Reviewed by Vicki
TITLE: Vegas Sin
AUTHOR: Jambrea Jo Jones
PUBLISHER: Pride Publishing
LENGTH: 181 pages
BLURB:
Sex, weddings and gambling hold a back seat to kidnapping and murder in the city of sin…
Owen Carpenter sets aside one night each month to relax at the Totally Five Star, but a case has just landed on his desk that has those nights disappearing for the foreseeable future. Someone is kidnapping women in Las Vegas and Owen needs to stop them before the women end up dead.
Harrison Boone is head of security at the Totally Five Star. He notices a man who comes in once a month and he wants to know more about him. When Owen introduces himself, there’s an instant attraction between Harrison and Owen, but they are interrupted by a kidnapping—at his hotel. After Harrison leaves the military, the hotel becomes his life, so Harrison will do anything to keep the hotel out of the news and protect its reputation.
Can Owen and Harrison find love in Sin City, or will the case of the disappearing women crush what might be the best bet the men have ever placed?
REVIEW:
This story is set mostly around a hotel I’d love to visit! Totally Five Star sounds like an awesome place, but the name is a bit odd… I couldn’t help but read “Totally” in an 80’s accent in my head every time I saw the name! But, I would still stay there…. fancy hotel, nice spa, good food. Just what Owen needs once a month to get him away from his life as a police detective, caring for his sick mother, and now helping his flaky sister and her daughter. Unfortunately his plans are interrupted when his boss hands him a file for a kidnapping case. Multiple women fitting the same description have been kidnapped over the last month or so. Owen and his partner Jeff are assigned the case. This ends up leading him to Totally Five Star anyway, as one of the women has been kidnapped from there.
Harrison has seen the hot man before, now he sees him behaving a little differently and decides to check it out. The dealer at the table Owen was at explains to Harrison that Owen is a cop and is there investigating a kidnapping. Owen comes back a second time and the two finally meet face to face. The two meet, eye each other, and head to Owen’s hotel room to fuck. But they are distracted by another kidnapping, right out from under their noses!
From there we get a mystery, that really isn’t a mystery at all. We know the killer, literally from the first page of the book. Raymond is as much a main character as Owen and Harrison, and we see his whole weirdo plan as it develops.
This book had the potential to be good, but it fell short for me. I think way too much time was spent in Raymond’s head. Then there were a few editing issues, miss spelled words and such. At one point Harrison and Jeff have lunch at the restaurant at Totally Five Star, we are told this restaurant has a Michelin rating of five stars and could have six. But the Michelin rating only goes to three stars. I had a hard time telling Owen and Harrison apart at times, and had to back up and remind myself which was which. I also had issues with the plot…. I don’t want to go over all of that because I’ll give some plot details away, but there where things I questioned that made no sense to me.
I think this book needed a couple of good beta readers to question the author on several points, maybe redirecting the story a bit. Also another round of editing would have been helpful.
It’s really not a bad story, I liked Owen and Harrison as characters just fine. The connection between them was there, and the sex scenes were good. I liked the basic plot, yes I had issues with parts of it, but the basic story line of the kidnapping was good. I liked the addition of Owen’s sister and niece, they added to the story without distracting me. I liked Jeff and his wife, they also brought a sense of family to the story. I wish I had liked it better, I’ve read a couple of stories by this author and I was looking forward to this. Unfortunately here was just too much that didn’t work for me to give it a higher rating.
RATING: 
BUY LINKS:
ARe