Romantic Mayhem that Falls Flat

Inviting Fire - Emily Kimelman

It’s tough dropping into a mystery-thriller series at the sixth book. I wouldn’t recommend it, actually, but only book number six in the Sidney Rye series was offered free, and I don’t pay for self-published books. Not even 99¢… Inviting Fire was free, but it still was’t a bargain.

In case you aren’t aware of the series, Emily Kimelman’s Sidney Rye is… well, I’m still not quite sure what she is even after having read the entire book. I think she’s supposed to be an avenging angel, since the group she helped found, Joyful Justice, seems to like to kill people it considers “bad.” Of course, this being 2015, bad people are human traffickers, just as they’d have been cartel sicarios ten years ago. Whatever.


Sidney and her dog Blue kill lots of people, get shot, and get cut with knives. Sidney (not her real name – that was “Joy Humbolt”) fucks everything in pants. I kid you not: when she isn’t either screwing someone or killing someone, she’s thinking about the next person she’ll kill or that last guy she screwed. There’s so little plot in this book that I can’t even describe it!

Amazon sells it...

Kimelman’s writing is awful. For one thing, it’s repetitive – according to my Kindle, she used some variation on “Blue tapped my hip” fifteen times in 240 pages. Never “nudged,” “nosed,” “brushed,” or another verb (or body part – I once had a dog who liked to bury his nose in the back of my knee): always “tapped my hip.” Kimelman also thinks sneakers have “souls,” among other grammatical flubs.

Worst of all, though, is the failure to advance a coherent plot. Instead, most of the book seems to comprise the author’s constant references back to earlier installments in the series – about how so-and-so was killed, such-and-such blew up, who screwed whom, and the like. Small wonder the plot doesn't move forward - it's always moving backward! Not to mention that it’s complete crap. And that cover? is that really supposed to look like a dog???


The violence is relentless: bad guys’ heads explode, hands are lopped off with machetes, trucks explode and everyone (but Sidney) dies horrible deaths. The seductions are just about as relentless, though not particularly graphic – especially compared to all those bullets stitching living flesh, etc. The weird combination of video game-like violence and hot sex makes it pretty obvious that the Rye series targets gamer girls who aren’t aroused by conventional Harlequin themes. Sheesh – and to think people pay for stuff like Inviting Fire. That's so sad.