From Library Journal
Crusie blends a combination of likable characters, gossipy small-town life, and a convoluted plot spiced with some steamy sexual situations into a highly entertaining read. Sisters Amy and Sophie, along with ex-sister-in-law Clea, have come back to Clea's hometown of Temptation, OH, to make a video, hoping to jump-start Clea's flagging acting career. The town council erroneously assumes the three women are making a pornographic film. Mayor Phin Tucker has the politically touchy job of protecting the town's morals and family values stance. Along with his police chief and best friend Wes, the mayor is supposed to investigate and keep the town council informed. Add to this premise a shaky mayoral reelection campaign, a charming 11-year-old, and an unexpected dead body found on a dock. Crusie's previous novels (Crazy for You, Tell Me Lies) are notable for merging a seemingly endless supply of secondary characters with outlandish situations and very funny dialog. This offering is no exception. Readers who enjoy novels by Susan Elizabeth Phillips or Susan Andersen will love Crusie. A smart buy for any public library with contemporary romance readers.
---Margaret Ann Hanes, Sterling Heights P.L., MI
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
If small towns are filled with heroes like Crusie's (Crazy for You, p. 163, etc.), then romance readers may begin to crowd the highways. Sophie Dempsey, the ``daughter of a thousand felons,'' and her sister, Amy, come to the town of Temptation, Ohio, to film an ``audition tape'' for Clea Whipple, a local girl turned porn star whose anchorman husband has run off with her inheritance and refuses to give it back. Sophie is one of the only honest, if repressed, members of a family of charming cons and thieves. After her mother's death, she raised her sister and her brother, Davy, who now specializes in parting shady businessmen from their dubious gains. Their father, a guy with a long rap sheet, is permanently on the lam. In the upright town of Temptation, the major bones of contention appear to be the painting of the water tower, which looks like a large erect phallus, and the ordering of new streetlights. These rather boring proceedings are presided over by Phineas Tucker, whose silly name hides a really hunky ``town boy''a single father who owns the local bookstore. Phin, immediately taken with Sophie's lower lip, seduces her with promises of slightly kinky sex. Sophie hasn't had any good ``head-banging sex'' in quite a while, if ever, and is inspired by Phin's technique, using their love scenes as a template for Clea's video. Crusie seems to have perfected the fan-delighting art of erotic, comic, and yet homey sex, with the understanding that the head-banging sex is made possible by that head-banging other word: love. Into this jokey, soft-core mix, Crusie inserts modern-romance's de-rigueur murder and hometown violence, the working out of which threatens to derail her plot as well as the appeal of roadside America. Nevertheless, with her third seriously pleasing hardcoverbright, funny, sexy, and wiseits time to welcome Crusie into the pantheon of top-flight romance writers. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Bright, funny, sexy, and wise."--Kirkus Reviews
"Cruise charms with her brisk, edgy style...a romantic comedy that adds luster to the genre, this effervescent tale will please readers."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Cruise blends a combination of likeable characters, gossipy small-town life, and a plot spiced with some steamy sexual situations into a highly entertaining read."--Library Journal
From the Publisher
"Crusie's characters have sharp edges tht lend themselves to both comedy and villiany." -The New York Times Book Review "Jennifer Crusie has a marvelous writer's voice - funny and dead-on realistic at the same time." -Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
From the Inside Flap
The Bookcassette® format is a special recording technique developed as a means of condensing the full, unabridged audio text of a book to record it on fewer tapes. In order to listen to these tapes, you will need a cassette player with balance control to adjust left/right speaker output. Special adaptors to allow these tapes to be played on any cassette player are available through the publisher or some US retail electronics stores.
About the Author
Jennifer Crusie is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Tell Me Lies, Crazy for You, Fast Women, and Faking It. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, and teaches writing at Ohio State University.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter
One
Sophie Dempsey didn’t like Temptation even before the Garveys smashed into her ’86 Civic, broke her sister’s sunglasses, and confirmed all her worst suspicions about people from small towns who drove beige Cadillacs.
