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A review by paulabrandon
Smash Cut by Sandra Brown
2.0
By turns both boring and ludicrous! It works on a dumb potboiler level, but it's silly, brain-dead trash nonetheless!
Creighton Wheeler masterminds the murder of his uncle Paul Wheeler to get his hands on his inheritance, although he's already ridiculously wealthy. He employs a method from Strangers On A Train, where he gets Billy Duke to do the murder - a shooting - for him. Billy does this because he owes Creighton for killing the wealthy widow that Billy was fleecing and who was now about to testify against him.
Paul's lover Julie is convinced of Creighton's guilt, despite his rock-solid alibi. When she learns that the Wheeler family is about to employ Derek Mitchell to represent Creighton, she flies to France so that she can wind up on a flight back to the US with him, in order to have sex with him, and thus ensure that he can no longer represent the Wheelers because of a conflict of interest. Yes, really! This is despite the fact that there's no guarantee Creighton will ever be arrested or that the Wheelers could easily find another lawyer. Did Julie plan to have sex with all of them? Derek actually brings this up, but the question remains unanswered - probably because it's so fucking stupid and Brown really couldn't come up with any way to make it logical!
Even though Derek refuses to represent Creighton and returns his retainer, he continues to dig into Creighton's past and possible motives. Despite claiming not wanting to be involved. Huh? Anyway, Creighton is carefully setting everything up to make it look like Julie and Billy were partners in Paul's death, which causes Derek to doubt Julie, even though he wants to have sex with her as well. The evidence keeps mounting up against Julie, causing friction between them, including the fact Paul recently changed his will to leave everything to Julie. But this is mired so deeply in the romantic suspense genre tropes that attempts to make Julie appear guilty are just pointless! By the very nature of this genre, we know she isn't!
Julie and Derek become convinced that Creighton plans to knock off the girl Ariel Williams, who apparently dated Billy and then testified against him. She also could have linked him to Creighton. Except it was actually her roommate Carol who dated Billy, which doesn't make much sense, but anyway. So it turns out that Creighton is actually off to murder Carol, so they all race off to save the day.
In the end, it's revealed that Paul was actually Julie's father, not her lover. Yes, that's why they had a weekly meet-up at a hotel! She claims it was to protect her parents (her father raised her as her own) and protect Paul's relationship with his deceased first wife, who couldn't have children. She wanted to spare them all the scandal. Except they all knew about the situation and were fine with it. So what's the scandal? Is this the 1960s or something?!? Julie claims she doesn't care if people thought she was Paul's lover - scandalous in itself - so it makes no freaking sense for her to care about the "scandal" of a unexpected pregnancy!
This revelation apparently also makes it okay for her to fuck a stranger on a plane, because she wasn't actually in a relationship with the person we believed she was in a relationship with. What I reckon is that Sandra Brown could have spent an extra five minutes to come up with a far less staggeringly contrived way in which to get her two main characters together! Absolutely nothing about that set-up made a lick of sense, and basically rendered the entire book very difficult to take!
I kept wavering between 1 star and 2 stars, but went with 2 stars because I suppose getting so riled up at a book's utter stupidity and inanity meant I was somewhat engaged with the material!
Creighton Wheeler masterminds the murder of his uncle Paul Wheeler to get his hands on his inheritance, although he's already ridiculously wealthy. He employs a method from Strangers On A Train, where he gets Billy Duke to do the murder - a shooting - for him. Billy does this because he owes Creighton for killing the wealthy widow that Billy was fleecing and who was now about to testify against him.
Paul's lover Julie is convinced of Creighton's guilt, despite his rock-solid alibi. When she learns that the Wheeler family is about to employ Derek Mitchell to represent Creighton, she flies to France so that she can wind up on a flight back to the US with him, in order to have sex with him, and thus ensure that he can no longer represent the Wheelers because of a conflict of interest. Yes, really! This is despite the fact that there's no guarantee Creighton will ever be arrested or that the Wheelers could easily find another lawyer. Did Julie plan to have sex with all of them? Derek actually brings this up, but the question remains unanswered - probably because it's so fucking stupid and Brown really couldn't come up with any way to make it logical!
Even though Derek refuses to represent Creighton and returns his retainer, he continues to dig into Creighton's past and possible motives. Despite claiming not wanting to be involved. Huh? Anyway, Creighton is carefully setting everything up to make it look like Julie and Billy were partners in Paul's death, which causes Derek to doubt Julie, even though he wants to have sex with her as well. The evidence keeps mounting up against Julie, causing friction between them, including the fact Paul recently changed his will to leave everything to Julie. But this is mired so deeply in the romantic suspense genre tropes that attempts to make Julie appear guilty are just pointless! By the very nature of this genre, we know she isn't!
Julie and Derek become convinced that Creighton plans to knock off the girl Ariel Williams, who apparently dated Billy and then testified against him. She also could have linked him to Creighton. Except it was actually her roommate Carol who dated Billy, which doesn't make much sense, but anyway. So it turns out that Creighton is actually off to murder Carol, so they all race off to save the day.
In the end, it's revealed that Paul was actually Julie's father, not her lover. Yes, that's why they had a weekly meet-up at a hotel! She claims it was to protect her parents (her father raised her as her own) and protect Paul's relationship with his deceased first wife, who couldn't have children. She wanted to spare them all the scandal. Except they all knew about the situation and were fine with it. So what's the scandal? Is this the 1960s or something?!? Julie claims she doesn't care if people thought she was Paul's lover - scandalous in itself - so it makes no freaking sense for her to care about the "scandal" of a unexpected pregnancy!
This revelation apparently also makes it okay for her to fuck a stranger on a plane, because she wasn't actually in a relationship with the person we believed she was in a relationship with. What I reckon is that Sandra Brown could have spent an extra five minutes to come up with a far less staggeringly contrived way in which to get her two main characters together! Absolutely nothing about that set-up made a lick of sense, and basically rendered the entire book very difficult to take!
I kept wavering between 1 star and 2 stars, but went with 2 stars because I suppose getting so riled up at a book's utter stupidity and inanity meant I was somewhat engaged with the material!