Night Fire, by Catherine Coulter

I finally finished Night Fire, by Catherine Coulter, which I'd abandoned last month. Here is the post I wrote at the time.

My final grade for it was a D.

Some parts were nice, even sweet, but what bothered me the most was the contrast between a hero who was apparently a nice person, etc, and the guy who'd think that since Arielle wasn't responding to her courting, he was perfectly justified in kidnapping her and tricking her into marriage, and that that was "for her own good", because he was going to make her love him.

That is, what bothered me the most was not exactly what he did, but the fact that he saw nothing wrong in doing it. I'd be able to deal with a hero who knows he's being a bastard in kidnapping the heroine and not respecting her desires, but he's not able to help himself (and he has to grovel, of course ;-). I'm able to deal with this if the author shows that this behaviour is wrong. Not only about kidnapping, I can deal with whatever behaviour (see Gaffney's To Have and To Hold, for instance), but if, and only if, the author doesn't seem to be saying, "Oh, men know best. She, being a woman, didn't know what was good for her". Here it's not like that. Coulter seems to see nothing wrong in Burke's reasoning, and that's what turned me off.

I'm not even going to go into the idiotic suspense subplot and the boring, inane heroine. The hero alone is enough for a D grade.