When She Was Bad...

By: Cara Summers

Narrated by: Gabra Zackman

Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

She should refuse. One minute, struggling P.I. Pepper Rossi and ex-CIA agent Cole Buchanan are sharing a wild, spontaneous kiss. The next, rough-edged Cole is propositioning her to spend the next 24 hours exploring all the sensual pleasures of the tropical island they're on...with each other.

She would say no, except they're in the Caribbean on a crucial case to track down a priceless stolen painting. She'll never prove her worth as a P.I. if Cole muscles in on all the action. And he promises to back off, if she promises him 24 hours to work this attraction out of their systems.

Pepper knows she should turn him down. Then again, Pepper hasn't gotten this far by acting the way she's supposed to.

©2006 Carolyn Hanlon (P)2006 Audible, Inc.

When She Was Bad...

A romantic suspense read with good characterization and action. The heroine is fallible enough for the reader to develop empathy, and the other characters are also likable and amusing. A good light read that holds interest and entertains. Would like to hear some more of Piper's adventures in Audible.

sub-par

Sub-par for Harlequin Blaze.
--Reader was good, except she sometimes overdid "male" voices.
--Recurrent fantasy of slave girl/ plantation owner son does NOT work. (slave girl set up sometimes works to set up bondage fantasy scenarios-- here there is NO bondage, so the slave girl setup is useless -- and just reminded me every time (which was A LOT) that slave women were often forced into sexual relationships with owners/ owners' sons -- YUCK, not sexy)
-- also, SEVERAL grammatical errors in reading (was that the reader or in the original text?) -- errrors were so glaring that they jarred me out of the reading.

Steamy

When She Was Bad was everything you expect from a Harlequin Romance novel - sex, suspense, and action. Gabra Zackman is such a good narrarator and brings such realness to the characters. I liked this book and you will too.

Misplaced Love

What made the experience of listening to When She Was Bad... the most enjoyable?

family PI business that our young heroine wants to impress.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Jewel thief Aunt who doesn't give up after 40 years of unrequited love

What does Gabra Zackman bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I have over 100 of her excellent reads, and all of her Harlequin Blaze reads. Great job on these light short stories

Any additional comments?

use new 1.25x speed

Flat

I usually love to listen to silly (but sizzling) romance novels but this book was so joyless and the characters so lifeless and unmoving that I couldn't even finish it. While the narrator has a nice voice, I'm fairly certain her utterly humorless reading is a large part of the problem. In any case, unless you're curious to see how sex on a tropical island could be dull, I recommend you keep shopping.

Just bearable

I have listened to lots of romance novels lately and have to say that although the love scenes are great, the story was extremely boring. Not a lot of development of the plot. I was less than satisfied with these two main characters.

Had so much room to be better.

I think my favorite part was the side character of Happy. The story had a lot of room to be a good light romance if handled well, especially the setup between the main characters. There was genuine respect despite imposter syndrome, differing kinds of competence on each side, plus the side love story with the aunt was sweet (if rather forced), and it was really drilled into us how incredibly hot they were for each other (so there could have at least been some nice smouldering bits), but the whole thing suffered from awkward and wooden writing and hackneyed harping on "it's never been like this before!". But so so so much worse, what really killed this, their fantasy involved a love story between a plantation owner's son and a field slave. Seriously? Command rape is so NOT hot. Even if they did get married at the end.

Eh...

This was ok, very predictable and not that captivating. I could take it or leave it - if you have extra credits then you can use it on this, otherwise I would pass.

Didn't enjoy this one

The main character is the biggest idiot and has zero self confidence, she's truly pathetic. I actually laughed when the main male character referred to her as a competent private investigator. This idiot helped someone commit a crime for the most illogical, unrealistic reason. She's such a bad investigator, her hands shook when she had to pull a gun on someone, then she needlessly fired a shot into the ceiling. Outside of being a delusional moron, she had no real personality. She actually compared her investigation skills to Veronica Mars. Not even close.

And don't get me started on the tasteless slave girl/plantation owner fantasy this woman had.

Gabra Zackman's narration was good as always.