Review

When a burglar breaks in to the microbrewery Tessa Donovan owns with her brothers, Detective Luke Asher is assigned to the case. He doesn’t notice much about Tessa at first—it’s not exactly lust at first sight. But then she asks him out, and the more he talks to her, the more he wants to be around her. She seems to be innocent and fresh in ways he hasn’t felt in a long time.

Luckily for Luke, she isn’t all that innocent.

There are many, many things I love about Victoria Dahl’s contemporaries. One of them is that she doesn’t pigeonhole her characters. They’re well layered with strengths and failings that are constantly in tension.

In GOOD GIRLS DON’T, both Tessa and Luke are battling other people’s misconceptions of who they are. Luke’s partner (in the cop sense, not in the lover sense) is pregnant, and most people think he’s the father—a belief he doesn’t deny because he doesn’t want people speculating about who the real father might be. People also think he left his wife when she was having treatment for cancer. Needless to say, he wouldn’t be most guys’ first choice of boyfriend for their little sister.

While Luke struggles against people’s misconceptions of who he is, Tessa has built her own false identity. She does a damn good impression of being a good girl—if “good girl” means virginal. After her parents died when she was a kid, her older brother Eric raised her. But Eric also had to raise their wild brother Jamie and inherited responsibility for their dad’s microbrewery at the same time. Not wanting to add more stress to his shoulders, Tessa kept her personal life closeted and never gave her overprotective brothers anything to worry about. So they think she’s much less experienced than she actually is.

It would be easy for Victoria Dahl to let these misconceptions drag on too long until they became misunderstandings, leaving the reader to bash her head against her Kindle, shouting, “Why can’t you just freakin’ talk to each other!”

But she doesn’t do that. Her characters do talk to each other and grow to understand each other in ways other people don’t know them. They build intimacy through revealing their secrets.

And intimacy isn’t something either Tessa or Luke is very comfortable with. Watching them take incremental steps toward a real relationship is thoroughly enjoyable.

There’s one thing I would’ve liked to be different. I would’ve liked more to stand in the way of Luke and Tessa being together. Her brothers hassle them and they have a lot of internal issues to work through, but there is no insurmountable obstacle that they have to get around, which would’ve made me feel like they needed me on their side, rooting for them.

But GOOD GIRLS DON’T is a fun, sexy read that I gobbled down in a couple of days, and I loved this new family Victoria Dahl has created. I can’t wait for Jamie’s story. I sense sexy times ahead.

Reviewed by Kat Latham