Review: This Man by Jodi Ellen Malpas

Young interior designer Ava O’Shea has an appointment for a first consultation at The Manor with the owner, Mr Jesse Ward. She is expecting nothing more than an overweight, cravat wearing, well-to-do countryman, and on arrival, nothing would suggest otherwise. How wrong could she be? This Man is devastatingly handsome, charming and confident. He is also a conceited, hedonistic playboy, who knows no boundaries. Ava desperately does not want to be attracted to him, but she can’t control the overwhelming affect he has on her. Every instinct is telling her to run, so she does, but Jesse Ward is not so willing to let her go. He wants her and is determined to have her. She knows she is heading for heartbreak, but how can she run when he won’t let her?

Review: I have to state straight away that this book really wasn't for me. I had to read this book for a book club and was quite pleased because I'd been wanting to read this one for a while now, I have the sequel as well so I thought I could marathon the two books. I found though, that this was incredibly hard going. I downloaded it on audiobook and I found myself completely switching off from listening because I just wasn't interested in what was going on in the book. To begin with I found there to be a storyline, I liked Ava and her friend Kate and thought it was intriguing that she had even asked to be part of a design project that really didn't seem like her. Things really went downhill from there for me though and I felt the storyline just tapered off. The overarching storyline seemed to be discovering just who this man was, whilst there was a storyline of her doing up his 'hotel' running alongside this. Both of these facts seemed to be ignored though so that we could read about repetitive sex, and not particularly exciting repetitive sex at that...

I didn't find any of the sex scenes particularly interesting. I thought that this author retreated a lot of the words and phrases that she used fairly often and found myself growing tired of them Gavigon the same conversation before, after or during sex again and again. I felt the some of the things Ava said, as well, she really wouldn't have said, I didn't find them believable from her as a character. I didn't like Jesse, I thought he was very one dimensional and I don't think he would have been able to get by in life behaving like he did. 

I found the fact that Jesse wouldn't reveal his age to Ava throughout the book funny, he continued to tell her one year higher than the last time every time she asked. There were also some very funny scenes between Ava and Kate and I would've loved to have seen more of these because these were the parts of the book that kept my attention. Overall I wouldn't recommend you read this book, it took me a very long time to get through and I don't remember parts of the storyline whereas normally with an audiobook I can't wait to get the chance to listen to it. As a piece of erotica I didn't really rate it either, although I am going to give the sequel a go because I was told by the book group that things get explained,more in the sequel and also to see if I enjoy this authors writing more on the page than listening to it on audiobook...