Long Time Coming

Author: Sandra Brown
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Random House Publishing, 2006 (first published in 1988)
Pages: 208
Rating: Recommend 

Synopsis: He arrived out of the blue - a flesh-and-blood phantom from the past in a sports car sleek and sexy as Law Kincaid himself. The world-famous astronaut was as devastatingly attractive as the first time Marnie Hibbs had laid eyes on him, seventeen years before. But she well knew the perils of falling for a ladies' man like Law. And this time she had someone besides herself to protect. Law is determined to discover who is sending him anonymous letters claiming he'd fathered a son he knows nothing about. Showing up at the Hibb's return address from the letters seemed like a step in the right direction. Marnie swears she isn't the guilty party, but when Law meets her son, it's like a one-two punch to his solar plexus. The boy is nearly a spitting image of Law. Law can't remember sleeping with Marnie - then again, he can't remember much about his crazy past. But there's more to it than Marnie claims the boy isn't biologically hers.

As the tension between them becomes unbearable and the attraction undeniable, Marnie is forced to reveal a long-held secret...one that might cause her to lose both the boy she loves more than anyone - and the man she desires more than anything.

Review: I had no trouble listening to The It Girl, but getting into a print version of a book, any book, has been a struggle recently. Historical fiction wasn't doing it for me, which is usually my go-to genre, I tried reading a fiction novel and while it was good, it wasn't grabbing me and my mind drifted. I decided to try a light book by an author I'd heard of, but hadn't read.

This novel was published in 1988, and that is an important detail. I don't know what women were like in the 1980s, but novels published during that decade or something else. By today's standards it's problematic - women are made to look like idiots, or as this novel flat-out calls them, "bimbos," and the ones who aren't "bimbos" need to be rescued by a wildly successful male who oozes toxic masculinity.

However, if you're able to let yourself be transported to the 80s and realize this was typical for novels of that time, and apparently what women wanted to read, or did read then, it's an entertaining book and I couldn't put it down. I read this novel in a few short hours, and now I want to seek out more by this author.

If you need a bit of smut in your life or to break a reading slump, this may be just the book. 

Suspension of belief - required!