Wednesday, July 16, 2014

But I Love You

But I Love You by Peter Rosch
Rosch, LLC: 5/31/2014
ebook, 282 pages
ISBN-13: 9780692210925
peterrosch.com


A successful dating service maven falls for a beautiful new client, forcing the hand of her sociopathic admirer.
On the well-intentioned dare of a friend, model and recovering addict Lisa Denton meets Alicia Lynn Wilde, Manhattan's hottest matchmaker to the city's elite and the mind behind an exclusive, very lucrative singles service built on a misguided ideal, lies, and Midwestern blue collar work ethic. Alicia's brief encounter with this new stranger quickly begins to unsettle her meticulously curated world, and throws Lisa unwittingly into a series of unsavory-possibly lethal-events already set in motion when one of Elite Two Meet's members claims to have been sexually assaulted by two high-profile clientele.
My Thoughts:

But I Love You by Peter Rosch is a highly recommended love/con story. You're just going to have to read it to figure out how that combination happens, but perhaps life is a con of some sort.

First, you know right at the start that somebody dies on August 7th in But I Love You, then the story jumps back to August 2nd and you will begin to figure out what is going to happen - or you will think you are figuring out what is going down. Yup, expect a twist or two in this wild ride of.... almost an anti-love story, but I digress.

Alicia Lynn Wilde runs the Elite Two Meet dating/single's service. Elite Two Meet is exclusive and all the members are carefully vetted by a very controlling and tightly wound Alicia and her very controlled staff.  Chris, one of the members of her service who is obsessed with Alicia, is becoming a nuisance with her constant texting and calling. Alicia is interviewing prospective customer/client Lisa and is clearly smitten/obsessed with her. Add to this garbled jumble a lot of self-medicating, many varied sycophants, some simple-minded co-conspiritors, and Rosch self-confessed love of the run-on sentence and you'll begin to see that this is not a simple love story.

Despite the run-on sentence part, Rosch is a very good writer and carries But I Love You along on that strength and the twisty plot. This is a cast of unlikeable characters with a number of obsessions, be it people, success, appearance, or the previously mentioned self-medication. I'm glad I had the time to read it in one sitting. I like one reviewer who compared it to a Shakespearean tragedy where the characters are to blame for all the mishaps that befall them. It's a train wreck waiting to happen - and Rosch lets you know from the start that the train wreck is coming. You won't be able to predict how or why, though.


Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of the author for review purposes.

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