Ten Nights of Love: Linnea Sinclair

originally posted on February 12, 2010

those early e-book covers are fun

Next up here I have a special treat. I was digging around some old electronic files recently. And I found some things that I treasure almost as much as some of my old paperbacks. A lot of people nowadays know about a book called Games of Command by Linnea Sinclair. But do they know about or have the original story that appeared as an e-book called Command Performance? From before she made it to the big time in print?

I do, plus several of her other books in their original e-book form. 😀

diving into e-books

Anyhow, I bring all this up for a reason. Prior to say, about, oh, 2001, I’d most likely already bought some e-books off the Internet. I wasn’t all that sold on the practice, though. To say it was a hit-or-miss proposition was an understatement. Do not get me wrong. There were already several fairly well-established electronic publishers who were producing good work in the romance line out there. They weren’t all focused on erotica/erotic romance, either. Some of my earliest romance e-book purchases were from Hard Shell Word Factory and LTD Books before it closed. I’m not even sure either of them sold erotic romance.

Most of the e-books I picked up back then tended towards a combination of science fiction and romance. Not all, but definitely the majority. They weren’t all great writing but, hey, at least they were attempts to make the combination work. It seemed the time had come. I was finally on that quest. I wanted to find that one last thing that the mainstream romance genre wasn’t doing to my satisfaction. Oh, it was still dancing around it. All over the place, but it wasn’t really doing it.

Not to my science fiction-fantasy-romance fan satisfaction. And therein lay the problem. I am a reader of romance but I am a huge fan of science fiction. Fantasy, too, but in a more tempered, mythological way, if that makes any sense at all.

And then I stumbled across Linnea Sinclair’s e-books.

Oh. My. God. And that’s putting it mildly. 😀

when you can rave about an author

Okay, very rarely do I openly declare myself a fan of any one author. Also very rarely do I openly promote individual authors. How can I put this? I distinctly remember how excited I was right after first reading her ebooks. I started raving about them on every forum I visited like they were water in the desert. Which in a certain sense they were. There was a simple reason for my excitement. I’ve never in my life read anything that comes as close to being that elusive half & half romance combined with something else as her books do.

It wasn’t just one book either. I don’t remember the order I read them in originally. But I do know that four of them were spot-on for me – Command Performance, Finders Keepers, Accidental Goddess and Gabriel’s Ghost. I loved them all but Gabriel’s Ghost blew me away because it was in first person heroine’s point of view. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d willingly read, much less enjoyed, a first person romance. Years don’t even come close. Decades is more like it.

first person is not bad

You have to understand something here. It’s not simply that I don’t care for first person. I do appreciate its advantages as a narrative device in certain stories. It’s more that I learned to avoid it after reading way too many of those old Gothic romantic suspense novels. You know the ones that featured the more or less brain dead heroine. Someone who was perfectly willing to believe anything bad about the hero on the basis of very little information. Or she’d run into the worst places at the drop of a hat. Get herself in trouble, again with very little to go on. And who ends up falling in love with him, yet, again, on the basis of what? More or less nothing. All told from within her viewpoint.

Oye. Notice I haven’t included a Gothic suspense author in this series. I did read quite a few of them, though. They simply were not my cup of tea.

Let’s be honest here. I believe those old stories are a large part of why a dual viewpoint is so popular in romance. Why so many romance readers want his point of view to get equal playing time with hers. We want to at least know why they’re both acting stupidly. If we have to put up with it at all.

I loved how she slowly “revealed” Gabriel

But I digress. Kind of. All of Sinclair’s stories feature a strong competent heroine, perfectly capable of holding their own with any of the guys. In all ways. Gabriel’s Ghost goes one step farther. It shows not only her capabilities but her vulnerabilities. Yet still manages to show his, too, as it slowly peeled the layers off of these two complex characters. Now that is what a first person romance is designed to do.

Heck, it’s what a romance, period, is designed to do.

And to do it with science fiction equally layered in, of all things? Whoa.

that half & half though

Science fiction geeks among us could argue her books don’t have enough science fiction in them. That they don’t qualify for that magical half & half label. And maybe even rightly so. That’s not really the point. Not to me and, to be perfectly honest, not in the grand scheme of things. Because the point isn’t whether there’s enough science fiction there for science fiction fans. The point is that there’s plenty of science fiction. And, yet, there is still enough romance that’s not overwhelmed by the science fiction.

Because that’s what I – a longtime romance reader – had been searching for. An honest-to-goodness romance combined with an honest-to-goodness science fiction. Not one tacked onto the other as an afterthought.

Oh, yeah. The sex. Was there sex? Well, yeah, there’s sex in her books, but honestly, who cares. We got science fiction and romance.

Sometimes with a cyborg.

Okay, I couldn’t resist that. So sue me.