Customer Reviews

Burn

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(22)
2 star:		(24)
1 star:		(28)

 

 

I'm a long-time Linda Howard fan, and was highly anticipating this book, but ended up disappointed. Being Linda Howard, it's still better than most of the romances out there, but it's just not up to her usual caliber. The characters were intriguing and hilarious, the plot should've been fast-paced and interesting, but instead it was just kind of boring.

Ms. Howard's main problem with this book is that the story-telling switches so often from character to character that the reader becomes omniscient. You know exactly what Cael and his team are doing on the boat, you know where his intentions lie, and why he kidnapped Jenner. But you get to read page after page (after page after page) of Jenner musing over just these questions. Unfortunately, with no mystery to the reader concerning his actions, being forced to read on and on about her trying to figure it out becomes tedious and boring with much skimming involved.

Likewise, it's very obvious, very quickly exactly what the villain of the piece is up to and why he plans what he plans because we read from his viewpoint so often. But having to go over and over (and over and over) Cael's musings to figure out the nefarious plot is equally frustrating. Ms. Howard could have easily created an extremely suspenseful and fascinating novel had she limited her character viewpoints only to Syd and Jenner. She could've expanded to include Cael and his team once we knew what role he played, and kept a couple of short blips from the bad guy without revealing anything but sinister design. But instead we're subjected to long and ultimately pointless descriptions of ghosting and surveilling Larkin, while the main characters struggle to understand what's happening around them. There's just NO MYSTERY. Even had it been set up like All the Queen's Men, wherein the reader understood everything happening, but the plot was filled with excitement and adventure, this novel would have been good. But no, after the kidnapping takes place, nothing at all exciting happens until the very end (that doesn't have to do with sex).

Don't get me wrong, as I mentioned earlier, the interactions between the two main characters Jenner and Cael are passionate and absolutely hilarious (reminiscent of Jane and Sam in Mr. Perfect). Those scenes are well worth the read and certainly enjoyable. But absolutely nothing exciting or interesting happens in the middle of the book. I would recommend this one for the fun of it, but expect long skimming sessions.

What has happened to Linda Howard? I thoroughly enjoyed "Son of the Morning," "Shades of Twilight," "Dream Man," "After the Night," etc but her recent ones have been real clunkers. This novel gives you no real relationships except that of the main two characters and they interact with one another in the same exact manner throughout the book, the sex scenes are boring and then magically they are in love forever. I sorely miss the old Linda Howard. Can someone tell her we want her back?

I've been reading Linda Howard's books since 1984 and I think I have copies of everything she ever wrote including some of her truly dreadful early work before she hit her groove that zipped her to the top of my favorite authors list for more than two decades. Everyone agrees that Linda Howard's claim to fame are her sexy delicious heroes. She writes wonderful sexy stories about cops, mercenaries, corporate sharks, cowboys and service men in the regular military. I loved her medieval hero in the time travel she wrote. And I thought the hit man in Death Angel was ok despite a *weird* deus ex machina scene half way through.

Unfortunately, I can't tolerate Linda Howard's spy guys. I dislike them so much that each time I read one of her spy guy books, I am motivated to write a negative review so that maybe her publisher can influence her to stop writing these clunkers! Linda Howard just can not make these spy guy heroes sympathetic. And her spy guy plots are just hokey and full of holes.

I can overlook an implausible plot if the hero and heroine are likeable but every one of her spy guy heroes are unfeeling, righteous, macho, sadistic jerks and the hero in BURN, Cael Traylor, lives down to all those adjectives. I was so repulsed by him from the very first chapter that I never could suspend disbelief sufficiently to fall for the incoherent plot. In fact, I put Burn down for 3 days before picking it back up again. I was close to deciding not to finish it. It's really too bad because the heroine Jenner Redwine started out great before she got dumbed down and by the jerk. Someone in another review wrote that she became boring. That's right, she did. Jenner kicks out her moocher boy friend, wins the lottery, makes some smart decisions about her money, and was shaping up to be one smart cookie before she took a 180 to boring and never recovered. She deserved a lot better book. Tant pis.

If you buy Linda Howard's books because you are collecting them, then you're like me. Buy it. If you want to buy a book because you want a good read. Skip this one, the plot's incoherent, the hero is an arrogant creep and the heroine is boring.

Linda Howard is one of my favorite authors. I love her stuff. Except for this one. The plot makes little sense. The villain's of the piece motivation just doesn't cut it which makes the whole storyline fall apart for me. How and why is having cancer sufficient motivation to blow up an entire boat? The cruise is populated by rich people, true, but they're all donating heavily to a charitable cause so how and why are they useless parasites? Jenner's father and best friend are heavily written about, then just disappear one third of the way through never to be heard from again. The same with Al, her accountant who's supposed to one of Jenner's two best friends. Lots of introduction with little follow through. I wait impatiently for each of Linda Howard's releases but found Burn to be very disappointing.

I thought I'd try Burn even though I put down the last few Linda Howard novels I started midway through because they were so unengaging. I actually finished this novel, but by the end I was angry at it. The story itself was okay, but the hero had no personality whatsoever and the heroine had no redeeming features.

