48 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Standard fare from the queen of romantic suspense., August 9, 2001
If you're a fan of Linda Howard's (and if you're not, you should be), you will find "Open Season" to be a satisfying read even though it doesn't offer anything new. If fact, I thought this book was VERY similar to Howard's "Dream Man" without the psychic elements. But hey, "Dream Man" was a great book, so a repeat isn't completely uncalled for.
The core story is about a small-town librarian, Daisy Minor, who wakes up on her 34th birthday and realizes that her hair is boring, her clothes are boring, her job is boring, she's boring. Not to mention lonely. Daisy decides that if she doesn't want to spend her life alone, she needs to get busy, and the fastest way to get results is to do a complete make-over into a "party" girl. Sure enough, there is a beautiful, sexy woman under all her frowsiness. Before she even starts her transformation, she butts heads with the new police chief, Jack Russo, an apparent fish-out-of-water Yankee in this sleepy southern berg. He's big, he's intimidating, he's rude. He's also very sexy . As Daisy ventures out to strut her new stuff at the local bars, he becomes concerned that she's way too naive to realize when she's attracted the wrong kind of attention. Daisy wants him to get out of her way so she can continue her man hunt. Dane - I mean Jack - decides that he needs to stick close for her own protection. Then he decides that he just needs to stick close. Somewhere along the way there's a crime to solve and Daisy becomes a target for bad guys. Which means, of course, that Daisy and Jack need to have some hot love scenes.
Howard's unique style and humor are evident throughout the book. Daisy's schemes to get the word out that she's available are hysterical, and you will never see colored condoms in the same light. Both of the lead characters are appealing, but Daisy is the more finely drafted of the two. Her ernest attempts to be a party girl are charming. I particularly appreciated that she isn't one of those ninny romantic heroines who has to go do something foolish that she's been warned not to do in order to prove how independent and spirited she is. In fact, when Jack thinks she's left a safe haven he's found for her, she lets him have it. Her response: "I'm safe here; why would I leave? That's what always happens in movies; either the woman or the kid disobeys instructions and does exactly what they've been told not to do, thereby putting both themselves and everyone else in danger. I've always thought that if they were that stupid, then let them die before they have a chance to breed." Hallelujah!
The mystery plot is good, but the romance is better. The secondary characters are well-developed, especially the bad guys. All in all, this is a quick read, but a good one.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Box of Condoms and Thou, July 21, 2001
Once I found out Open Season is about a librarian who has a make over and moves out of her mother's house I couldn't wait to read it since I'm a librarian.
Linda Howard delivers another winner with Open Season, a cute, sexy, satisfying read that has more comedy than suspense. I guffawed at several passages (especially the scene involving a box of condoms). Linda Howard is one of the few romance writers who is an "auto-buy" for me. She never disappoints....Although, I'm rating this title four stars, because, I don't think Open Season ranks among the best she's written. I would have liked a little more characterization of the main characters. But Open Season's still darn good. I very much enjoy reading Ms. Howard's analysis and observations of nonverbal language that is part of her narrative voice. Running into those small gems are one of the joys of being a reader.
Linda Howard is much like Susan Elizabeth Phillips on an ordinary day: reliably good. Always deft and always satisfying.
The small town setting of Hillsboro, Alabama are reminiscent of Linda Howard's earlier After the Night and Jennifer Crusie's hilarious Tell Me Lies and The Cinderella Deal. Other Linda Howard titles that top my list are: Son of the Morning, the Mackenzie series, Diamond Bay, the short stories Lake of Dreams and Overload.
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29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Where is the thriller?, August 16, 2001
Ive been utterly mislead by some ad and/or review in buying this book. I dont know anything else by this author, but Open Season, in spite of Linda Howards skilful craftmanship as a writer, to me has been an absolute flop. As it is written in the back-cover, it defied me as a reader to put it down... but only because I was eager to find whether and whenever the story would become something close to a thriller, how and where I would eventually face the blending heart-pounding romance and breathless intrigue its back-cover is talking about. I found rather hard to believe that the author is a woman: to me the psychology of her main character is very like the caricature of feminine psychology that one would expect from a terribly outdated, oldfashioned man. Here and there depictions of petty details totally irrelevant to the story are dealt with for an unbelievable number of long paragraphs or even whole pages, that in fact Ive skipped altogether. The best evidence are all the pages spent about Daisys pet - pages, moreover, full of the most obvious... common places concerning puppies. Finally, the quick evolution of the relationship between the two main characters from an... affair to a dedicated, everlasting, family growing love is simply ridiculous. My opinion is that this book is best epitomized by the following quotations: She had a lover and a dog: could life get any better? (p.196) to be matched later on by her mate statement: ...A naked woman and a fuzzy puppy: what more can a man want?...
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