Impulse by Catherine Coulter

Copyright: 1990
Publisher: Signet
Genre: Pages: 419
Challenges: Mystery and Suspense
Author's Website
My rating: 2/5


Simple Description: 
When Rafaella's Mother is in a car accident and ends up in a coma, Rafaella finds her journals.  In these journals her Mother actually reveals who her real father is and what happened when Rafaella was born.  She then goes on to journal her obsession with this man.  Her father is a rich man who is in the black market arms dealing.  Her Mother is not in love with this man, but she is somewhat infatuated with him.  Mostly this is due to how she was treated when she did know him.   Her mother is now married to a very rich man whom she loves, yet she can't get this other guy out of her mind.

Rafaella is an investigative reporter and she does some research on her father and decides to meet him and learn about him in order to write a biography about his life so the world will know who he really is.

She travels to his private Island and stays at the private resort he owns and there is is able to meet him and worm her way into his private household.  Never telling him who she really is.  The only problem seems to be Marcus.  A man who won't stay away from her and wants her to leave.  The problem is that while he is a pain in the butt, she's also attracted to him.

My Thoughts:
I like the story line to this book. It's sounds interesting doesn't it?  I've liked the author's work in the past, so I had some expectations going in to this book. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me.  I had a really hard time with her writing style.   Coulter constantly changes who the speaker/narrator of the story is.  This wouldn't be so bad, expect there is no formal break between changes. It's not like she changes with a new chapter.  Nope, you could read a handful of paragraphs from Rafaella's point of view and then suddenly we are getting the story from Marcus' point of view.  She doesn't just limit it to those characters either.

It took me awhile to get into the book because of this and the fact that the book starts from her Mom's point of view from when she was much younger, then it switches to Marcus, whom we haven't met yet, etc.  It was very confusing for me at first.

Once I got used to the writing style, note I said I got used to it and not that I liked it, the story moved along and I found I was interested in what happened and I actually liked Marcus and Rafaella.  The writing style still bothered me though.

Then we get to the ending.  The ending felt a bit rushed, I felt a lot of things were left open and that parts of it seemed to contradict each other.

I had a hard time writing this review, I've actually had it started since Saturday - when I finished the book, but couldn't spend much time with it. I was torn on what to say, how to express my thoughts.  While I didn't like the writing style and had issues with the ending, I did end up liking the story itself.   I gave it a low rating because of the issues I had with it, yet I can't say that I hated it. I would even say that if you think you can get past the writing style issues I had, you might even like it.  I'll let you decide though.