First of all, she starts out the novel working at a meat packing plant, where she apparently has utterly no ambitions other than to go out drinking at night. I felt like Howard was trying to create an average-yet-poor person, but she made Jenner so stupid I was kind of insulted. Jenner has no plans, no interests in anything, few friends, no bank account, and no general knowledge. There are people with crappy jobs and no plans to change them, but everyone has interests, or wishes.

Second, Jenner wins a huge lottery jackpot. . . and whines about taxes. Repeatedly. Throughout the book. She likes Marines, she roots for the good guys, but shows no insight about what pays for Marines. She ends up with over a hundred million dollars that she won randomly by chance, and we can't just read a romance novel without this whining about taxes? Worse, when Jenner whines, it seems embarrassingly like Howard's whining bleeding through. I'm not reading this book to get an idea of Linda Howard's sociopolitical views. . . in part because they seem so bitter.

Third, Jenner--despite showing no particular skill at anything--manages to take that hundred million dollars and multiply it with her financial skills. This has the effect of creating a weird feeling of moral capitalism in the book--Jenner is good because she can make money. She can make money because she is good. Her goodness can be seen by looking at her money skills. Taxes are evil because they take her money that she won in a lottery. She must have won the lottery because she was a good person waiting to happen, and once she got all that money she was transformed into a totally different person.

Fourth, her name was Jenner. All through the book, I kept hoping that it had just been a misprint thus far and that it was really Jennifer, or Jennet, or Jenne, or anything that wasn't Jenner. No luck.

Fifth, there are just no positive points about Jenner. Negative ones abound: falling in love with the guy who's kidnapping you and holding your friend hostage? Just plain creepy. I didn't feel very comfortable with the situation, and I really wasn't sure what I was supposed to like about Jenner.

Thinking back on this, I think that this has been my problem with a lot of Howard's more recent books: her heroines just aren't that great any more. The last of Howard's novels that I really liked was Mr. Perfect, and even in that one the heroine bordered on being unsympathetic. They've just gotten really self-righteous, and they lack emotional depth. I miss Marlie from Dream Man, Roanna from Shades of Twilight, and Grace from Son of the Morning--these characters had a vulnerability that is just lacking from Jenner. This is the last Howard novel I pick up where the characters are embittered secret agent/assassin/criminal types. I don't like these people. I don't get the romance high from watching unlikeable people fall in love, and if there's none of that. . . what's the point?

I love most of Linda Howard's books but this was not one of them. It was a dry story line and the characters were not developed enough to make me care what happened to them. The ending was anti-climactic. I wondered if there was a printing deadline and this was all she could come up with. I won't elaborate but I felt that I wasted time and money on this one. This book felt like it was something from early on in her career that had been reworked with a few updates so it could be released as new in 2009.

I used to love Linda Howard and I still buy all her books thinking that the magic will be back with each new title. So far I've been disappointed. "Burn" is boring and doesn't even have much of a romance. I look for "romantic suspense" in reading a Linda Howard book and "Burn" has neither. One of my favorite Linda Howard books is "Touch of Fire" and has a similar plot whereby the hero kidnaps the heroine but it is done much better with a much better plot and better building of the relationship between the two main characters. In "Burn" the only basis for the romance between Cael and Jenner that I could see is physical attraction and the "Stockholm Syndrome" (which Jenner said she would NOT succumb to in one of the passages of the book). BIG disappointment but I keep hoping that Linda Howard will begin writing the kind of books that made her fan worthy to begin with. So far, not so much.

I don't understand why so many people didn't enjoy this book. I completely bonded with the main character Jenner who is a strong minded individual. And simply loved the way she managed her life after winning the lottery.

I also enjoyed Cael, the main guy in the book and found him very interesting. My only complaint was that not enough time was spent on him. But that had to happen in order to concentrate on the plot.

Linda also took time to develop Sydney many other secondary characters. I would love to see Sydney and the young blond hunk/agent working on the ship (His name escapes me right now) get their own stories and perhaps even fall for each other despite never having met in this book.

Finally, I was very happy with the ending. Won't give it away but we now know what happened to Jenner and she did get her wish.

Its not a typical romance story, but its a very fun and fast read. Perfect for a lazy weekend of reading.

This book was slow and boring. The plot was pretty bad. I just can't believe a great author like Linda Howard would release a book like this. The characters were not developed or interesting and you found you could really care less about any of them. If you insist on reading this, wait until you can borrow it.

I'm only giving this a 3 star because I liked the two main characters. Otherwise, I found the book kinda boring. Usually, I can't put down a Howard book, but this time I kept putting it down and going to do other things. Where normally I finish a book in one sitting (If I like it) this book took me two days to finish. I'm not going over the plot since others have already done that, but I will say that it got tedious after awhile reading about the bad guy and his problems and all the surveillance of him, over and over and over. There was no mystery at all to this book, which I think was one main problem. Also, I really didn't see any heat between the hero and heroine until way close to the end. ALSO, I was hoping Ice would be a continuation of this group of people, but now I see that it's not. What a shame, because the end Burn sets up another story.