I read O’Reilly’s trilogy, Those Sexy O’Sullivans, last year, and enjoyed them, especially Sex, Straight Up, the best category with the worst title ever written. Recently, KMont at Lurv a la Mode blogged about her failed attempts to fall in lurv with categories, and her commenters gave her a heck of a great list to try.

My favorite comment was Wendy’s, who said she loves categories because they give you “all of the romance, with none of the bullshit”.

I totally agree with her on that. It’s cheeky to call secondary characters, subplots, worldbuilding, suspense, and fur, “bullshit” but I totally know what she means. I’ve already gone on record as saying that to me, the contemporary feels like the purest form of romance. Well, the contemporary category is like the boiled down essence of that purity. The couple meets right away, and they can’t stay away from each other for more than a page or two. It’s all about the romance.

I have a lot of respect for category romance writers, because they have so much to do in so little time, with so many rules. It’s like the Iron Chef of romance writing.

Of course, a lot of them are dreck. But when you find an author you can trust, it’s heaven. I feel that way about Kathleen O’Reilly.

I started this glom with Hot Under Pressure, just out this month, and reviewed all over the place already. Ashley (boutique owner from Chicago) and David (financier from New York) meet on a plane. They are both divorced and a bit gunshy about dating, but there’s instant attraction. When their flight in canceled, they end up in the airport hotel. They are both in some emotional recovery, especially David, whose wife left him for his own brother, and Ashley has her own problems at home, where she lives with her neurotic mother, her troubled sister, and her young niece. This is a darker story, with a lot of intensity around the sex (there’s a lot of plunging, as Jayne in the Dear Author review mentions. Maybe he was a plumber in a past life?), which for David is how he shows emotion. David is intense, and Ashley is hyper-responsible and tentative about going after what she wants. David needs to learn to let go, and Ashley needs to learn to focus on her own needs. Theirs is a story of learning to trust again, making compromises, and putting one’s neck out for love. I think the heavier themes are not easy to tackle in the shorter space of a category, and while some of the loose ends were tied up a bit too tidily, others were left to dangle, which is a lot like life. This gave the book a melancholy feel to me throughout. I did really like it, but I enjoyed the other two a bit more.

On a gossipy note (wait, can one gossip about oneself? Must ponder.), I commented about the use of a potentially questionable word on the Smart Bitches review on this book, and Kathleen (she totally said I could call her that) responded in a very detailed and helpful way, which I really appreciated. I honestly don’t care if authors are monsters in real life, but it’s nice to know when they aren’t.

My second read was Beyond Breathless, the first installment of The Red Choo Diaries, three books published in 2007 about the Brooks family of NYC. Beyond Breathless starts with a bang, just like Hot Under Pressure, when uptight, driven, up and coming Wall Street broker Jamie has to share a Hummer limo with similarly uptight and driven Wall Street super broker Andrew Brooks. I know some people may think the sex in a limo thing is a stretch (har har) but it was worth it just for the many times Jamie thinks later, “and in a Hummer!” and you can just see her wincing and shaking her head. It was totally out of character for both of these serious workaholics, but thanks to Andrew’s little sister Mercedes, a wannabe erotic romance author who narrated their encounter (anonymously) on her blog, The Red Choo Diaries, all of Wall Street becomes obsessed with their story. Neither of them have big issues, so this was a pretty low conflict romance.

Andrew wants Jamie, but Jamie wants to make it on her own. I liked Andrew, but Jamie was not easy to like. While I understood her fear that a relationship with the biggest dude in the stock market might forever make her seem like the beneficiary of nepotism no matter what she does, at times she seemed to blame Andrew for being a white male, something he can hardly help. I did love the Nietzschean overtones of Andrew’s “everyone is not equal speech”, and the Randian tones of his comment that she should take his insider help to get a client because “life isn’t fair. If you play by the rules, you’re always competing against someone who won’t”.  Andrew was possibly one of the most amoral heroes I have read in a Blaze.

This was a story of two very similar people who love in each other what is most like themselves. Andrew’s reluctance stems from always needing to be in control (he has been the de facto male head of his family since he was a child). He’s the one who gives in to love first, and his attempts to break out of his shell to court Jamie made for a very enjoyable read.

My third read was Beyond Daring. This one is about Andrew’s younger brother, Jeff, the charming, gorgeous PR man. Jeff’s latest assignment is to keep Sheldon Summerville (think Paris Hilton) from embarrassing her wealthy family with her drunken antics. Sheldon is gorgeous and constantly tries to seduce Jeff, just to see if she can. Jeff, a ladies man who normally wouldn’t think twice, has to resist for the sake of his career. In the meantime, they fall in love. Jeff, never very ambitious, worries that he can’t keep Sheldon in furs, while Sheldon, for her part, has agreed to a marriage-merger to some other guy. Normally, I hate those arranged marriages in contemporaries, but Sheldon, a life long party girl with no talent other than making trouble, feels it’s the one thing she can do to make herself useful.

I don’t know what to say about this book, except that my brain stopped and everything else took over when I read it. I loved every second of it. It pushed every one of my buttons. There was an incredibly romantic kiss at a baseball game, crying in the shower, a fight at a dance club, hot sex on the beach, drunkenly yelling up at closed windows, sleeping outside doorways, and secret violin lessons, all capped off with a big splashy finale a la An Officer and A Gentleman. It was like Total Drama Island all the time with these two, but somehow it worked for me. It was a very pure romance — all they wanted was each other and they couldn’t manage it. It was just so romantic and sexy and sad and terrific.

The one quibble I have is the sequel baiting for Mercedes’ book (this is turning into a full blown peeve of mine), which threw me right out of the story at the worst time (not the interview, but what came after, for those who have read it). “The Red Choo Diaries” conceit worked great in Beyond Breathless, but the blog didn’t add much to Beyond Daring and I would have been happy without it.

If you like Blazes, I would recommend any of these. If you are not sure about categories, I dare you to read Beyond Daring.