Book Review: Rescuing the Bad Boy

Title: Rescuing the Bad Boy

Author: Anna Catherine Field

Quote: "You'd think at nearly thirty, he'd come up with something better to do with this time."

Could this e-book ever have benefitted from developmental editing. The book title Rescuing the Bad Boy and series title Last Chance at Love made me think it was going to be about a desperate older woman convincing herself that she's "in love" with one of those juvenile delinquents shuffling around in fifty-year-old bodies. It's not that, but, as the line quoted shows, it's not been professionally edited either.

Gabrielle is a social worker who's been managing a halfway house for juvenile delinquents in adult bodies, like the one referred to above. He's mostly harmless; he just hasn't learned, from Gabrielle's kind of approach, that it's wrong to steal other people's cars to go "joy riding." He is, once again, locked up for test-driving another neighbor's car. And really, as long as the consequences of test-driving neighbors' cars instead of going to a used car lot and talking to the dealer are limited to free meals and rent in what's probably a reasonably clean jail, followed by free meals and rent at Gabrielle's place with a few pep talks about self-esteem, he's likely to keep "joy riding" until he's ninety years old, unless he dies first. As long as the federal grants keep rolling, Gabrielle will keep exercising her maternal instincts on him and his kind.

In one of those coincidences that happen in cornball romance novels, "Chance" happens to be the name of the judge, who doesn't want to tell Gabrielle her approach to crime is wasting taxpayers' money. What he wants is to ask her for a date, as he did in high school, but since they quarrelled in high school the judge has yet to reach a decision on what to say. Right.

When the federal grant money is cut off, however, Chance and Gabrielle have a chance to talk. This story does not end with "happily ever after." Field is not that amateurish. There will be a short series of longer novels about other couples who get married and live happily ever after, and then Chance and Gabrielle will be ready to affirm that they do.