I've seen Sandra Brown's novels around for years, but I always avoided them, probably because I was afraid there would be too much boring police work and icky crime scenes (like in Laura Griffin's technically excellent but romantically dull TRACER series) and not enough hot-blooded sex and steamy sexual tension.
Well, I was really wrong to avoid Sandra Brown, because FAT TUESDAY is an amazing book! And yet what shocked me as I kept on reading was that I loved this book precisely because it's NOT a romance novel. Over and over I saw things happen that NEVER happen in a romance novel.
The hero and heroine are BOTH married to other people as the story opens. Neither of them are virgins. Burke Basile is a bored, resentful cop, and he's very frank about how much he hates married life and how little respect he has for his wife. When he catches her cheating with the local football coach, he beats the crap out of the guy, and calls his wife every name in the book. Stuff like that just doesn't happen in romance novels!
Remy the heroine starts out as a weak-willed, passive trophy wife, married to a sleazy lawyer. At first I thought Pinky Duvall would be a funny crooked lawyer, like Saul Goodman on BREAKING BAD, my all time favorite TV show. But no! Pinkie Duvall is slimy all right, but he's also deadly. He's a defense lawyer who has half the cops in New Orleans on his payroll, and he's got his hooks into everything dirty that happens in the city, from drugs to prostitution. Nobody crosses him, certainly not his terrified and weak-willed wife. I loved Pinkie because he's the opposite of the usual romance novel villain who's either a sniveling weakling or a crazed psycho. Pinkie has the brain power to build up a whole empire based on sin, and he has every kind of sinister henchman you can imagine, from slimy sex offenders who like to play with knives to gigantic brutes who break skulls like walnuts to high ranking cops who lose their souls while trying to bring him down.
So when Burke Basile gets framed for shooting his partner and Pinky Duvall gets the real killer off the hook, it's not like a romance novel at all. I mean, Remy is stunning and Burke is so turned on by her he actually masturbates in her honor while lying in the bathtub drinking whiskey after he quits the police force and walks out on his wife. This stuff was so nasty I nearly had a heart attack! It wasn't romantic, but it was almost terrifyingly real and dirty and sexy all at the same time. So then, Burke has nothing more to lose, and he decides he might as well kidnap Remy, and when Pinky Duvall's goons come after him, he's just going to kill as many of them as he can before they get him. Sort of like a plains Indian making his last stand!
What shocked me was that as Remy and Burke got to know each other things really did become romantic, but not in the usual way of romance novels. I mean, the two of them have really, really good reasons to hate each other and they're not shy about throwing all kinds of horrible and true accussations right into each other's faces. But once they're out there all alone in the endless bayous of Louisiana, each one starts to realize the other one is far more complicated than they thought. And when Pinky finally comes after them he finds he has two enemies instead of one, each one far more formidable now that they're working together.
I loved this book so much because it had a much stronger villain than most romance novels, a much more realistic view of cops and criminals, and a much more suspenseful plot with a lot of twists and turns. I also loved the supporting cast, several of whom were so charismatic they just jumped off the page and made me wish I would see them again in some other book. My favorites were Remy's kid sister Flarra, so flirty and innocent and full of life, and Dredd, the Cajun swamp rat with the sinister past. I also loved Gregory James, the timid sex offender who becomes a most unlikely hero. (He was a bit of a gay stereotype, but I loved his redemption all the same. And he totally reminded me of Richard Peed in Stephen Hunter's DIRTY WHITE BOYS.) But my favorite supporting character hands down was Madame Ruby, who runs a very, very refined and expensive bordello, and who manages to come across as both elegant and ruthless. She has ice water in her veins when it comes to fighting for her business, yet when she's dealing with her young girls she comes across as strict and firm but also caring and almost motherly. I would love to see her in some other book!
So summing it all up, I never even thought of reading Sandra Brown before I read FAT TUESDAY, and now I can't believe how much I was missing!