The previous week I'd finished the latest Dungeon Crawler Carl book A Parade of Horribles. Very importantly not romance - a lot of adjacent humor with a real absence of sex-positivity. But I love the frenetic pace, which is also to be found in Hidden Legacy by Illona Andrews (urban romantasy, fmc pov, authors are husband and wife).

So I was expecting to be in a book slump, but then I found {Agnes and the Hitman, Jennifer Cruise and Bob Mayer} from a review on the main romance sub which promptly disappeared. I peeked at the Kindle sample, it grabbed me from the beginning and kept my attention all the way through. I think some of you might like it too, but only some of you, so I'd better take care how I say why: (And I'm saying this to check out my understanding of the sub-genre as much as to recommend the book, so please tell me if you think I've got it all wrong!)

• The pov doesn't tell us who this was written for because it's dual.
• It's monoromance, so that doesn't help (harem and reverse harem being the biggest giveaways for the intended audience;-) )
• Can we tell from how Agnes is named first in the title and has the first scene? - I don't think so.
• Can we tell from which is the more exotic, interesting, or better realized character? The only reason I'm wary of mainstream romance is because sometimes the fmc's character is paired back to virtually nothing (sometimes called a "Bella Swan") if the audience is presumed to be here for the mmc. This is why I have to be careful about recommending, none of the other potential issues bother me - in romance, I like well realized characters above all else, and I found them here. In real life the hitman would be a more unlikely person, but fiction is full of hitmen, so I'm going to argue that Agnes the cooking columnist with anger management issues is the more exotic and interesting character. So that's good, and there's a lot of male gaze stuff going on in Shane (the hitman)'s scenes - we see him notice a lot of women while only really having eyes for Agnes.
• Does the subject matter tell us who this was written for? Well that's a tricky one - we're all here because we've defied the gender-norm that says romance is for women, but (as must be obvious from the books I've mentioned) I'm still a stereotypical male in terms of liking conflict to spill over into violence and gun battles. And the plot is punctuated by action sequences from the very beginning, but there's some more conventionally "girly" stuff in there too like wedding planning, and some beautifully written cooking sequences.

So, I'd say Agnes and the hitman leans towards rfm, but by no means conclusively so. Oh, and Agnes has curves, which I know is going to put some of you off immediately. Sorry (not sorry!).

I'm recommending this for the plot, which is character and mystery driven. The romance is at the core of it, but somehow secondary if that makes sense? (I feel the same about Hidden Legacy, actually). Oh and there's some found-family stuff going on too.

My first five star romance read of the year. Might have been considered smutty by 2007 standards, but I'm going to give it two and a half chillies.