Half an hour earlier, Sophie’s sister Amy had been happily driving too fast down Highway 32, her bright hair ruffling in the wind as she sang “In the Middle of Nowhere” with Dusty Springfield on the tape deck. Maple trees had waved cheerfully in the warm breeze, cotton clouds had bounced across the blue, blue sky, and the late-August sun had blasted everything in sight.
And Sophie had felt a chill, courtesy, she was sure, of the sixth sense that had kept generations of Dempseys out of jail most of the time.
“Slow down,” she told Amy. “There’s no need to rush.” She stared out the window as she twisted the rings on her middle fingers. More riotously happy, southern Ohio landscape. That couldn’t be good.
“Oh, relax.” Amy peered at Sophie over the top of her cat’s-eye sunglasses. “It’s a video shoot, not a bank heist. What could go wrong?”
“Don’t say that.” Sophie sank lower in her seat. “Anytime anybody in a movie says, ‘What could go wrong?’ something goes wrong.”
A green sign that read Temptation ? Mile loomed ahead, and Sophie reviewed her situation for the eleventh time that hour. She was going to a small town to make an unscripted video for a washed-up actress she didn’t trust. There were going to be problems. They’d show up at any minute, like bats, dive-bombing them from out of nowhere. A strand of her dark curly hair blew across her eyes, and she jammed it back into the knot on top of her head with one finger. “Bats,” she said out loud, and Amy said, “What?”
Sophie let her head fall back against the seat. “ ‘We can’t stop here. This is bat country.’ ”
“Johnny Depp,” Amy said. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Stop quoting. There’s nothing to be nervous about, you’re just overreacting.” She turned off the highway and onto the old road that led into Temptation. The exit was marked by a shiny new gas station and a less shiny but still-plastic Larry’s Motel.
“Colorful,” Amy said.
“Trouble,” Sophie said.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Amy said. “It’s not the Bates Motel.”
“You have no idea how dangerous small towns are.” Sophie scowled out the window. “You were only ten when we moved to the city. You can’t remember what hell all those little places we lived in were.”
“Sophie.”
“And it’s not as if we have a plan.” Sophie stared with deep suspicion as they passed a blackened, log-built bar that sported a rusting neon sign: Temptation Tavern. Beer. Music. “It’s all very well for Clea to say, ‘We’ll improvise,’ but even if this is just an audition video, I need more of a script than ‘Clea goes back to her creepy hometown and meets her long-lost love, Fred.’ ”
“Frank.” Amy shook her head. “I don’t believe you. We’re finally filming something besides a wedding, and all you can say is, ‘Trouble ahead,’ and, ‘Why can’t we stay in Cincinnati?’ and, ‘I don’t trust Clea.’ Face it, the only reason you don’t like Clea is because she dumped Davy to marry a TV anchorman. That’s very sisterly of you, but it’s time to get over it.”
“That’s not it,” Sophie said. “I don’t know what it is, it’s just—”
“Come on, Sophie. This is good for you. It gets you away from Brandon.”
Oh, yeah, sure this is good for me, Sophie thought, but Amy couldn’t help it. It was in her blood to turn everything into a con.
“Why you’re dating your therapist is beyond me,” Amy was saying. “Your health insurance covered his fees.”
“My ex-therapist.” Sophie squinted at the deserted tree-lined road before them. Ominous. “It saved a lot of time. You don’t know what a relief it was not to have to explain the family to him.”
“You know, sometimes I think it’s just our destiny to be bad.” Amy took her eyes off the road to smile at Sophie. “What do you say we quit making wedding videos and fall like the rest of the Dempseys?”
“No,” Sophie said. “The fall will kill us.”
She waited for an argument, but Amy was already distracted. “Oh, wow.” She leaned forward and slowed the car. “Gotta love these road signs.”
Sophie read the battered white-and-black signs: Temptation Rotary Club, First Lutheran Church of Temptation, Temptation Ladies’ Club, Temptation Nighttime Theater. The last one was a corroded green-and-cream metal sign that said, Welcome to Temptation. Under it a smaller sign in the same rusted antique green said, Phineas T. Tucker, Mayor. And under that, a newer but still battered sign said, We Believe in Family Values.
