Review: By a Thread

By a Thread by Lucy Score
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think it must be a sign of getting old when you think, 'this would have been a much better book if the author didn't insist on filling it with sex every five minutes'.

And OMG the angst!

Ally was a solvent, happy, thirty-nine year old until her father got sick. Then a bad situation got worse and worse (just catastrophe after catastrophe) and now she's working four part-time jobs and trying to repair his house in her (limited) spare time. It is in one of these jobs, waitressing at a pizza place, where she meets Dominic.

Dominic is fashion editor of his mother's print and online fashion magazine, brought in from his investing job a year ago after his father was 'exited' from the business for highly inappropriate behaviour. Dominic feels totally out of his depth, convinced the staff hate/fear him, knowing others are better qualified for the job, and wishing desperately for his old career. Against this backdrop, when an uppity waitress tells him off for using his phone in the restaurant despite the no phones sign and makes some totally inappropriate comments when he ignores her, he is gunning for a fight. When said waitress spells out a rude message in pepperoni on his pizza Dominic goes ballistic and gets her fired. Now leaving aside the improbability of the owner of a fashion magazine (think Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada) and her billionaire son eating in a questionable pizza joint, what kind of asshat gets a minimum wage employee fired? I get that this is supposed to be a grumpy boss romance but that's not grumpy, its abuse of power.

In fact, there seems to be a lot of rewriting of history in this book. At first the reader is led to believe that all the staff at the magazine fear Dominic because he never smiles, and they all call him Mr Russo, never Dominic, and I'm sure they all seem to shake with fear when he speaks to them. This is later refocused as everyone finding him so attractive that they can't even look him in the eye?

Anyway, the woman Dominic is dining with is his mother, and she chases after Ally and offers her an admin job at the magazine as compensation for her son getting Ally fired. She also has an ulterior motive, she wants to find out what staff morale is like after the departure of her husband and a number of the senior management.

Despite her monetary issues, Ally is incapable of keeping her mouth shut, and bolstered by Dominic's mother saying that he can't fire her, she is rude to him whenever they meet. He calls her Maleficent and she calls him Charming (because Prince Charming he ain't). Soon their 'banter' is the talk of the office, but because of his father's transgressions Dominic will never cross the line with an employee (which frankly leads to more disturbing scenes where he masturbates in his office bathroom every night). Similarly, Ally desperately needs this job to keep her father in the nursing home which looks after him, so she can't quit. But they are wildly attracted to each other. It's push-me, pull-me. Ally gets upset because she doesn't LISTEN to what Dominic says, he doesn't say he doesn't want her, he says he can't cross that line. Dominic gets upset because Ally won't divulge all her financial issues and secrets to HER BOSS.

Then there is the ludicrous scene where Ally resorts to amateur night at her BFF's strip club to earn money because there was a snafu with her pay and the payroll team just shrugged their shoulders and did nothing. Of course Dominic overhears and follows her to the stripclub where he pays for a private lap dance - sleazy much?

Overall, as others have said. This is supposed to be a romance about a thirty-nine year old FMC who has grit and determination and skills and her forty-four year old MMC boss, whereas it reads more often like a pair of high school teens. The snark and plot were really enjoyable and stopped me downgrading this to a two and a half star review but the rest was so cliched and angst-filled that it made me laugh more than anything.

Free on my Kindle Unlimited subscription and I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.

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