Such a Dance by Kate McMurray

3 STARS

Well, it wasn't the greatest, but it was by far not the worst I've read, that's for sure.

Eddie is a dancer and Lane is a mobster in the late 1920's in NYC. They meet, there's attraction and they begin to see more and more of each other until they fall in love and then decide what they're going to do with the rest of their lives. That's pretty much it.

I never really connected with either of the two main characters. I didn't find anything much special about Lane other than that he seemed to be a nice guy. Eddie was a lot less sympathetic - I think he was supposed to be a cranky sort but he just came across as an unlikable, negative type fellow. I have no idea what Lane really saw in him past the physical attraction. I was honestly far more invested in the secondary characters of Julian and Frankie.

I wished that the mob parts of the part could have been more explored - it seemed to me that Lane got lucky far too many times in his dealings with them. I also wished that we could have seen the baddie - Hardy - get his comeuppance. That would have been satisfying.

The parts of the plot dealing with Eddie and his dancing partner, Marian, seemed rather meaningless to me. Not meaningless, no... pointless. I never felt that I saw Eddie rising above the whole debacle of the breaking up of the team. I also wanted Jimmy, the show promoter, to get his comeuppance too. Just telling me that his show will probably go in the toilet wasn't enough.

So, all in all, it was rather a bland read for me. McMurray's writing is good, so it wasn't as awful as it could have been (I saw one knob on Goodreads give it 5 stars because the book was grammatically correct and punctuated correctly. WHAT??), I just didn't really care much about Lane and Eddie. And it just proves to me that I must have good characters in my reads. Most important thing.