I picked up Lovely Bad Things by Trisha Wolfe when I was searching for interesting dark romances a few months back. The cover looked gorgeous, the narrators sounded great, and I thought the concept was interesting. An investigator teaming up with a murderer to solve some wild killings while falling for him. In reality, it was a bit of a mishmash that didn’t have enough of what I wanted and too much of what I disliked. This was literally teetering on the one star rating scale until the very, very end.
Now, part of me wonders how much my review is tainted by my background – from knowing law enforcement procedure, to legal process, and ultimately judicial proceedings. So whenever things were brought up specifically referring to any of that, my mind could only stop and pick at it and think well, that’s not right. That’s not how that works. That’s not realistic. It really broke me out of enjoying the story, but I don’t think it’s all on me. If the story itself was more engaging, I could’ve overlooked the inaccuracies. Unfortunately, the rest of the plot is so overly pretentious, I found myself listening at double speed to get through to anything interesting. I get that Kallum is an expert in philosophy. I didn’t get that this book would be so deeply steeped in it that I would be bored to tears. I simply did not care about any of the philosophy bits.
I wanted more crime. I wanted more murder. I wanted more romance. Instead, we get a regular guy that says he is going to push boundaries but doesn’t really, and an analyst that says she doesn’t want him but does. The tension that is supposed to exist between them is practically nonexistent. His expertise comes in teaching her philosophy to understand the crime scene which is needed because apparently google and wikipedia don’t exist. Then, we get this entire subplot of Kallum having and charging sigils on his body that supposedly do things and give him powers? The book wants to present as realistic but then we get this shots of something paranormal and it just doesn’t vibe. So, with all of these complaints, how did this end up at 2.5 stars? The ending sucked me in and I hate myself for it. Things unravel at the very, very end leaving readers on a cliffhanger and man, if I can’t stand not knowing how things end.
If I’d known that Lovely Bad Things by Trisha Wolfe was going to have a lot of philosophy and very little romance, I don’t think I would’ve picked it up. Now that I have made my way through it, I absolutely will be picking up the second in the trilogy. Would I recommend this? No, unless you’re a big fan of philsophy.
