Sparkles With ‘Deceptive Innocence’
by
My rating:
Bellona Dantes is seeking revenge for her mother jailed for the death of the rich financier she was having an affair with. Bell, at the time, was a young teenager absorbed into the foster care system. Now as a twentysomething, she’s created a formula to bring down the Gables: the family who she’s convinced covered up the murder of their colleague by implicating her mother, who later committed suicide in jail.
The story starts with Bell as a bartender at a questionable bar where she knows Lander Gable frequents. They fall in a lusty affair that may be love as she becomes conflicted with bringing him down with his brother Travis; sister-in-law Jessica, who she’s a personal assistant to; and their father Edmund for what they did to her mother.
Sorta spoiler: The actual revenge continues in the next book I have yet to read, but this novel is mostly Bell and Lander sex scenes with Bell getting a feel for all her targets. Lander even buys her a formal dress for Jessica’s fundraiser toward the end, and it sounds like an event with fireworks, but it doesn’t happen in these pages.
Overall, it’s a sophisticated chick lit thriller that’s well-written with a not-too-complicated plot. In first person voice, Bell goes back and forth constantly in questioning her feelings for Lander. It comes off as annoying at first but could be realistic when mixing love and revenge.
I don’t usually read chick lit masked as an erotic thriller, but when I received Kyra Davis’ “Deceptive Innocence (Pure Sin #1)” in a giveaway, I gave it a try because my idea for a chick lit novel was heading in that dark direction as well. And this showed me the way.
I’m putting pieces together slowly for a novel about a digital journalist who falls for a tech tycoon in Silicon Beach only to witness him being kidnapped. Originally, it was going to be working girl falling for rich guy and all the amenities, but then I had another idea for a girl searching for her entrepreneur boyfriend who’s gone missing amid financial trouble at his startup. So I combined these ideas into one and began studying similar literature since it’s a genre I never dipped in. These were the formulaic points I found:
Steamy sex scenes: The reader must blush or nibble on a nail for the best effect. This took up about 40 percent of the novel. I would scale back for mine for more thriller than erotica, but description is key for realness.Animosity between characters: The characters must hate each other so much that they’re not speaking, so the protagonist can twist their minds with misleading information. Bell played Lander and Travis against each each other by simply dropping prevarications around them and claiming it came from the other brother. Travis hates wife Jessica and vice versa, so the communication is off between them. Lander hates father Edmund because of how he treated his mother during cancer stint. Hate wins in this genre.Potential losses: If Bell’s plan works, she gets vengeance for her mother. Except the plan could set off losses for different characters such as Travis losing status in the company, Lander losing status, mob friend Micah losing money, etc. For a thriller involving business, money is gold and everyone must feel it slipping between their fingers.
