Tom Riley sells insurance policies while privately daydreaming about being a private detective. With fantasies much livelier than his real life, into his life walks Marla Meyers, a six–foot tall semi–supermodel. Accident–prone Marla has been ordered to get insurance for her face after she tripped into a dress dummy and got a black eye. Before she can collect on the policy, Tom must watch Marla's face for the next 30 days.
I was born in New Mexico back in the fifties (she said vaguely), mingling with the aliens and the big bombs.
My family settled in the northwest, where those rainy days led me to read constantly. I grew up with Nancy Drew, Anya Seton, Gene Stratton Porter, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hardy, anything to take me Far from the Madding Crowd!
Marla Meyers is the clumsy supermodel that is forced to take out a policy for herself to protect the agency. Tom Riley is apparently the only insurance agent dumb enough to write it. When his company finds out, he is forced to be Marla's bodyguard. But is someone out to get her? All the suspects are there. The book is written like an old Sam Spade episode, but all tongue in cheek. Completely unbelievable, but very fun.
I liked this book. How refreshing that the ordinary male character wasn't threatened by the higher income of the female character. Not a great plot, but intelligent characters and amusing dialoge.
I needed to read this romance book for my book club, and it was good, as far as romance books go (I am not a big fan of this genre). Its saving grace is that it was part romance, part mystery. A very handsome, but very poor, insurance man gets a visit from a beautiful model whose agency wants her to insure her "face" because she has been having accidents. Our poor insurance man writes her a policy, but then is told by his company that he needs to "watch out" for her for 30 days to protect their interests. What follows is a sometimes funny, sometimes mysterious and sometimes romantic story.
This is a pleasant, light-hearted read. Though there was no desperate pull to getting back to reading the book each time I put it down, I still enjoyed it.
The story is rather superficial, in my opinion, but not in a bad way. It's good for someone who is looking to take a break from serious novels. It's predictable in some parts, while others threw me off a little. Descriptions in settings are not the most detailed, but they are not necessary in this comical, breezy book.
I saw this book in my library and it was a book I bought ages ago. I figured it needed to be read! The beginning starts off right in the action and it continues to build. There's a lot of good content and characters. I was really surprised, given the genre, that there was a lot of character depth. The mystery subplot was a nice touch too. Glad I read this and hope to read more of her work!!
Solid plot. The tone switch for the two characters was unfortunately inconsistent (Tom varied from normal to noir, while Marla’s was much more consistent), but that wasn’t a major drawback.
This felt a lot more dated than it was. I really disliked the POV of the narrator in the Prologue and Epilogue - I'm assuming it was the hero but it felt so out of place, it wasn't enjoyable. Also, while I quite liked the premise and that was why I picked this up at the library, the pacing felt slow and it actually came across as OTT/ridiculous, making it hard for me to buy into the events that occurred. In the end, this was a DNF for me.