Beyond Desire Book

Beyond Desire is the first book I have read by author Thea Devine. Let me start off by saying I am not a book reviewer or blogger so I will not pretend to be able to do something efficiently that I have no experience doing i.e. reviewing a book which is someone else's hard work and labour of love. My main intention for writing this review at all is to see if anyone else who may have read this book felt the way I did. I wanted to love it but I couldn't. For a description of what this book is about you can click on the cover picture to read about it. It is considered erotic romance but is also historical, adventure, mystery, etc. Oh, and Ryder Culhane, the main character/hero, just "knows" things in a loosely described ESP Irish kind of way. The difficulty I had in losing myself in the story was it tended to be too many things at once, not too many genres or storylines--too many styles of writing including speech, cadence, dialogue, whatever the technical terms are. Portions of the erotic romance scenes between the main characters are amazing and the character development of the heroine, Alexandra DeLisle, speak to me and my experiences to a degree. The portions of mysterious, thrill-seeking cross-country adventures are excellent as well and almost remind me of watching an Indiana Jones movie. There is one descriptive scene about the innoccuous act of brewing tea that I love and have marked on Goodreads as one of my favourite quotes. This should make me want to rate this book as a 4 or a 5. The whole of the book is like a badly stitched patchwork quilt. The story lines and characters flow and make sense but I can't really describe it...it's like the technical parts of putting the story together are not meshing as cohesively as they should. At one point I feel like I'm reading Dickensian prose and then I read something else that sounds like it belongs to the 1990's. It's inconsistencies like this that I am trying to put into words. Consequently, I gave it a 2 (there is no 1.5) because the confusing changes in tone, from my perspective, dulled the brilliant gems scattered throughout the rest of the story.