A black woman in a white man's world, Jamie Hanna was a cop that wanted to make detective sergeant so badly that she put herself in a compromising position. She was dragged into a setup by her crooked partner, Hillhower; he ended up dead with his dick hanging out, and Jamie was blamed for setting him up.

The Tribune editor Dan Janson planned on letting reporter Mike Neely take Jamie down as another dirty cop. Her lover had died two years earlier under suspicious circumstances, and although she had been cleared of his death, the death of her partner did not make her look good. But the closer Dan looked, the more it appeared that Hillhower, and not Jamie, was the dirty cop. White supremacist Mike had been determined to pin it on the black woman, and had written an article incriminating her.

Dan struggled to fight his attraction to Jamie as he tried to help her find the truth, but when he heard her crying in the night and she begged him to make love with her, he gave in to his desire to pleasure her. Even though she knew it was just a one-night stand, Jamie was hurt when he didn't call her after their explosive night. Their next bout of lovemaking in the woods without a condom set things right, but when Jamie revealed that she had lied about being on the pill, Dan was furious. With a fourteen-year-old son, he thought he didn't want another child. When he looked back over his life as a father, he realised that another child might not be so bad. This was fortunate, as Jamie fell pregnant as a result of their unprotected sex.

Meanwhile, talking to Hillhower's girlfriend and one of his snitches brought some astonishing revelations: not only was Hillhower a crooked cop, he was being paid off for drugs by white supremacists. And furthermore, there had been a man with him at the scene of an investigation. A man with an expensive camera.

Led into a setup alone, Jamie found out that Mike Neely was the man, only minutes before the man himself arrived and tried to kill her. Dan, ever the white knight, came to her aid in the nick of time.

A THING CALLED LOVE is a fast moving, engaging ride that entertains, even though I managed to work out the identity of the man with the camera well before the characters did. Jamie and Dan are great characters and easy to relate to, with hot sex and sizzling chemistry. That said, I found myself skipping over the sex scenes after the first few because there are only so many ways that you can describe copulation before it gets a little repetitive. However, for both the characters and the reader, the story reached a satisfying conclusion. This story is definitely for Adults Only.

Reviewed By: Melinda Stanners
© August 2004