Every Move You Make: Carla Cassidy

On her thirtieth birthday, Annalise Blakely gets a strange package. Inside, along with one of her company's hand-crafted dolls, is a note: I don't need this anymore. I have my own. Annalise puts the package aside-she has enough on her mind. Since her mother died, Annalise has been working nonstop to keep Blakely Dolls a success. Her deadbeat dad wants to be back in the picture. And she's dating again.

But the policeman she's seeing has chilling news: someone is murdering women, dressing them up as Blakely Dolls, and leaving them for the police to find. And, although no one knows it yet, the killer is stalking Annalise, the model for the original doll, for his final display...

Every move you make...every breath you take...He'll be watching you... A song lyric for a title of a novel always makes me cringe. Regardless of the lack of originality in a title choice, the tale does seem full of several creative juicy bits of intrigue. A workaholic doll maker runs her mother's business and doesn't even have the time to dream of white picket fences much less a night on the town. What is a best friend to do but set her up on a blind date and soon things are hitting it off with the detective.

Two people who are dedicated to their job seems to be a match made in heaven if they are both willing to never see one another because of work scheduling conflicts. He has to deal with a serial killer and she gets to deal with doll parts. It seems like a lovely pairing until Annalise starts to get odd packages and that sudden creepy feeling like she is being watched all the time. With an open window forgotten, a half-brother breaking in and dreams of possessed dolls attacking her, Annalise seems to want nothing more than to be in the arms of the detective. Will love protect her when it is time to replicate the Annalise doll or will she end up playing dress up with the serial killer?

At first I found the novel rather placid until we meet the first replicated doll because it was all work work work and no character development beyond the fact that, yeah, she's a workaholic. It seems as if the author threw in several random people in the life of the victim to attempt to confuse the reader about who the killer would end up being. I found this distracting and almost felt as if the tie-ins with those weak characters were forced into the story to get more page numbers. I did find it refreshing that Cassidy chose to dance around the sex bits; she writing it as a...well...romance, not a six-pack abs, perfect breasts and rods of steel fuck-a-thon. Three stars for an okay job; not horrendous, not super great either, just okay.

-----------------------------
Publisher: Signet (March 4, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0451223438
ISBN-13: 978-0451223432