Review #40: Heat Wave, by Jill Marie Landis

I'm 87% sure that I read this book once before, but it doesn't appear as though I reviewed it so I'm counting it. Also? There are approximately eleventy billion books out there called "Heat Wave". It took me like, five pages on the Amazon search to find this. I feel like we can come up with a more unique title, kids.

Kat Vargas is a private investigator living in California by way of Hawaii. She's tiny, tough, and she's built a wall around her heart following the loss of her unborn baby to a car accident and her jackass surfer fiancé to a supermodel. Ty Chandler is a semi-retired entrepreneur who just sold his adventure business in Alaska and moved to California, and he's enlisted Kat's help to find the daughter he never knew he had.  Kat's attracted to Ty from the start and knows that she's putting her heart at risk, but she reluctantly agrees to take his case.

In no time, Kat finds Ty's missing daughter Sunny, who is living in LA with her baby and a hodgepodge of sketchy characters. Ty is thrilled, but Kat realizes that Sunny's in over her head with some car guys, and when Sunny and the baby disappear, it's up to Kat to find them and save them.

Heat Wave is okay. It's kind of halfway between a Harlequin romance and a Nora Roberts kind of romance. The B story with Sunny and her gang was a little bit jarringly out of place, but it worked well enough within the structure of the story. The C story of Sunny's sort of/kind of romance with Ty's best friend was weird, and Landis kind of dropped it mid-way, which I found even more strange. I also wanted to shake Kat; for being such a hotshot PI, you'd think she'd be a little bit smarter about her safety. And Ty was a smidge too perfect and earnest for me. 

Huh. Interesting. I thought I was pretty neutral about this book, but writing this review, it seems like I'm irritated with all the characters. I think this one will go in the donation pile.