Sizzle by Jennifer Cruse

Emily Tate is something of a marketing whizz kid, with her last campaign being wildly successful. One thing she is not good at is keeping to her budgets and so the company brings in Richard Parker whose job it will be to keep tight reins on the money side of things. Of course Emily and Richard clash immediately, but it isn't long before their attraction to each other can't be denied, and something will definitely begin to sizzle!

Whilst Jennifer Crusie doesn't deny that this book is in existence, she doesn't exactly proudly claim it as the following quote for the FAQ page of her website shows when asked if there will be reprints of some of her older books:

DO NOT ASK FOR A SIZZLE REPRINT. That damn book is following me around the way early porn films follow actresses.

Whilst I can see where she is coming from, because there are definitely some major flaws in the book (or more precisely novella given that it is less than 100 pages long), I am glad that I tracked it down. The heroine is smart, attractive and funny, a Jennifer Crusie prototype for some of her later heroines if you like.

One of the major problems in the book is that Richard is never given his voice - the whole story is told from Emily's point of view and therefore Richard comes across as somewhat two dimension, or almost like a characiture of a hero in some ways. He was also a bit of a one joke heroine - that being that he never seems to really listen to Emily's point of view. Having said that the picture I have in my mind is of a really sexy bloke....so he wasn't a complete failure character wise.

One of the differences between this book and many of her others is that this one is a whole lot hotter and sexier. The sex in this one was a lot more explicit than I remember many of the others I have read being, although that could be a case of selective memory in my case. There are a couple of desk scenes in particular that are very steamy!

I am not sure that I completely like the idea of a perfume that heats up on your skin either, which is where the title of the story comes from, but overall it was a fun, very short read, that is worth going to the trouble of tracking down if you are a fan. I'm glad I didn't pay 20 or 30 dollars for it though!!

Oh, and just in case you think that I have lost the plot completely, I am aware that I have put a picture of the cover for Anyone But You in this post, but there is a reason I promise you! A while ago Harlequin Australia rereleased Anyone But You with this horrible green cover, but they also included Sizzle in with the book. There is however no mention of this on the front cover, so if you are looking for Sizzle and see this horrible cover on Ebay and it's going for cheap it might be worth getting hold of it just to read Sizzle. That's what I did and it definitely wasn't a waste of the $5 it cost me! Who knows, one of these days I might even reread Anyone But You now that I own it!!

Rating 3.5/5