The book begins with a married woman named Jennifer Burton (boring!) desperately searching her husbands office for something. He has always left his office locked and forbid her to enter it (like most husbands) and she has broken into his crazy office of mysteries right before a major hurricane hits the sleepy town of Belmar, Mississippi (double boring!). Perfect timing right? I mean there's no way her husband is going to come home and catch her when a hurricane has the whole town being evacu...oh shit, he's home.
But she's already found a tape with the name of a murdered 16 year old girl on it WITH the date she was murdered! Really? I always label my murder tapes "2 1/2 Men season finale", but to each his own.
Her husband, who also happens to be the chief of police (duh.), catches her with his creepy keepsake and she runs to a river behind their house? There they have what wife beaters call "a marital spat" and he knocks her unconscious, and as her body floats away he's pretty sure she's dead. He commences to set up an elaborate death scenario where she dies by accident.
She's not dead, obvs. She escapes and goes to California to recuperate at her twin sisters home. She and her sister devise a plan for Jennifer's twin sister Jessica to impersonate her and go back to Mississippi to retrieve the evidence that Jennifer can't remember anything about and to get revenge against her estranged husband. Apparently, the husband, Taylor Burton, had no idea that Jennifer had a twin sister. He knew she had a sister, but he never met her nor did he ever see a picture of her. Jennifer never even mentioned, during their 3 years of marriage, that her sister was a twin. Phew! That is very literarily convenient!
Well, like most fictional twins, they just couldn't be more night and day! Jennifer is the kind of girl who lets her husband almost murder her and Jessica is the kind of girl who would probably put up a fight until she was totally murdered.
When Jessinifer comes to town we find out that Jennifer was already estranged from her husband and living in a crappy apartment that was formely a crappy motel. There we meet...wait for it...Mitch Lasiter! (Finally! A romance novel name I can get behind. Ed. note: That's what Mitch said.) He lives in the apartment next to her that conveniently has one of those connecting doors on the inside (foreshadowing!) But, I forgot to mention that Mitch is a cop and is working for Taylor. Jennifer tells Jessica that he cannot be trusted, but he can be fantasized about as much as she wants. They immediately begin feeling the heat and mentally yadda yadda yaddaing each other. Mitch even begins to share personal information about himself with her that he has never shared. Things like his first pets name was Mitch and he grew up on Lasiter St.
At one point, Mitch takes Jessinifer to an out of the way BBQ joint owned by a friend. This is where the author makes the mistake of trying to be so politically correct that it turns around on her and it becomes mildly racist. She describes the staff of this restaurant as "ebony" more times than necessary and all their dialogue is stereotypically "sassy". It made this ivory girl just a tad uncomfortable. Sample line, "When you're done, just make sure the fingers you're lickin are your own." Looks like Jessinifer just made herself a sassy ebony friend! Ugh.
The trust thing starts to get a little annoying. Yeah, I get it, you both have crazy big secrets and it's too early in the book for you to reveal them. I guess the author just wanted to cash in on all the great final sentences of the chapters as long as she could. "And if there's one thing she definitely was, it was Trouble with a capital T." Classic!
Finally, they do it. And I don't mean reveal their respective secrets, if that's what you think. They lie with each other in the biblical sense! I won't go into detail, but it was.....unrealistic....I mean HOT! And they used protection which was a smart move, because I've heard that STD rates among senior citizen has been increasing as of lately and this is the perfect tool to get the word out about protecting yourself.
After the "act", Jessinifer goes back to her place and takes a call from her sister, who checks in on her throughout the book, and her sister tells her that she just remembered that whatever the incriminating evidence was, she is pretty sure she found it in Taylor's office. Jessinifer hangs up and goes back to Mitch who had just got a call from his brother/private investigator who told him that he just got word that Jennifer is DEAD, but she has a twin sister! Everyone at the bbq place is like, "Oh, no she didn't!"
Mitch confronts her and she admits that her sister has been dead this whole time? And she has twintuition which allows her to talk to her dead twin sister? And her sister gives her clues from the grave? At this point in the story, I closed the book and proceeded to throw up on myself. When I started reading again, I noticed that Mitch did not do the exact same thing. He was like "Okay, let's go find out what's in that office. And, oh yeah, my secret is that I work for the F.B.I. and I'm investigating Taylor and the corrupt inner workings of the police department here." And Jessica's like "Okay, let's do this thing!"
Luckily for them, there is another hurricane coming. Which as we learned earlier is the perfect time to break into your estranged husbands house and collect evidence, because surely they won't be caug...they get caught. Mitch hides Jessica in something. The author spends a lot of time describing said object, but I still couldn't figure out what it was. I think it was a giant liquor cabinet. And Mitch confronts Taylor and his corrupt deputy sheriff. While their backs are turned Jessica attempts to flee and is spotted by Taylor who chases after her. In the definition of full circle story telling they end up at the exact same section of river that Taylor murdered Jennifer in. And Taylor is really excited cause he's really good at murdering people in this particular area. So he starts drowning her.
But twintuition (lame) kicks in and Jennifer tells Jessica to fight! So Jessica grabs a big ol' rock and bashes Taylor in the head with it. And in a not so subtle moment of poetic justice, watches Taylor's body float away down the river. Then the house explodes in the background! Where's Mitch, you ask? Well, he was busy fighting the deputy sheriff who apparently attempted to set the house on fire in order to get rid of the evidence, but blew himself up instead. Way to go, Barney Fife! (I barely get that reference.) Of course, Mitch emerges from the smoke very sexily. And they ride off into the sunset.
I'm not going to act like I didn't kind of enjoy this book. I understand why people read them. As my grandmother says "You always know they're going to have a happy ending." And there's something to that. Although I will not be introducing romance novels into my regular book genre rotation, they are like a little vacation for the brain. But, my brain can't take too many vacations or it will stop working all together.
