Bad Girl by Night by Lacey Alexander (H.O.T. Cops #1)
Erotic Contemporary
June 7, 2011
Trade Paperback
Berkley

Reviewed by May

“Meet the H.O.T. cops, a group of alpha males trained together in law enforcement but naturally skilled at the arts of pleasure and seduction.”

This is the description of this new series from Lacey Alexander, as seen on both the back of the book and on amazon where I first looked it up to see if this was something I wanted to read for review. I was going to pass on this book- but how could I? As one of my girlfriends pointed out to me some of the very best books I’ve ever read have cheesy tag lines.

Our story opens as we follow the heroine into a hotel bar in a tourist town – far from her little home town where she is a “maker of furniture by hand, the old fashioned way”. She’s there to find a one night stand, and as she’s a young single girl I had no problem with that – game on. She calls herself Desiree (that’s desire with an extra e at the end- that’s why she picked that alias) and gets extra lucky – not only does she find a guy that she has chemistry with, but she also has chemistry with his friend and so the three of them head off to a room so she can be their “dirty little plaything”.

“arrow straight, pink, and engorged, it was solid and large. Just right”

“it was perhaps paler in tone than Jake’s, with a slight arc, and shone with more veins”

Guess which guy is our hero? As they get into their tryst, it’s clear that she is more interested in Jake (aka he of the straight penis). Of course this isn’t going anywhere, so she just cuts loose and lets herself enjoy.

“Her body felt like a receptacle – a receptacle for cock, all the cock she could get.”

I’m going to be straight with you – this book was a big fail for me all around. Between the heroine’s spasming, weeping, and humming vagina and the manipulative hero with his straight penis – the book read more like a parody than a steamy romance.

I do have to give props to the author though – as there was clearly something good about her writing. I can’t define what that is, except that I was entertained enough to keep turning the page, I did want to know what she’d come up with next. It reminded me of the pornographic movie I watched with my girlfriend when I was 18. It wasn’t sexy, we were howling laughing, and yet we couldn’t turn it off because we wanted to know just how this girl was going to wind up impaled on yet another penis. I’m going to forge ahead and attempt to do this book justice with my review.

Our heroine Carly is back in her home town and she meets the new cop… and it’s ménage Jake of the straight as an arrow penis. He says “Hi Desiree!” and she freak out. Yells at him, refuses to speak to him or explain why she’s the exact opposite of the woman he met before, and generally acts completely crazy. The local men explain to him that her name is Carly, and that she’s frigid, doesn’t date, and the one relationship she did had ended over her lack of interest in sex.

Jake can’t let this stand, he’s too interested and must find out what’s up. What he finds is that she feels it’s impossible to have sexual relationships with people she actually knows and has to morph into this alternate personality “Desiree” to have sex and pretend it’s not real, it’s not really her. This is incredibly sad to me, and sets the tone for the book. How can it be sexy, knowing that this woman has such trauma that she can’t have a real relationship due to serious mental issues that she will barely even face?

Jake sets out to show her how good they can be together, fix her, and gets her to accept that there isn’t another person or alternate personality– it’s all just her. He also reveals his deep dark secrets, and destroys a fair award winning chocolate cream pie:

“He wanted to see, wanted to watch his chocolaty fingers go in and out of her, the pudding melting and oozing now, the sight weirdly exciting to him”

“As he reached for the pudding now – it was no longer pie – he simply saw it as lubricant, as what would make this work for her. He generously slathered his erection with it. And then he positioned the head of his cock at the tiny fissure of her ass and wondered how this would go.”

Creative choices for lubricant in her sex scenes aside, I found this author to be repetitive in her wording, the pace of the book is slow, and while the plot development and story was weak, there was enough that it made me question her choices. I found myself wondering if the author’s intent was an erotica novel, or if she was going for a very steamy romance novel. It doesn’t do either genre any favors.

“aiming carefully from up above, he let a large drop of saliva drip from his mouth and watched as it hit dead-on, then slipped neatly into her ass… almost weak with his growing lust now, he spit again. This time the saliva landed in the crease, just above her asshole, and he used his thumb to rub it in around the puckering entryway”

The author tells us that Jake is a great cop, that he’s an alpha male but nowhere in this story did I see this in action. The only actual “Jake the H.O.T. cop in action” scene I found both unbelievable and  unprofessional. I was also disappointed in him as a character – I found nothing to like about Mr. straight as an arrow. He both manipulates and does his best to control the heroine, then backs off and claims he’s too damaged, not good enough for her.

Here is a woman who is both weak and all messed up in the head getting all hot for her boyfriend – finally she’s able to start have a real relationship + sex – and he’s talking her into doing stuff with his guy friends too. Yes, they go hang out with his “H.O.T” friends and there’s some group action. How some training program as cops working for different departments, some aren’t even cops is relevant to this series… I just don’t know.

Jake is busy calling all shots in both the relationship – meanwhile she’s read some self help books and feels like she’s all better now. My prediction is when she’s truly a healthy happy woman again, she’ll dump this looser and find someone who won’t spit on her during sex.

If I haven’t made it clear, this book didn’t work for me. But because it made me laugh aloud – hard enough to have my husband ask what the hell I was reading, and because I was intrigued enough to not DNF it, I can’t give it a complete fail.

Grade: D-

Recent Reviews:
Fiction Vixen – 4/5
Love to Read for Fun – 4/5
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