After three chapters of The Truth About the Tycoon, the 2005 Harlequin Silhouette novel by Allison Leigh, we were aware of many things that only make sense within the confines of the book. Billionaire business owner, American royalty and Rockefeller stand-in Dane Rutherford, of Clan Rutherford, was in the small town of Lucius, Montana to track down one Alan Michaels, the dastardly bastard who years before had kidnapped Darby Rutherford and held her hostage for four days on the roof of a warehouse. While Darby and the United States were able to move on, Dane continued to blame himself for his sister's trauma, while Alan Michaels continued to be completely insane.
When Michaels escapes from his low-security mental ward, for things such as this happen in The Truth About the Tycoon, Dane seizes his opportunity to track him down and deliver some billionaire-style personal justice. Plans go awry, however, when his car collides with the car of a pretty, wide-eyed brunette by the name of Hadley Golightly. By the time Dane has awoken and found himself covered in blood, with a headache and nasty wound, he realises that his car wasn't the only thing involved in a collision. For his heart, or fate, his destiny, you know, collided with the destiny of Hadley Golightly, and even though finding Alan Michaels remains his top priority, she quickly becomes all he can think of and his top priority. Yet who is this beguiling virgin who never met her own father and how does she fit into Allison Leigh's complex plotting?
Life hasn't been treating Hadley Golightly too kindly of late. Sure, she loves living in backwoods Montana, with her step-dad and half-siblings, but she longs to make it on her own, to create her own identity and become a celebrated writer of things no one is allowed to read. At the tender age of twenty-seven she remains hamstrung by her mother's legacy. Had, to her friends (Hi, Had!), runs her mother's boardinghouse and spends her days helping those in need and generally being a darling girl to everyone she meets. When all seems lost and there is no easy way for her to carve out a personality of her own a handsome, rich man rolls into town, solving all of her problems with his masculinity and sturdy torso. However, Dane wants to keep his Rutherford name and his motivations a secret, so he calls himself Wood Tolliver, the name of his business partner. Hadley's half-brother, Shane, is suspicious, but Hadley falls head over heels in love with Wood, the dashing hunk, leaving the discovery of his true identity and hatred of his deceit until the story's predictable conclusion.
The reader is well-advised to gloss over the next one hundred and fifty pages for nothing of consequence takes place. Hadley is briefly concerned with her new tenant, a pregnant lady who collapses whilst sleighing in the snow, but once she is whisked to hospital she is never mentioned or heard from again, allowing the reader to assume she can't have been important. Equally meaningless is Evie, Hadley's half-sister, and her marriage to Charlie, a drunk. Leigh uses this to further prove Dane's tough manliness with a series of deeply improbable bar fights with events culminating in a surprise party for Evie, where a few things occur that should have been edited out. Meanwhile, Dane's father, Roth, needs surgery to save his life and there is a maniac on the loose headed to Lucius for unspecified reasons. With several heavy burdens weighing on Dane's broad, masculine shoulders, he and Hadley decide this is the perfect time for the book's one and only momentous sex scene.
With Hadley's innocence hanging in the balance and Dane being a man who can ignore any danger when sex is available, the tumultuous love-making is inevitable, but good God does Leigh find a bizarrely-written way to deal with the lack of a condom that avoids any possibility of pregnancy. Perhaps the words, 'hot pleasure jetting over abdomen,' and the line, 'Gotta get a wash-cloth,' should suffice. However, this fails to mention that no wash-cloth is forthcoming and sleep is immediately undertaken. Needless to write, it was the first time Bewildered Heart had ever come across an incident like that in a Mills & Boon. Still, by now we should celebrate original sequences in our romance consumption and then try our best to forget they ever happened.
Shortly thereafter, Dane's world of arrogant indiscretions collapses when one of the characters bothers to check who he is. Does Shane the Sheriff finally get around to looking into the chap who arrived in town, crashed his car, shifted around mysteriously, got into a series of highly improbable bar fights and then slept with Shane's sister? How about anyone seeing Dane and recognising him as the most famous businessman in the world? No, it is left up to Hadley herself, to find Dane's driving license in his wallet, as she routed through it in search of a prophylactic. She is enraged and naked and tells Dane or Wood, whoever he is, to get out, to leave Lucius behind and never look back. He had taught her a valuable lesson, that moments before he had learned the opposite of from her. Some things are unforgivable and seducing a virgin using your true personality albeit it with a fake name is one of those unforgivable things. Somewhat at odds with Dane's new perspective that even kidnapping a young girl in front of a crowd of people and tormenting her for days before pretending to save her and becoming a national hero is forgivable when holding onto vengeance is stopping you from having sex with a beautiful woman.
