Title: All Things Burn Author: Jodie Slaughter
Published: May 15, 2019
Genre(s): Romance: Contemporary
Page Count: 280
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Halle Temple is a good person; she doesn’t know anything as surely as she knows that. A successful black woman who uses her expensive law degree to work full-time at a women’s legal aid center, she has no doubt that her entire existence is being spent in the service of others. That perfectly normal life takes a deadly turn, however, when she crosses paths with a man who is willing to go to extreme measures to take possession of her.
After he sets his threats on her family, Halle begins to question every moral she has ever held dear as she realizes that there is only one way to get him out of her life for good. To do that, though, she needs a bit of help.
Callum Byrne is an Irish-American hitman who has made a life out of robbing others of their own. Darkness has always lurked inside of him and he has no qualms about setting it free - especially for profit. Halle enters his life suddenly, bringing with her an intensity that he has never felt before. It isn’t long before Callum’s narrow view of himself is twisted and challenged.
As the job she’s given him becomes more complicated by the minute...so do Callum’s feelings for her.
Halle Temple, a Black lawyer in Chicago, is being stalked by her ex-boyfriend. The police are useless (surprise, surprise), so Halle has to find an alternative way of protecting herself: she hires a hitman.
Enter Callum Byrne, an Irishman with a murky past (that never gets explored). He has Rules, but in spite of himself, he falls for Halle.
They come together, they fall in love, nobody remains the same.
And throughout the book, I’m on the edge of my seat, super pumped, because this is the morally ambiguous, dark romance plot of my dreams. Jodie Slaughter went there, and I flew through this book, eager to see how on earth things could be resolved. How do a lawyer and a hitman make it work? And once the author has thrown the gauntlet of murdering the heroine’s ex down…how does she resolve it?
God, what a fucking great plot.
Yet for me, this book is a case where the author’s weak execution and skill couldn’t match up to the quality of the story idea itself. On a high-level overview, All Things Burn does everything right: a desperate woman who’s been failed by the police who are supposed to protect her turns to a hitman in order to keep herself safe—then follows a tricky descent into moral ambiguity and shades of gray. It’s a perfect, perfect book that embraces the complexity of human lives and shows that not every “Happily Ever After” is the same.
Problem? When you really get into it, at this point in her career, Slaughter just doesn’t have the technical skill to pull it off. The book is full of weird inconsistencies and plot holes, and the second half of the novel fails to bring about the emotional depth one would expect from such a dark narrative.
My major point of contention with this book is that the inciting incident for the entire plot, the fact that heroine Halle is being stalked by her abusive ex, is not treated logically by either Halle or Callum (a supposedly seasoned hitman). Of course, I do understand that abuse survivors don’t always behave “rationally” and that it’s unfair to judge them based on the standards of a distanced bystander. That’s not what I’m talking about. My complaint with the characters is more that they tell the reader they feel one thing, but then act in a way that doesn’t support their previous assertion.
Case in point: Callum is an experienced hitman. He knows that Halle is being stalked by her ex. Yet he encourages Halle to meet with him frequently, and they go to each others’ apartments on the regular. But isn’t she being stalked? Shouldn’t we be trying to keep a low profile? Why are we hanging out with each other nearly every day? The chances of Halle’s stalker seeing her engaged in a romantic tryst with another man seem high; the blowback resulting from that would be even worse. If they’re so deeply concerned about Halle’s safety, why aren’t they being more cautious?
But that’s the thing: Halle’s stalker never seems all that dangerous. More than anything, he feels like a plot piece—when it’s convenient to the story, he’s Bad and Scary; when he’s inconvenient (such as when the hero and heroine need to have sex or comfort each other in-person), the stalker is nowhere to be found. The author asserts, time and time again, that this guy is gross and demented and will 100% kill Halle when he gets the chance. But on page, we never see him do anything more than send threats via the mail and be creepy. This is obviously very frightening and unacceptable behavior, and I’m not minimizing that. But when Halle claims she’s in fear for her life, and follows up on that by hiring a hitman…then meets her stalker for dinner the very next night…it’s difficult to feel a sense of urgency or danger.
All Things Burn had all the set pieces together for a brilliant story, but it was almost as if Slaughter was too hesitant with really putting them out there. She spends a lot of time telling the reader that the situation is dire, but the novel’s conflict never comes to an intense head like it should. I wanted this story to go deeper and really engage with the subject matter. Halle goes from a picture-perfect civil rights lawyer to an aider and abettor of murder-for-hire, but we really don’t see how that changes or affects her at all. She’s not angsty about this progression of events at all, which is fine—but why isn’t she angsty? Who is Halle, at her core?
I really, really loved the plot and basic storyline of this book. Slaughter’s idea is great, and my only disappointment is that she didn’t quite execute it with as much finesse as the idea deserved. I wanted the threat of danger to be palpable, a consistent hum in the background of every single scene. I wanted to see the characters really grappling with their situation and their feelings and the choices they make. But instead, I was given a shallow, surface-level only glimpse into the narrative.
All things told, Jodie Slaughter’s debut romance is exceedingly promising, and I can only wish it had lived up to that promise. I’ve spent the preceding paragraphs critiquing the book not because I didn’t like it, but because I did like it, and was disappointed by the many moments where things feel flat for me. I believe that this is only a hint at what this author can do, and that’s very exciting. All told, I do believe that All Things Burn is a great example of what a romance novel can do when it’s unafraid to deep-dive into a world where things are more gritty, grim, and (compared to a large portion of the genre), realistic.
