cover image Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasures

Donna Hill. St. Martin's Press, $19.95 (246pp) ISBN 978-0-312-35421-3

With ""fifty published titles to her credit,"" Hill checks in with a tepid offering of R-rated crime. Eva and Jake Kelly, an oversexed Manhattan couple who have glamorous day-jobs in the respective worlds of fashion and luxury car sales, moonlight as a high-rolling, con-artist power-couple. Together with Jake's brother Jinx, an expert hacker, and Eva's cousin Rita, a master forger, they embark on one last heist that'll net them enough to retire forever. The requisite crosses and double-crosses involve smuggled diamonds, the FBI and suave South American villains, and proceed at a pace about equal to the speed of the cruise ship on which they all end up. Hill (Getting Hers) injects some emotion into the characters's various inter-relations and motivations, but dialog is flat (""You have forced me to respect you, beautiful Rita,"" says slick thug Xavier Suarez as the two hold off from having sex), and various short sex scenes fail to gloss the lack of meaningful complication.