Heroes Are My Weakness.  Finished 11-16-14, rating 3/5, romance, 367 pages, pub. 2014

The dead of winter.  An isolated island off the coast of Maine.  A man.  A woman.  A sinister house looming over the sea …

He’s a reclusive writer whose macabre imagination creates chilling horror novels. She’s a down-on-her-luck actress reduced to staging kids’ puppet shows. He knows a dozen ways to kill with his bare hands. She knows a dozen ways to kill with laughs.

But she’s not laughing now. When she was a teenager, he terrified her. Now they’re trapped together on a snowy island off the coast of Maine. Is he the villain she remembers or has he changed? Her head says no. Her heart says yes.
from Goodreads

The book opens with our heroine, Annie, having a conversation with her multitude of puppets as she drives to her secluded cabin in the middle of a snowstorm.  It’s those puppets that kept me from investing fully in Annie from the beginning.  She grew on me but the absurdity of the puppets (and their continued butting into the story) turned me off.  The puppets did, much later, play a part in the sweetest aspect of Annie’s story and I think if that had been their involvement I may have liked this better.  I’m sounding very anti-puppet with all of these complaints, aren’t I?  Maybe it’s my problem and not Annie’s!

As for Theo Harp, our dark hero, he came off as so damaged at the beginning it was interesting to see how she would redeem him. In the end the big reveal wasn’t all that big a surprise but it did work in making him a more sympathetic character.

This felt very different from SEP’s other romances.  There’s always hot sex that happens before it seems it should and there is always humor, sarcasm and intelligent characters and this book had all that.  It felt like less romance this time around and it had a more sinister undertone since someone was trying to scare/hurt Annie.  It was good, but different.

I know this has been nominated for many end-of-the-year book awards, but it just didn’t quite do it for me.  But, no worries, I’ll still buy the next book by Susan in hardcover the week it comes out 🙂