt. Norris appears to have two personalities: One is that of a violent man, the other a man of great compassion who helps Sassy with her cousin who is dying of AIDS. Fear and edge-of-the-seat suspense plunges Sassy into a nightmare of deception and danger where romance cease to exist and the real world of murder is the force to be reckoned with.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

Gloria Mallette sets her suspenseful romance SASSY in present day New York City, where successful romance novelist, Sassy Davenport, meets one of her male fans, Norris Yoshito, at a book signing and falls for him hard. Meanwhile, the New York Police Department is investigating a series of brutal murders, and it appears that Norris is at the hub of all of them. Fortunately for him, the sexy architect has airtight alibis for each time in question. Oh, and just to complicate things, Sassy’s cousin Bernard is dying from AIDS and is holding all of his loved ones, including his son Brice and Brice’s mother Evelyn (Sassy’s not so successful romance novelist best friend), at arm’s length. Will Sassy and Norris be able to survive all of the twists and turns and roadblocks thrown at them?

Mallette creates very complicated lives for her characters, who only want what most of us want—to love and be loved. When Sassy first meets Norris, she is at the end of a four-year relationship that is going nowhere. She realizes that Kenneth will always choose his family and their money-grubbing ways over her while letting his family walk all over her. Norris just wants to cherish her. He’s had a rough life to get where he is, and his history seems to be reaching out for him after all these years. He’s half Japanese, half Afro-American, born out-of-wedlock to his mother who hung out near a US Army base. He lived on the streets of his Japanese town after his mother died, until he could contact his father in America and work through all of the paperwork to get him to the States. Moving into the lives of his new family was jarring for him, but even worse for his half-brother, Clarence.

The plot hangs together despite the two disparate threads of death—Bernie is ready for death and fights with anybody who tries to talk him out of it—and the faux Norris seemingly is getting away with treating people badly before using them up and killing them. That’s the blessing and curse of looking like somebody else: people accept him for who he says he is. At times, it felt like Mallette was stuffing the story chock full of contemporary cultural references, with a lot of name dropping. I suddenly felt the urge to tweet about the book as I was reading it. The unrestrained violence was what really overshadowed this story of love and romance. The two concepts just kept battling for my attention, and the horrific murders often blinded me to the more positive aspects of the story.

SASSY isn’t the romance for everyone, but if a reader likes scary and brutal mixed with their cuddles and cozy dinners for two, then this is the book for them.

Susan Barton