Failure to Match (Bad Billionaire Bosses #2), by Kyra Parsi
Failure to Match by Kyra Parsi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
After the police procedural version of a “grimdark” novel, I needed “light” – and quickly! “Failure to Match” by Kyra Parsi got the job done.
Of course, everything was highly predictable and, yet, I enjoyed reading how Jamie fell in love with Jackson. In the beginning, I was highly sceptical considering character descriptions like these:
»Minerva Sinclair was a tall, willowy woman with stark white hair and cutting features, and her signature “look” consisted of cherry-red pantsuits, vintage cat-eye sunglasses, and knife-sharp stilettos. Per our client paperwork, she had her personal tarot reader (Imogen) on speed dial and kept her wrinkly sphynx cat (Harry) cradled against her bony chest everywhere she went, as per the guidance of her spiritual advisor (Velma).«
Or eye-roll inducing humour like this:
»Also, she’d literally named her hairless cat Harry, and I didn’t think she’d intended the pun.«
(Since it’s so bad: It’s not a pun because “Harry” and “hairless” lack intentional wordplay or a double meaning, and it also makes no sense phonologically.)
All the characters were pretty much the literary equivalent of cardboard cutouts (Bensen, the stoic factotum; Mable and Molly, scheming twin sister housekeepers; the deceased evil, child-torturing father; Beatrice, man-eating, cheating wife who eventually left them all to go and live in Paris) and the story – matchmaker fails her customer but falls in love with him due to forced proximity and, ahem, his tongue – is almost as ridiculous as the title of the series “Bad Billionaire Bosses”.
And, yet, there were some ideas expressed, some pictures painted, some writing skills acquired in the process that—despite all the stupidity—made me enjoy this novel and recover from the kitten and child torture of my previous read.
»You know how sometimes you manage to convince yourself that you’re fine and that everything’s under perfect control when, in reality, you’re barely hanging on by a frayed thread? And then something really small happens, or someone says something seemingly insignificant, and it makes you break in half?
Well, I broke in half.«
There’s a fine line between intentional cheesiness and downright cringe-worthy missteps, and the author walks that line with a precarious yet daring confidence. At times, the rope stiffens beneath her feet, granting balance; at others, it sags, pulling her dangerously close to a full tumble into cringeworthy territory (which she skirts more often than not). Yet, despite the wobbles and near-falls, she completes the tightrope act with a redeeming bit of flair.
Three stars out of five.
