Sunday, May 22, 2011

Love.com by RW Bennett


What in the name of flowers and candy is going on?!?! People are falling in love and getting married in unheard-of numbers after meeting on the new internet dating site, Love.com. Marsha Underwood, Director of Marketing believes something fishy is going on; the crazy success can’t be just good marketing. Marsha suspects her boss, Paul Latimer, may have something to do with it. She knows Paul will do anything to earn the respect of his own powerful, rich but remote father. And Paul flunked ethics in business school.

The trouble is, Paul is in love with Marsha, but for good reason she doesn’t consider Paul to be marriage material. When Marsha, her father and best friend begin to investigate the goings-on behind the pretty web pages, her allies are destroyed in mysterious fashion. Afraid for her own life from the man who claims to love her, Marsha nonetheless chooses to pursue the truth about the company that has made her rich. But Love.com is now a worldwide phenomenon, and won’t give up its secrets easily. All her courage and smarts may not be enough to unravel the Love.com mystery and save her own life. And while she’s at it, she wouldn’t mind finding the love she was created for.

Love.com is smart, original, fun and funny. It’s for everyone who has been in love, or wants to be, or just enjoys a suspenseful whodunit.



A mystery about an online matchmaking service with too much success, a promising premise for an interesting book. One, that fortunately, did not disappoint.

This is a fun book. The plot is fast paced, yet carefully constructed to tie in a number of seemingly unrelated storylines that provide a good background to the main character, Marsha. She is a dynamic business woman suffering under Paul Latimer’s unrequited love, a love that is as violent as it is obsessive. I do wish we’d seen a few more dimensions to Marsha’s personality, but I can’t complain too much, she was fun to read.

Paul is represented better, elevating him from just a “bad guy” to a “complicated guy”. It’s hard to cheer for him, but we can at least feel his twinges of romantic dissatisfaction.

What I enjoyed the most were the chapters of Love.com’s creation, all the minutia that is so cleverly introduced into the story. You’d think that the steps to putting a business together, the marketing tricks, etc. would be boring to read about, but on the contrary, they make for some really entertaining sections.

There is an aura of tension throughout the whole book, that makes the reader pay attention, waiting for the violence to start. And it does.
The only real issue I have with the book is the ending. In my opinion, it felt a bit rushed. Everything gets resolved in the space of two pages, so suddenly that I had to reread them to catch what happens. A bit more suspense would have fit the careful story better.

Other than that, this is a very entertaining book. I spent a good bunch of hours reading it and I can recommend it to everyone who enjoys a good mystery.



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