"Hot In Hellcat Canyon", by Julie Ann Long

There is nothing on Facebook that annoys me more than the People You May Know sidebar clogging up my feed with random strangers. It's not unlike a terrible game of Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon that you never agreed to play, yet you find yourself assaulted with nonetheless. This feature is further amplified on shopping and movie apps, always trying to sell you on what their algorithm believes is the true love you hadn't realized you wanted. Mostly, I find their assumptions to be as obnoxious as those of the Book of Face. However, in this case their intrusive guesstimations were right on the money. I originally downloaded Hot In Hellcat Canyon as a sample, and was hooked from the very first sentence. (No, I'm not exaggerating.)

Imagine my shock and dismay upon discovering that there was no complete version available for download to my Kindle app -- only paperback to purchase and suffer through the torture of USPS shipment times. Hissy fits of a most alarming nature then ensued. Thankfully, I was finally able to locate an iBooks digital download, and promptly inhaled the addictive book in a single evening. Here follows my assessment.

As previously stated, this book had me one hundred percent invested from the get-go. Julie Anne Long's witty and intelligent prose captured my attention in a way that a romance novel rarely does, appealing immensely to my Scripps National Spelling Bee-style vocabulary and my love of sharply intellectual writing.

Britt Langley is a gun-shy bar waitress, hiding out from the stresses of the world after enduring a painful end to a marriage-turned-domestic-violence-story. John Tennessee McCord is a down-on-his-luck actor, landing in Hellcat Canyon in between acting gigs to lick his wounds after a brutal dismissal from his facile mega-celebrity ex-girlfriend and a resounding NO from the casting agents for a part he was destined to play.

When McCord saunters into the Misty Cat Tavern to have lunch, he becomes enchanted with Britt. They then exchange a brilliant verbal repartee, leaving him feeling intrigued by the skittish server and her jocular quips. A great deal of time is spent with each of the two advancing on and retreating from the other, only to ultimately flit away again to avoid being burned by love once more.

The sudden appearance of a pair of rivals for Britt's and McCord's respective affections forces their hands, resulting in a series of grand gestures designed to make plain what they seem incapable of simply saying aloud. I did feel a touch of whiplash right up to the end there, watching them fly together and break apart over and over again. Luckily for us, Ms. Long is not the cruel sort who leaves either a devastating cliffhanger or a less-than-happy ending to a novel.

Bottom line? This book is wickedly brilliant, and just plain fun to read. I fully anticipate this book becoming one that I read and reread incessantly, as I am wont to do with the ones I enjoy the most.

Rating: ★★★★★