A Woman Without Lies by Elizabeth Lowell ****

I got this on audio book from the library - and it's missing the LAST 18 MINUTES!! HOW DOES IT END???

Whew. As it turns out, I'm having some kind of issue transferring my audio book CDs into iTunes and it just dropped the last track of 18 minutes. I got out the disk and listened to it on the computer.

This is another of Lowell's typical style - her jackass hero who developed a hatred for women when he was 18 and had some disastrous encounter with a cheating woman. In his suspicious, closed little mind, all women lie to get what they want. "Hawk" meets "Angel" (follow all the flying and wing metaphors throughout the book) through a mutual friend, Darry. Hawk assumes (that's "make an ass out of u and me") Angel and Darry are lovers, and he's put off when there's chemistry between himself and Angel that she freely shows him. See! he thinks, even though she's Darry's lover, she's coming on to me!! The whore! The slut! I'll show her - I'll boink her mad and leave her high and dry, like the good friend to Darry I am.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why do I keep reading her? Is it for the groveling she puts those jackasses through at the end?? I dunno, cuz I still rated this one 4 stars, in spite of the extreme jackassism of Hawk.

Angelina AKA Angie AKA Angel is an artist working with glass. Her troubled past included a tragic car accident in which her parents and her fiancé were killed, and from which she received multiple bad medical issues that took months to recover from. Darry was the fiancé's brother, and he stayed by Angel's side and helped her through her emotional and physical recovery. Therefore, she feels she owes him whatever he needs when he suffers a broken leg and needs assistance. However, the assistance he asks her to give him is in showing his property to Hawk, a potential buyer. Selling the property will give Darry the money he needs to complete medical school.

Since Angel never bothers to communicate the details of her relationship to Darry, Hawk continues to assume the worst - not that Hawk ever asks her, either. Why bother? He assumes she's a cheating, lying bitch who should be brought down, and treats her that way. But Angel soon realizes that what Hawk needs is love, an unconditional love that he has never experienced.

Why do I put up with these storylines? Because somehow, Lowell manages to make it work for me - even though I hate the hero and his treatment of the heroine, her writing evokes the feelings in me that I look for in a good story. She manages to make me feel what the characters are feeling (even as I'm rolling my eyes at some of her phrasing). Oh yeah, and because I love audio books and I got this one as a free dowloand from the library (which I had to burn to a disc and transfer to iTunes to put on my iPod, and lost the last 18 minutes). 4 stars.