elfs | Rayne Dancer, finished (forever)

I finished Mlyn Hurn's Rayne Dancer, which I had mentioned reading a few weeks ago. Man, what a dud. First, do you remember the ridiculous uproar when Cassie Edwards lifted an entire passage on the natural history of the blackfooted ferret for her romance novel from a book, passage by passage, and put it into the mouth of her "primitive" hero? Hurn's done more or less the same thing; there's an entire disposition on the history and origin of the white tiger. While cuddling in bed after sex, Sean asks Rayne where her pet white tiger (no, really!) comes from and Rayne says

No white tigers in the wild were found after the 1950's in fact, and the wild species, which is really just a sub-species of the Bengal tiger, only survived in captivity due to inbreeding and crossbreeding programs. The white tigers, which survived until present times, are the result of the breeding programs using inbred and crossbred mixes of the Bengal and the Siberian tiger. An albino would have pink eyes, and there had been only one recorded instance of true albino tigers. In Cooch Behar, which we know as West Bengal, in India, two albino cubs were shot in 1922. The white tiger has pale blue eyes, a mottled grayish-pink nose and is white with the dark stripes that can vary from black to a chocolate brown color. White tigers are born only to parents who both carry the recessive gene for the white coloring.

Yeah, that's real post-sex conversation. Sounds like it came straight out of Wikipedia (the Wikipedia article is pretty close, even mentioning the Cooch Behar incident, but I suspect she got her pillow talk elsewhere, as the wording and tone aren't quite the same). Oh, but the rest of the book's just as bad.

In a scene in which our hero has been called away from Rayne's side to deal with some crises at his brother's farm nearby, our hero says of the third crisis of the day, "I think this goes beyond normal happenstance and things going wrong." What things? Oh, the phone line has been cut in two places-- but we're supposed to accept that the villain, an experienced international psychic man of mystery, would make such a mistake and that Sean, an experienced international psychic man of mystery himself, would not immediately jump to the conclusion that something very wrong is happening. Oh, and he's already met the villain, a man who wears expensive suits and drives an expensive car who visited Rayne yesterday with no apparent agenda and no explanation for his being there. Yet Sean's never actually shows real suspicion about him.

The scene where Sean proposes to Rayne was written by Victor Appleton, only without the punning skill. On the other hand, the villain was by John Norman, complete with pointless exposition.

Oh, Sean doesn't have a PDA, or a cell phone. Hurn tells us, "Using his computerized communication device, he had connected with the wireless remote to the Agency's database." Uh, yeah, it's called browsing the web with your iPhone, maybe using HTTPS. Amazing technology there, Sean.

Oh, and toward the end of the book, Sean and his boss have a conversation in which Sean basically says, "I have everything under control. No, I don't need to be tested. She couldn't possibly have suborned me. I'm going to marry her, she's the best fuck I've ever had." And the boss says, "Okay. As you know, Sean, you're the best field man, so I'll trust your opinion." And that's it. No follow up, no procedures, nothing.

Goddess, I think Kouryou-chan could see through this crap.