After the Night by Linda Howard

After the Night by Linda Howard has been in the TBR for quite some time, but after hearing a comment on how sexy the hero was on one of my boards, I pulled it out last night and starting reading.

Ack!

I had many, many, many, many problems with this story. The worst have to do the the book's set-up. It begins with a very young Faith (11-14) having a crush on Gray who is much older (19-22). Her mother is the town slut and his dad is the town mogul, and they are having an ongoing affair in a little LA parish. Faith's family is hugely dysfunctional. Her dad is a drunk, and her two brothers are following in his footsteps. Her older sister is a slut, and her younger brother is severely Down's Syndrome. She is the one who cares for his needs. Every character is a stereotype. Faith is the good girl from the family the town loves to hate, and Gray is the bad boy who's rich and charismatic and totally hot and gets his way in everything. Gray's mom is frigid and his sister is emotionally fragile. I'd go off here on a tangent about how there are no good female characters except Faith, except that the testosterone brigade is no better. Anyway...blah blah blah blah blah...one night Gray's dad and Faith's mom disappear, and the next morning EVERYONE has decided that they've taken off for good. Gray is left with a business mess. His sister tries to commit suicide. All this stress leads him to toss Faith's whole family out of the house they've been living in (paid for by Faith's mom's body basically). In the middle of the night he brings the cops out, they toss the Devlins out of the house, and after ogling Faith in the most icky way, Gray tells her her whole family is trash and they need to get out of the county NOW.

Fast forward 12 years. Faith is now the successful owner of a travel agency and a young widow. She's tracked her mother down and found out that she didn't run away with Gray's dad after all. Which leaves a big mystery. Faith decides to go back to her "home" and figure out what happened that night. She purchases a house outright (so Gray can't use his ties to buy out her mortgage) and decides to run her agency business from home and then she confronts Gray. The sparks fly. They are so horny for each other, they can hardly see straight. But Faith is determined to prove to everyone she's not a slut Devlin, so she resists the lure of Gray. She still loves him, but she will resist him. Blah blah blah blah blah.

Okay, is it just me, but are there a million plot holes here? Why does Faith still love Gray? He's a jerk. He threw her and her defenseless brother out of her house for something her mom did. They were children. She had to go into foster care because of what he did (amazingly good, unbelievably emotionally healthy foster care, I might add). And then he harasses her when she gets back, inducing the local business owners to shun her so she can't get groceries or buy gas in town (Why she would want to patronize these horrible people who looked down on her in childhood is another question.). But she doesn't blame him. She's never blamed him. Why? Why? Why is this? He's a jerk. Blame away.

Howard makes a valient effort to prove what a self-made woman Faith is. Her tumultuous childhood spurred her on to becoming class valedictorian and getting a college degree (unlikely, but okay). And then she was able to take over a successful multi-site travel agency by age 26. Her business is successful enough that she doesn't have to work onsite and she can purchase a home for cash. (This really strains credibility.)

Another plot problem is how everyone assumes that Gray's dad is gone permanently when he's only been missing for a few hours. Why would they assume this? I suppose it gives the story a sense of urgency and forces all the characters to act highly emotionally, but why wouldn't everyone just wait and see what happens? And why wouldn't the family do everything in their power to figure out where he went? That makes no sense.

The age gap between Faith and Gray is also problematic. She's a child in their first encounters, but by the time he boots her out of the parish, she's a budding woman hot enough to give him a hard-on? That is soooooo yucky. But plot-wise she has to be a child, and, therefore, helpless in order to accomplish her transformation into self-reliant, successful woman by their next meeting. And unfortunately that can't be much more than 12 years because the reader wouldn't buy the connection between them as valid if it was a more realistic 20 years, and by that time Gray would be 42 anyway.

I am just dumbfounded that this book got a B grade at AAR. The set-up makes no sense, the hero is a jerk, and almost all the characters have only one dimension. There is no subtlety at all to this story. It's like a fairy tale with all of the usual hyperbole and exaggeration.

My grade: D