When Mara has to foster her drug-addicted petty criminal cousin’s kids, Billy and Billie, Mitch steps in to help. Thus begins a back-and-forth courting dance, as Mitch battles Mara’s self-perception to win her. One evening, way after the live-in man was gone, when Mara’s bathroom faucet runs wild, Mitch helps her out by changing the washer. She’d noticed him when she was living with another man, and even though a parade of women came and went in and out of his apartment. Mara has been in love with Mitch for four years. Her reading may be erroneous, but she’s going to plunge into it anyway.ĭenver, Colorado denizens, Detective Mitch Lawson and Mara Hanover rent apartments in the same complex.

Suffice to say, hero and heroine are people, as originally defined (thank you, Oxford American Dictionary) by the word “proletarian,” “having no wealth in property.” (They certainly do not own the “means of production!”) Fear not, Miss Bates is not doing a Marxist reading (she wouldn’t even know how), merely sharing some fascinating, to her at least, observations regarding class and status that permeate Ashley’s romance. Mara Hanover is “pink collar,” a successful retail salesperson, but nevertheless one of the vast number of women who occupy precarious service-industry positions, working mainly on commission. Miss Bates discovered that Ashley wrote, in her breezy style, a contemporary cross-class romance, a perceptive portrait of class and status, a debate between nature/upbringing and individual will, between determinism and free will.ĭetective Mitch Lawson is a middle-class, college-educated, no-working-beat cop.

Ashley’s devil-may-care prose and not-politically-correct characterization and narrative won her. However, by the end of chapter one, she was eating humble pie. Miss Bates too, at first note, slipped into derision mode. When Miss Bates read Kristen Ashley’s opening page for Law Man, she understood why Ashley’s novels come under scornful fire: sloppy writing, bizarro switches in point of view, a certain sentimentality, the hero’s machismo, heroine’s naïveté, and rugrats’ cuteness … all at the mercy of a reader’s sneering lip curls and exasperated eye-rolls. Kristen Ashley’s novels, Miss Bates suspects, have received their share of disdain. Miss Bates herself has a certain distaste for the silliness factor of paranormal romance, indulging in a sweeping generalization and dismissal of hundreds of beloved and worthy stories. Those judgements are aimed at sub-genres, or category romance, or individual authors, or books, or whatever chip a reader/reviewer carries on her shoulder. It is interesting, however, that within the romance-reading community, gradations of snootiness exist as well. Time and again, romance readers contend with harsh verdicts aimed at the genre from non-romance readers.

Law man by kristen ashley