Over the top. Melodrama. Those words are fair. So are page turning, brilliantly plotted, and attention-grabbing.

How I came to read it: In what feels like another lifetime, I dated a gentleman who was fixing up a '71 Mustang, and pre-internet, the only way to acquire the right parts was to personally cruise junkyards looking for them.

He would pop the hoods of each derelict, and I'd pop the trunks looking for abandoned treasures. I found a copy of this book in one of those trunks. I turned to the first page to see if it was worth taking home, and I could not stop reading it. My boyfriend eventually found me sitting in the trunk of the car, already three chapters in.

The interesting thing about this title and how it stuck in my memory, though, is that I remember it as having a lot of sex in it. When I re-read it a few months ago, I was struck by the fact that it didn't really have any. What it had was tension, sexual and otherwise. It's worth reading just to see how the author pulled that off.