Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.
Not much to say here, I could not get into this book. Other reviewers mentioned how crude it is, and honestly it is. I just couldn’t root for the main character, Valerie Hart. I don’t know if I would have felt differently if I had read book #1 (The Killing Lessons) and book #2 (LoveMurder). Valerie is obsessed with sex it seems and her ties to this case (a man she almost had sex with is killed during a home invasion) didn’t do much for me. I am definitely going to pass on reading any moer about Valerie.
“Anything For You” follows homicide detective Valerie Hart. Valerie is called in when former prosecutor Adam Grant is found murdered and his wife injured. It looks like a home invasion gone wrong, but as readers follow along, something else seems to be going on. Valerie is worried about working the case and anyone finding out that she and Adam Grant had a passing something (honestly the scenes about them almost having sex were just…blah) and wants to stay on the case.
I can’t say much about Valerie besides she seems or is written as oversexed. She has recently got back together with her ex-husband Nick and they just seem to be two bodies that meet and never really click. Or at least I didn’t think they did. I don’t want to poo poo women liking and enjoying sex. Valerie is just written as a male fantasy I think. She meets a dude and starts thinking about how he is in bed and practically starts humping men’s legs. She really is a female version of the Lucas Davenport character in the first couple of Prey books. I stopped reading that series for a year since the first few books were so bad and I was tired of reading about how Lucas saw a woman and how he jumped right into wanting “to nail her.”
I can’t say much else about the secondary characters since I didn’t get a good sense of anyone. Once again I am going to blame myself for getting a ARC and not realizing until after the fact it was the third book in a series. We do flip between Valerie and a woman in this one (no spoilers) but once again I didn’t think the other woman was written well at all.
The writing was not good. I think other reviewers nailed it on the head is that you definitely get that a man wrote this book especially with how Black graphically describes sex. I started to skip over any sex related scenes. The flow wasn’t working for me either since you go back and forth between Valerie investigating and then some mysterious woman who is up to something. It takes way too long for the dots to connect.
The setting of the book is mostly San Francisco, but it just felt like any old beige city in America. I wish that Black had incorporated more of the city into this. I just recently watched “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” and thought that movie was brilliant in showcasing the many facets of those that live in that city.
The ending was okay. I was just glad to be done.