Marriage of Inconvenience - Penny Reid (Knitting in the City #7)

Finally, finally, the end of the Knitting in the City series is upon us.  And I have to wonder: why do I keep reading Penny Reid?  The thing is, I think I liked a couple of her books that I read early on, and then I just kept reading, hoping I'd like them as much, or that the issues I found in each would be resolved in the next...and they just never are.  Hmmm...

In Marriage of Inconvenience, we finally come to the book of Kat and Dan the Security Man, who have been making eyes at each other since the very first book in the series.  It has been ages.  Kat has to face up to her evil family who want to control her life as a billionaire pharmaceutical heiress, and she has to do so by not letting her cousin commit her to a mental hospital, and she has to do that by getting married.  Oh, and she has to learn to orgasm again.

This plot is paper-thin.  Basically, what I have noticed in Reid's writing is that she wants to be hip and current, and so in this book, she decided to write a romance with pharma bro Martin Shkreli as a villain.

Yes.

This is not the train wreck that Happily Ever Ninja was, but it also didn't have the slow-burn and sex appeal of Dating-ish.  Reid brings back having both leads as point of view narrators, which was lacking in the previous book, which is good...except they are both completely boring.  Dan has exactly two personality characteristics: he says "fuck" a lot and he has the hots for Kat.  Oh, you say those don't constitute a personality?  How odd.  Well, there's still Kat.  She has three personality characteristics: she was a Bad Girl in her youth, she is the heir to a pharmaceutical company, and she has the hots for Dan.  Oh, wait, that's not a personality either...?  Hm...

I wanted so, so much to like this book.  It was so long in coming!  They had been wanting each other for so long.  But ultimately, there is no romance here.  The characters already adore each other and are together within the first few chapters, and the conflicts that arise throughout the course of the book never seriously threaten their relationship.  The conflicts themselves are half-baked.  I never had a single ounce of worry for Kat because the premise of "sending the perfectly-well-functioning woman to a mental hospital on the premise that she did drugs years ago when she was a teenager" was so flimsy.  Reid tries to put in a little relationship tension with the characters not being "allowed" to have sex with each other so that Kat can work on not being able to have an orgasm, but of course they just throw that out and she's suddenly orgasming like crazy.  This happens fairly late in the book...but it's really only a handful of days after this edict comes down from her therapist.

Overall, this book was a lot eye-rolling and sighing in disappointment for me.  Not a great conclusion to the series, and not worthy of a build-up it got throughout the other books.  There are two more Winston Brothers books coming out in the future, but at this point I'm torn on if I read those and give up on Reid, or if I should just cut the cord and do it now.

Sigh.

2 stars out of 5.