“Get me out of here,” Sophie said.
“Can you imagine how old Phineas T. must be if the sign is that rusted?” Amy said. “Older than God. Hasn’t had sex since the Bicentennial. Do you think the Church of Temptation is like the Church of Baseball?”
“Not if it’s Lutheran,” Sophie said.
Then they crested the hill and there was Temptation.
“Pleasantville,” Amy said, taking off her sunglasses.
“Amityville,” Sophie said.
The town proper was on the other side of a muddy river that streamed sullenly under a gunmetal bridge at the bottom of the hill. Beyond the bridge, the land rose up green and lush behind smug little brick-and-frame houses, and as the hills rose, the houses got bigger, much bigger. Sophie knew the kind of people who lived in houses like that. Not Her Kind. “ ‘It’s quiet,’ ” she told Amy as they started down the hill. “ ‘Too quiet.’ ” But Amy was gaping at something in the distance.
“Oh my God!” Amy pulled off the road. “Look at that water tower!”
“What?” Sophie leaned forward to look.
The flesh-colored, bullet-shaped tower thrust through the trees at the top of the hill, so aggressively phallic that Sophie forgot to fidget with her rings as she stared at it. “Hello. Do you suppose they did that on purpose? I mean, you couldn’t accidentally paint it to look like that, could you?”
“Maybe Phineas T. is compensating. I don’t care. I love this town.” Amy handed Sophie her sunglasses, yanked her orange tube top into place, and reached between the seats for her camera. “My God, the visual opportunities. Change places with me.”
“Why?” Sophie said, but she climbed over the stick shift and into the driver’s seat as Amy got out of the car. “Okay, the water tower is cute, but ‘I bet the Chinese food here is terrible.’ ” When Amy gave her a dirty look, she said, “I’m not whining, it’s a line. My Cousin Vinny.” Sophie squinted out at the road. “I will bet they don’t have a decent pool table. Probably outlawed them. Where are we going now?”
“Back to the beginning.” Amy got in the passenger-side door. “I have to get all of this. The Church of Temptation, Phineas T. Tucker, and that big hard-on of a water tower. This is our opening-credits crawl.”
“Can we film in public without a permit?” Sophie put on Amy’s sunglasses with only a brief thought as to how pink plastic and rhinestones would look with her plain white blouse and khaki shorts. She double-checked the road and then pulled out and made a U-turn. “Because breaking the law is out.”
“They’ll never know,” Amy said, sounding way too much like their father. She braced the camera on the window and added, “I’ll keep watch this way and you keep an eye on the rearview in case somebody comes up behind us. Go about five miles an hour. I want to get all of this.”
Sophie drove back to where the signs began and turned around, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror as Amy filmed. All they needed was to get rear-ended by some irate Citizen of Temptation—
Then, as they reached the crest of the hill, the beige Caddy zoomed out of a side road that Sophie hadn’t even seen and smashed into their front fender.
Sophie hit the brakes as she felt the impact, and the sound of crunching metal tore through her head at the same time Amy’s sunglasses flew off her nose and hit the dashboard. She tasted blood as she bit her lip, gagged once as the seatbelt cut into her stomach, and then it was over, and they were sitting in the wrong lane with Dusty singing “I’ll Try Anything” as if nothing had happened. There was no one coming the other way, so Sophie breathed deep, licked her bleeding lip, let go of the steering wheel, and turned to deal with the situation.
Amy was bent over, her head at a funny angle under the dashboard.
“Amy!”
Amy straightened, holding the video camera. “It’s okay. I dropped it but it’s fine.” She scowled at the dash and picked up her glasses, and the broken lenses fell out. “But my sunglasses are history, damn it.”
Sophie swallowed her panic and tried to stop shaking. “Oh. Good. Good. The camera’s okay. Good. Sorry about the glasses.” She turned Dusty off in the middle of “Playing it safe is just for fools,” and said, “How are you?”
“Me?” Amy scowled out the window. “I’m pissed as hell at the asshole who hit us....
