Fast Women by Jennifer Crusie

Possible ways that I wanted to start this book review:

• “Pity Party table for every character in this book.”
• “If only this book was about women who drove fast cars, because then I would have hoped they would have driven over a cliff.”

How I’m actually going to start this review – Jennifer Crusie may be one of my favorite authors, but I think I found one of her worst books. This book took me three days to read and drove me insane with hate the whole way.

I’m not even going to go into the plot of the story too much, I’m going to just talk about the characters without last names because dude, I’m not going to even try to spell them. So:

Nell – basically she’s supposed to be the main character of the story. She just divorced her husband Tim, who she also used to work for. When the book begins she’s trying to get a new job at a private investigator firm that has had better days. She’s strong willed and stubborn, but her biggest character flaw is that she always compromises against the controlling men in her life. Annoying.

Suze – is the ‘young child bride’ (she’s 32) who is married to Jack and doesn’t want to be alone. She gets a job working for the same PI firm that Nell works for, but when her husband finds out she quits to make him happy, which in the end doesn’t really matter because she leaves her husband anyway because – SHOCKER – he cheated on her.

Gabe – the head of the PI firm and stubborn as a mule. I’m not sure what exactly it is that Nell sees in him, because he is so controlling and tells her on multiple occasions that she is only a secretary and that she needs to do what she is told. He is an ass and gah. I didn’t like his character at all.

Riley – shockingly I thought he was going to be the one redeeming character in this book because of how well he took care of Nell at the beginning, but shockingly he became an ass too. He’s Gabe’s partner/cousin and at one of the scenes where he’s trying to reassure Suze about her marriage ending he basically guilt trips her into realizing that it was her fault that Jack cheated on her. What kind of guy does that?

There are more characters that are somewhat pivotal to the plotline, especially when it comes to the reveal of the murder mystery, but they all just suck. At one point near the end of the book, Nell’s apartment goes up in flames and I kind of wished that this book had too.

Final Rating: 2 out of 5 stars. I was rooting for all the characters to die in this book, because they were just so – poor me, wahh – throughout the whole novel. This is not Jennifer Crusie at all.

Bookshelf worthy? No. I don’t even recommend renting it from your library. Save yourself the 359 pages of fury.