Phew, eh? Next, Dane boards his private jet before a convenient call from a bounty hunter-turned-attractive-barmaid tells him that Alan Michaels is heading straight for Lucius, also finally explaining where his obsession with the town stems from. Clearly someone else has the same belated sleuthing skills as Hadley, because she has discovered that Michaels had a child with a woman whom we the reader know as Holly Golightly, but not that one, the one in the book, Hadley's mother. Oh no, Dane Rutherford, the woman you're in love with and can never see again because you repeatedly lied to her in order to trick into sleeping with you is in danger from the man who kidnapped your baby sister. At last! All the plot strands are being brought together, with the exception of those that Leigh has forgotten about. Quickly, Dane and Shane, back to the boardinghouse and step on it!
The excitement, if that is what it is, is short-lived, however. Michaels believes Hadley to be Holly, but so in love with her as he is he presents no greater physical threat than the shards of china on the floor from Hadley having dropped her coffee mug. Nevertheless, Dane's timing is impeccable and he saves the defenceless woman from being attacked by the irrational man, proving he does love Hadley no matter what his name is. Dane puts to rest his demons over the destruction Michaels wrought over his family and is ready to embrace the next stage of his life, quitting as Rutherford CEO, returning to death-defying custom racing and marrying a girl ten years his junior.
For Hadley the finale is equally rewarding and perfect. No longer is she the shy, penniless virgin she once was. Now her social problems are irrelevant for her husband has confidence to spare, her financial struggles are immaterial for her husband is a billionaire, and her virginity issue was sorted out by the same man in chapter eleven. Perhaps with everything fixed she can concentrate on her fledging career as an author, but she should be warned not to write a novel about a twenty-seven-year-old virgin with a criminal father and insensitive family, who meets a mysterious, gorgeous man who may or may not be who he at first appears, because she can be sure that that novel will be rubbish.
And so, what have we learned from reading The Truth About the Tycoon? Firstly, we have learned that Harlequin Silhouette and Mills & Boon Modern Romance are the same, with the possible exception of length. Allison Leigh's book weighs in at a hefty two-hundred and fifty pages. While size may not matter, Leigh's failure to do anything with her extra few thousand words counts against her work. She wastes many pages on peripheral characters, including Hadley's co-workers, her siblings and her tenants at the boardinghouse. While a little local colour might have strengthened the appeal of the story, it is under-utilised, largely irritating and in the cases of Wendell and Nikki the lack of closure and representative meaning are maddening. Dane wonders aloud why Evie, Hadley's sister, named her son Alan, briefly believing this may have something to do with Michaels. The reader learns at the end that Evie had known that Michaels was Hadley's father and had warned her half-sister about him. However, we never learn why Evie then named her son Alan. Is she a tactless idiot, is she mean-spirited, forgetful or is the writing needlessly clumsy?
We also learned something about characterisation. When we spoke of creating heroes and heroines we had a good laugh about personality traits, those telling signs that establish no two humans are quite alike. We too learned that these signs can be visualised by cooing at babies in supermarkets, fidgeting with hair, baking cookies and speaking timidly. It is easy to dismiss these particular foibles and examine the more vital complexions of an individual. The few idiosyncrasies that embody Hadley at first seem to suggest a compelling protagonist, but are quickly forgotten to the insistence of the plot. Her actions are not grounded in our understanding of her introduction. The story should never demand passiveness in a protagonist, and when the protagonist is characterised by passivity for continuity’s sake you have self-sacrificing romance fiction. This counter-productive attitude is amateurish, but the root of the issue lies at the heart of the genre. No matter how a heroine starts out she invariably folds to the rigours of her archetypal storyline.
Does meeting Dane change Hadley? Her lifestyle did not make her content and she awaited the arrival of change that came in the form of a strapping gent. If we ignore the evidence we can argue that Dane allowed her to explore an undiscovered, dormant side of her id, and if so The Truth About the Tycoon is the tale of womanhood and the pitfalls of sexual awakening, the deceit of men and the pain of idealising love, except for here all works out well thanks to an under-cooked thriller subplot. In truth, of course, the book is the tale of true fated love and how our soulmate will find us eventually through a sequence of dubious external contrivances. If you have never read The Truth About the Tycoon the former is a nice way of remembering it.
