Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was a fan of Laurell K. Hamilton since I first picked up Lunatic Cafe. I have bought every book of hers since then. However I feel she has begun an alarming trend of writing soft-core porn rather than fantasy fiction with great stories with the occasional hot, steamy sex scene. I find myself with great difficulty writing this review to tell you not to bother buying this book. It's such a waste, I feel like I was mugged. The last book ended with Merry at a press conference inside the Sithen, well get this, the entire 366 page book takes place that same night and ends before dawn! (Hence the title Stroke of Midnight, I'm sure.) The "story" is that Merry has lots of sex, the goddess manifests, lots of magic happens, people get new powers, she cries, some of the guards cry, the Queen acts psycho...in other words exactly the same as the last book and the last and the... There is no movement in the plotline whatsoever. With the exception of a show like 24 hours, this kind of writing that stretches a storyline's action over a one day time period just doesn't work. Especially not in a book! I don't believe this is anything more than an excuse to turn a storyline that should be limited to a trilogy into something that takes 13 or more lucrative books to "tell". In all fairness, I must say the sex scenes are very well written and riveting. (Hence the 2 stars instead of the one I'm tempted to give this book.) I actually enjoyed reading them; however once I realized that's all that was there I was extremely pissed! This book is like a bad porno movie, all extremely unlikely sex scenes and no plot! Now the main character is even going to have sex with girl guards "to protect them from her evil cousin". All I can say is this seems a blatant attempt at expanding her marketbase to make sure and capture those with lesbian tendencies and the potential guy market with some hot girl on girl action. I have no problem with a book with awesome sex scenes but when you have the main character doing nothing but "doing it" for over 300 hundred pages, almost no emotional context, and no actual storyline development, then even raunchy sex gets old.