Second Bookses

Well, I can't say I wasn't warned.On paper, this book has absolutely everything I should love: a grifter heroine (Hello, one of my favorite movies of all time); a tattooed, pierced, ex-nerd hero; broken pasts for both of them; and an author I've previously enjoyed a LOT via her Experiment in Terror series.Unfortunately, all these fantastic things combine to create a book I wanted to love but simply couldn't.The story here is told through jumps between present-day and the past. The tl;dr version is that Ellie, our heroine, is back in her old hometown hoping to go straight. She applies for exactly one job and is turned away before she meets our hero, Camden. She and Cam go way back to high school, having had a complicated relationship, and between the flashbacks and Ellie's near-instant decision to steal from him instead of continuing her job hunt, if you can't see the writing on the wall, you've probably never read a book before.From there, the two team up in the most convoluted deal I've probably ever seen. And oh, BTW, they have sex.What really depressed me about this book is that Halle has written characters with great chemistry before. These two? Have exactly none. It's all explained why they are together, might want to be together, etc. but you never really get a good feeling that they SHOULD be together. There's no chemistry, no reason to root for them, and the deus ex machina ways they get out of corners just frustrated the hell out of me.By the end, I didn't care enough about either of the characters to want to know what happens next in this series. While the writing was good, the rest of it left me cold.Here's hoping Halle goes back to the great stuff she was doing with the horror books.