BLUE LOTUS

Author: Marisa Chenery ISBN: 9781595783790 9/2007 EROTIC Publisher: LIQUID SILVER BOOKS

Kendra Miller finds herself intrigued by the gold pendant her brother sent her from Egypt. She finds the enameled blue lotus flower on it lovely, but the hieroglyphs engraved on the back are a mystery she wants to solve. After innocently translating the glyphs, she sets off a chain of events that can only end in disaster. Nefertem, drawn to the woman who summoned him, knows his love for Kendra can only lead to heartache. Being bound to the pendant, his stay in her world is limited. Together they try to stop the disaster Kendra has unwittingly set in motion; Nefertem fights the changes taking place inside him. If they fail, Kendra may pay for her actions with her life.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

Marisa Chenery sets her paranormal erotic romance, THE BLUE LOTUS, in Memphis, Tennessee (and later Memphis, Egypt) where Kendra Miller gets a surprise gift from her brother Markus, a dealer in Egyptian artifacts. She cleans up the pendant he has sent only to find it is solid gold and has some hieroglyphs on the back (why didn't her brother, the ace trinket dealer, know any of this?). Kendra's best friend Tory has a friend who just happens to be an Egyptologist with a killer bod who gladly trades a dinner out with Tory for translating the message. Kendra gets her next surprise when she speaks the words from the pendant and SHAZZAM!—the Egyptian god, Nefertem, arrives in her living room in a blast of white light wearing a leopard head helmet and a white linen kilt, and brandishing a sword. She has unwittingly set loose the Egyptian goddess Sekmet's weapon of destruction. Her son Nefertem's job, when called forth, is to assess the evil of the people and then when his mother arrives on the scene two weeks hence, mow down the evil doers.

Chenery has the fantastic bones of a story with great characters and incredible sexual scenes. Kendra and Nefertem are made for each other, and with the help of Tory and her Egyptologist friend Scott, they are off to save the world from Sekhmet's death and destruction. Where Chenery falls down is that everything in between the bits of action, is bland to the extreme. Everything is generic and without description. Kendra lives in a modest two-story house; all clothes are just clothes—no Prada or even K-Mart—the car isn't a Ford or Toyota, it's just a car. And so it goes. It lacks color. And speaking of color (or should I say colour?), despite the fact that the story is set in America and published by an American press, the language is Chenery's native Canadian. Every colour, fibre, behaviour, demeanour, and favourite is spelled using the British standard, and not once do these southerners speak like they live in the south. And while I'm picking grammar bones, the editors also missed that at least three of the main characters had their names misspelled at least three times each. And to stand on my soapbox one final time: Chenery uses a writing technique that can crisp up narrative, but becomes obnoxious with overuse, employing gerunds to start several sentences in each paragraph—wiping, being, having, breaking, pulling, grabbing, throwing, spying, and deciding—are the examples just from the first page. It gives a sing-song feeling overall which is distasteful.

All of my gripes taken into consideration, THE BLUE LOTUS is a great story that with a little more effort could be so much better. I love the power of Kendra and Nefertem's love triumphing over his wicked mother. I thrilled to their ingenuity. I rejoiced to the fairy tale ending. Readers who like to see the world, as well as those who enjoy a little God-complex action, will find THE BLUE LOTUS right up their alley.

Susan Barton