LynneC’s review of The Greek Tycoon’s Achilles’ Heel by Lucy Gordon
Contemporary Romance print/ebook published by Mills and Boon Presents/Harlequin Modern 6 Apr 10/8 Jun 10

This one is a bit different. Gordon’s style and the way she tells this story is very different to the usual Presents/Modern. It contains some interesting ideas and while I don’t think she entirely pulled it off, it’s a great experiment.

The blurb is more inaccurate than usual because Petra is far from an innocent, she’s 32, divorced and has had experiences outside marriage. Hooray! She doesn’t excuse her experiences, doesn’t explain them or feel ashamed of them, and neither does Lysander. I absolutely loved that. She’s also a woman with a successful career as an academic, and she behaves with intelligence and grace. She knows what she’s getting into when she embarks on an affair with Lysander, or she thinks she does.

Lysander isn’t a character I warmed to. At the beginning, it shows how he dismisses one of his lovers by text message. Unpleasant, I thought, and the messages were callous. The book seems to assume that the rich are all money-grubbing, immoral people, apart from Lysander, of course, and he’s just cold and callous. I don’t like any sector of society dismissed like that, or reduced to cliches, and I didn’t particularly believe it here. Neither did I believe in the jolly fisherfolk on Corfu who appear later in the story.
I think that was my main complaint, that Gordon uses a lot of cliched approaches and some of them don’t come off properly.

She also has a very flowery style, reminiscent of the “waves on the seashore” school of sex, describing what is happening in terms of hyperbole and metaphor. I had to read the account of their first “real” kiss a few times before I actually found it, and it was more frustrating than anything else. It amounts to “telling,” and partly because of that, I feel divorced from the characters.

“Then, under the cover of darkness, he pulled her into his arms.
‘Now!’ he said.
Pleasure and relief went through her. She had wanted this so much, and now everything in her yearned towards him. Her mouth was ready for him but so was every inch of her body. As he grasped her, so she grasped him, caressing him with hands and lips.
‘How did you arrange for the phone to ring?’ she gasped.
‘It didn’t. I simply pressed a button that set the bell off, then I pretended to answer. I had to get you away from there, get you to myself.’
He kissed her again, and his kiss was everything she’d wanted since their meeting. Nothing else in her life had been like it. Nothing else ever would be. It was the kiss she’d secretly longed for since he’d cheated her with a half-kiss all those years ago.
‘What have you done to me?’ he growled. ‘Why can’t I stop you doing it?’
‘You could if you really wanted to,’ she whispered against his mouth. ‘Why don’t you…why don’t you…?’
‘Stop tormenting me-‘
At that she laughed. Why should she make it easy for him?
‘Siren-witch-‘
But his lips caressed her even as they hurled names at her. He was in the grip of a power stronger than himself, and that was just how she wanted him.”

And there’s a lot of conversation. A lot, and some of it without tags of any kind, speech or action. It tended to divorce me from the situation, so I lost touch with the story. That, added to my dislike of the cold Lysander, meant it wasn’t entirely satisfactory for me.

Gordon mentioned several legends of the Mediterranean  in this story, most prominently the story of Achilles, as related by Homer in the Iliad, and the story of Sissy, the Empress Elizabeth, who was obsessed by Achilles and the myth. Although elements of the legends and histories were incorporated into the story, there were also times when they told each other the story, or it was simply related in the text. It was a bit like being hit over the head with a large hammer, and I thought some of those parts could have been cut, in favor of the romance.

The black moment was one of the strangest I’ve ever read. One aspect of it kind of cancelled itself out, and the big reveal didn’t work. The villain is easy to spot, and he/she is somewhat cliched, although I did enjoy the motivations behind the near-split. The denouement was good, although one part of it was unsatisfactory.

I think this was a great attempt at something different, and most of the points here are for the heroine. Despite having a dominating, cold fish hero who treats women like dirt, she gave as good as she got, and didn’t take any garbage from him. But the flowery style and the long conversations tended to put me to sleep.
Still, a C for this one.

Grade: C

Summary:

An innocent for the Greek
Lysandros Demetriou: shipping magnate and Athen’s most sought-after bachelor. Glamorous women compete for this tycoon’s attention, but his focused ruthlessness ensures none outstays her welcome! Until Petra Radnor whirls into his life. Her beauty is a lure Lysandros cannot resist, she awakens something within him that he’s kept hidden for years. When their scorching passion shows no sign of burning out, Lysandros has to decide whether his desire for Petra is a temporary craving or a lifelong obsession…

Read an excerpt.