There are days when one wants to read about a truly heroic type of guy — a swashbuckling cowboy who sweeps women off their feet and dashes villains into the sides of buildings and generally breathes testosterone.
Cue Jayne Ann Krentz! I adore her muscled explorers, especially the men in her futuristic paranormals. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but the future (like the past) is a great place to play out an un-pc, not-quite-so-feminist-as-one-would-want type of scenario. The men are big and strong, and the women are smart, if not quite so strong. These are relationships I wouldn’t want to be in (the men are by definition no good at dishes, let alone grocery shopping), but they’re huge fun to read about.
When Krentz writes contemporaries, she can’t reproduce that particular scenario, as her readers would likely end up despising the heroine for being a weak little twit. But Krentz is wonderful at getting enough of the dangerous gun-slinger into the present so that the thrill is there. So, if you like an alpha male who’s not insanely aggressive (ala J.R. Ward and Feehan), definitely try one of Krentz’s contemporaries.
Lost and Found is a good place to start. Krentz’s contemporary heroines tend to be artistic and not particularly practical (though very talented and intelligent). This allows the hero to be a strong, fairly silent type without going head-to-head with the heroine on an hourly basis. In Lost and Found, Cady Briggs is an expert at finding missing antiques. But a death in her family lands her in charge of a prestigious art and antiques gallery, Chatelaine’s. Typically, Cady doesn’t want to be CEO of the gallery. “I’m happy with my little art consulting business,” she moans. She ends up hiring the ultimate CEO type, Mark Easton to help her figure out the problems at Chatelaine’s — and incidentally, whether there’s a murderer lurking in the background.
Mark has alpha stamped on his forehead, with all the coding of the strong, silent hero: “He was a compelling if enigmatic figure, his expression unreadable in the darkness.” When Cady interrupts an antiques robbery in progress, he takes out three robbers in a page or two. Naturally, he’s annoyed by the desire he feels for Cady, since guys like this generally envision themselves striding alone into the sunset. Delicious!
Krentz turns to a similar match-up in other contemporaries: Falling Awake pairs a dream interpreter with a strong-willed, powerful investigator; Grand Passion puts together the owner of a small inn and a former CEO of a huge hotel chain. Dependable is not a word that any of us want applied to ourselves and our work (let alone our children). But think about it: isn’t that what we really want in a spouse? And isn’t that what we want in a favorite author too?
I have a weakness for gothic romances. I used to love them when I was in high school. Back then, they were published as slender paperbacks featuring a girl in a nightgown, her hair whipping behind her. She was usually leaning into the wind at an odd angle, turning around to stare back at the huge house behind her, looming like a big, huge….um…phallic symbol.
