Open Season [Hardcover]

Linda Howard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 17, 2001

She's hunting for a mate...
and there's no more playing it safe.

Daisy Minor is bored. Worse than that, she's boring. A plain, small-town librarian, she's got a wardrobe as sexy as a dictionary and hasn't been on a date in years. She's never even had a lukewarm love affair, let alone a hot one. So when she wakes up on her thirty-fourth birthday and wonders how it is that she still lives with her widowed mom and spinster aunt while her friends have all gotten married and started families, she decides it's time to get a life -- and a sex life. And as far as she can tell, good girls don't attract nearly as many men as bad ones.

Can a lifelong good girl turn bad? No, not exactly.

But they can pretend, right?

One makeover later, Daisy has transformed herself into a party girl extraordinaire. She's letting her hair down, dancing the night away at clubs, and laughing and ?irting with men for the first time in, well, forever. With a new lease on her own place, she's found a new lease on life -- and it's open season for man hunting.

But on her way home late one night, Daisy sees something she's not supposed to see. Suddenly the target of a killer, she's forced to put her manhunt on hold. But the very moment she stops looking might be the moment she finds what she's wanted all along. Trouble is, before he can share her life, he might just have to save it.

Seamlessly blending heart-pounding romance and breathless intrigue, Linda Howard has once more proved herself a masterful storyteller, writing this stylish and provocative novel that absolutely defies readers to put it down.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The Orlando Sentinel A thriller...with deftness and charm. --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

About the Author

Linda Howard is the award-winning author of eight New York Times bestsellers, including Mr. Perfect, All the Queen's Men, Now You See Her, Kill and Tell, and Son of the Morning. She lives in Alabama with her husband and two golden retrievers. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Atria; 1ST edition (July 17, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671034421
• ISBN-13: 978-0671034429
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (225 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #613,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Linda Howard is the award-winning author of many New York Times bestsellers, including Up Close and Dangerous, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Cover of Night, Killing Time, To Die For, Kiss Me While I Sleep, Cry No More, and Dying to Please. She lives in Alabama with her husband and two golden retrievers.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

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

By 

mirope "mirope" - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Open Season (Hardcover)

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.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Box of Condoms and Thou, July 21, 2001

By 

--corinne-- (Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Open Season (Hardcover)

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.

29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Where is the thriller?, August 16, 2001

By 

Carlo Turco (00147 Rome (Italy)) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Open Season (Hardcover)

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?...