The beginning of Suddenly You seemed promising, with a thirty-year-old spinster deciding to celebrate the occasion by -- paying for sex. What she gets, of course, is not a gigolo, but the hero, sent there because the golden-hearted Madame knew instinctively the two would be a perfect match. The hero has a mysterious and tortured past of his own, which makes him -- allegedly, of course -- unsuitable for any kind of a lasting relationship, and the heroine, who wants to keep her reputation intact, has to wrestle with her heart's (and body's! particularly the body's!) desires to keep her rationality.

All of which is well and good, but... First of all, the hero, although given some excellent opportunities for grovelling -- and to be honest, I for one like a good grovel in a romance -- never uses a single one of them, resolving everything through sex instead. Particularly in the last part of the novel -- and, frankly, the last 50 or so pages feel almost as if there were an afterthought anyway -- he resolves a situation that shouldn't and couldn't have been resolved through sex by... well, let's just say it involves berries.

All in all, this is a book that starts well, falls to a lot of cliches in the middle, and goes rather flat towards the end. But it was a quick read, and the beginning was fun enough for two stars.