Bone Deep by Bonnie Dee

TITLE: Bone Deep
AUTHOR: Bonnie Dee
PUBLISHER: Liquid Silver Books
LENGTH: Novel (roughly 60k)
GENRE: Historical erotic romance
COST: $5.95

When widow Sarah Cassidy first spies the tattooed man at the traveling carnival, she’s drawn to him in ways she can’t explain. When he shows up in her barn the next morning, after having run away from the owner who kept him a prisoner in his own life, the attraction is even stronger. She takes him in, offering shelter even though he claims to have had a dream about her. His visions later lead him into helping the small community find a missing girl, but his appearance creates mixed reactions. Sarah isn’t willing to hear any of it, too protective of the man she has fallen in love with to listen to any of her neighbors’ warnings. What she doesn’t know, however, is if they really do have a future together, and Tom’s visions aren’t any help at all with that…

I have never had any doubt that Bonnie Dee knows how to write on a technical level. In the two anthologies I’ve read that she contributed to, her prose was consistently solid with very little wrong with it, if a trifle dull. In at least one of the stories I read, there was genuine characterization that rose above, “Oh, I’m horny, let’s have sex!” characterization that cripples a lot of erotic romance. That works to her advantage in this particular story, when it’s critical that the reader understands and likes her two main characters.

Tom, the man whose body is covered entirely in tattoos, is as damaged as they come. He’s frightened at the start of the book, reluctant to communicate even with coaxing, and pretty much knows nothing about interacting with people. This is every “Oh, I can save him” fantasy anyone has ever had, all rolled up into one guy. To the author’s credit, Tom remains realistic, grows in a credible fashion throughout the story, and is pretty much the emotional anchor for the story. Without him, I very much doubt I would have been as invested in the story as I was. Sarah, the heroine, is solid and believable, but when Tom wasn’t around, she suffers from the sort of sameness feel I get from other stories I’ve read of this author. I believe her. I just don’t engage with her.

While the romance works quite well for me, the conflict generated by the community’s bigotry didn’t meet the same level of satisfaction. Ms. Dee does an excellent job carefully constructing the prejudice of a small town in the ‘40s, so much so that when she resorted to a Timmy’s stuck in the well plot device in order to introduce him to the people who fear him, I was hugely disappointed. The fact that Tom had supposed visions inherited from his mother – the carnival’s fortune teller – never sat well with me anyway, but then to turn around and use one of the oldest tricks in the book to gain sympathy for him set my teeth on edge. It was too easy. Way too easy. And the world the author created up to that point was far too complex for such a copout answer. Granted, it doesn’t completely work. But she had enough people falling for it that my disappointment tarnished my enjoyment of the second half of the story.

It is incredibly difficult to categorize this story, which in the end, becomes its greatest asset. It’s sold as a contemporary, though it falls into that nebulous mid-20^th century timeframe that seems to confuse a lot of publishers. I’m calling it a historical, because the narrow mindset of the 1946 timeframe is crucial to the story. It’s also sold as an erotic romance, but I’m going to make a confession. I almost never remember this author’s sex scenes when the story is over. It’s only been a few months since I read her short stories, and all I remember is thinking one had too much sex and the other had an m/f/f threesome in it. Where this story resonates is not in its plotting, or its eroticism, or its prose. It’s in the character of Tom. He is the heart and soul here, and the reason why most readers probably won’t even notice the things that bugged me.

Readability	8/10 – Gentle prose evoking a gentle story
Hero	8/10 – As damaged as they come, this one satisfies readers’ savior instincts better than most.
Heroine	7/10 – Solid and believable, if a little boring.
Entertainment value	7/10 – The romance in this worked for me a lot better than the plot the author laid on top of it.
World building	9/10 – Tightly detailed with some absolutely exquisite minutiae that lent even more credibility.
TOTAL:	39/50