LINDA CASTILLO – A Whisper in the Dark. Berkley Sensation; paperback original, August 2006.

   The brief notice about this book in my local mystery supplier’s bi-monthly newsletter described the protagonist as the owner of an antiquarian bookstore in New Orleans.

   That sounded promising so I bought the book and, some weeks later, settled down to read it on a very cold day in February. What was not noted was that the writer is generally known as a writer of romantic suspense, and Whisper has far too much heavy breathing and fatal attraction romantic fol-de-rol for me.

   A stalker is targeting Julia Wainwright because of her pseudonymous soft-corn pornographic novel that he considers sinful and makes of her a harlot. Yet he’s aroused by her while she’s irresistibly drawn to a former cop she lusted after when she was 15 and who has returned to New Orleans after killing an undercover cop in a Chicago shoot-out and is drinking himself into oblivion as he fights his primal urges that have him lusting after…

   Oh, this isn’t worth taking up anymore of anybody’s time. I will add that Julia’s father is a prominent church leader who’s unaware of her novel. I read the beginning, sampled the middle and raced through the climax.

   I need to look more closely at the books I buy, and especially at the writers’ track record.