Seriously this time, we get to the sex

Title: Lethal

Author: Sandra Brown

Progress: 85%

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

NYT BS Hardcover List: #8 (former number 1)

Book 2 out of 107

Oh my. Chapter 37, and then chapter 39. I think I’m still blushing.

I now know why some refer to Ms. Brown’s genre as the erotic-thriller.

Up until chapter 37, Lethal is a solid, conventional thriller, one that could have been written by a Grisham (but with lawyers) or a Sanford (but with a dark sense of humor).

Then Mrs. Brown brings on her signature move, what makes her dominant in her genre, hardcore sex.

How hardcore? Well, Coburn, the main character, says this…

“I think I’m gonna like the way you fuck.”

And he thinks to himself things like…

Damn, she’d been sweet. Tight and hot and slick for want of him.

Not hardcore enough? Try this…

His cock woke up and stretched.

It’s odd how disrupting these erotic segments are, how they take over and make the story something different.

It’s not like the adult parts of movies and cable TV shows. On screen, sex is an observed act, interesting, but not anything we are taking part in.

In a book, the naughtiness happens from a distinct point of view, from inside someone’s head. Somehow, that makes the sex more intimate, more embarrassing to read. When Coburn asks Honor to rub the head of his penis a certain way, I felt like I was intruding on some private moment and wanted to let them finish up before returning to the page.

Turns out that sex, written about, in detail, that goes a little further than expected, makes for good reading. I’m guessing this is one of the reasons Ms. Brown has sold over 80 million books. She delivers the danger, but also a big dash of explicit sex that other writers are too prudish to deliver. So bravo!

On the other hand, I don’t understand the post coital discussion. Our hero and heroine discuss a horse he owned as a boy and had to shoot. Where the hell did that come from? Talk about a softening agent.

You know when it wouldn't good to talk about the shooting of this horse?
Right after your really hot sex scene.

Mrs. Brown must have been in an interesting mood when she was writing these chapters because she goes from sex, to a few scenes of bloody violence, followed by some even more brutal violence, and then back to more intricately described sex, followed by…the craziest plot twist I think I’ve ever read.

No seriously. It’s clever and silly and contrived but also kind of brilliant all at once. Even though zero people read this blog, I’m not going to reveal this twist. You are just going to read 85% of Lethal to find it out for yourself.

What have we learned? Nothing we didn’t already know. Well-described sex makes for compelling reading. But it takes a brave writer to pull it off. It’s hard to write anything that you wouldn’t want your mother to read, and had I written chapter 37 and 39 of Lethal, I would have to cut them out of the copy I sent to my mother.

And if I had sent Mother the entire book, she would have asked me, “What was with the talk about the shooting of the horse after all the woo hoo?”

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” I would have said.