Let’s say you own a trendy Chicago coffee café called The Daily Grind and for the last several weeks have been drooling over a hunky new customer. Let’s say this customer is the ultimate bad boy - but you’re a little gun shy because of a now deceased, slime ball husband. Let’s also say that you live with an impulsive younger cousin, a phone sex operator, who has disappeared.

Let’s say you find out that the sexy bad boy is a private investigator and you decide to hire him when the police offer little assistance. You go to his office and proceed to have your first ever conversation with him. It is decided that you will pose as a phone sex operator at your cousin’s place of employment. The bad boy proceeds to agree to take your case then admits he’s warm for your form. He then leers at you and invites you to sit on his lap. Do you:

A) Slap his face so hard his teeth rattle?
B) Knee him in the family jewels?
C) Play tonsil hockey and nearly wet yourself you’re so turned on?

Like a guy I dated in college - Wilde Thing lacks foreplay. There is little build-up to the main characters going at it like rabbits. With this story not even clocking in at 300 pages - a chapter or two allowing the characters to tap dance around each other could have gone a long way in building up the tension. The whole start to this story felt like jumping into a frozen lake in the middle of January.

While Wilde Thing starts out on extremely shaky ground - Denison does some things differently in her erotically charged novel that separates it from the pack of normal romance-erotica fare. For one thing, I like her characters. Liz Adams could be anyone’s sister, daughter or best friend. While she has a misguided sense of duty - she’s the kind of gal I’d like to hang out with. Steve Wilde starts out as the prototypical romance hero bad boy - but Denison softens his image by giving him a teenage daughter he dotes on and a failed marriage that ends amicably. This blessedly means no loathsome ex-wife mucking up the works. It also helps that our bad boy soon finds himself head over heels for our heroine.

The plot of the missing cousin only serves to move the story along - which means going from one sex scene to the next - and Wilde Thing offers up wall-to-wall nookie. When the characters aren’t doing it, they’re either talking or thinking about it. One sex scene in particularly practically melted my glasses off my face.

My original problems with the story set-up did become a dim memory as Denison turned up the steam and delved deeper into her characters. Then I got to the ending. Wilde Thing takes place in one week’s time, and the way the author chooses to end this tale of hedonistic pleasure was just too much for me to swallow. I’m willing to suspend disbelief to a certain extent - but I’m not about to throw it out the window completely.

That said, even with my mixed reaction - I’m largely pleased with Denison’s first full-length foray for Brava. Her likable characters and steamy sex scenes make Wilde Thing compulsively readable. If you’re looking for a hot book to go along with a hot day at the beach, this could be the wild ride you’re looking for.

--Wendy Crutcher