Sullivan's Miracle by Lindsay Longford

Sullivan's Miracle Reviews

• 
  Carmen

  "You're attracted to her." She also looked Maggie's way.
  
  "Yeah... not surprising. Everything's still in working order."
  
  Alicia chuckled. "There's hope, then."
  
  He knew she truly didn't get it. "No. Because there's nothing working except testosterone. And that, after all's said and done, is nothing more than a cheap thrill.... Doesn't fill the gnawing vacuum. If it could, I'd line up for the carnival ride."
  
  Is this what Romantic Suspense by Harlequin was like in 1993? Because I actually enjoyed this. It's head and shoulders above what is being published in their current Romantic Suspense line, that's for damn sure.
  
  This is a weird book. Sullivan is a cynical reporter. His girlfriend - Lizzie - is both dying of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and is suicidal. The book opens with her planning to kill herself by walking into the ocean to drown.
  
  Dark.
  
  Sullivan finds her on the beach and takes her inside and cares for her. They argue. He wants to stay and help care for her during her illness until she dies. She thinks this is too much of a burden to place on him and wants him out of her life 'for his own good.'
  
  When Sullivan is called away to cover the shooting of a cop at the Quik-Deli up the street, she tries to kill herself by overdosing on pills, but conveniently dies of her fibrosis before she can get the pills down.
  
  10 months later, Sullivan is in a dark place. He knows someone is trying to kill him, and there have been attempts on his life, but he can't bring himself to care. And he won't stop working on the story that is most likely the source of the assassination attempts. Maggie (our heroine) is the cop assigned to his case.
  
  Then this book gets even weirder....
  
  
  THE GOOD
  
  ONE Unlike a lot of romance novels, Longford pours on the characterization here. I could actually see Maggie and Sullivan in my mind. I could predict what they would do based on their well-developed personalities. I felt like I was watching a movie in my mind. Good stuff!
  
  TWO I like the way Longford writes. Now, caveat - everyone is not going to feel the same way. She stuffs so many metaphors and similes on a page that you think the book is going to explode. Open to any page and you're going to find stuff like this:
  
  Relentlessly, truth settled like dust motes between them.
  ...
  Her voice was orange-blossom honey flowing around him, slow and easy and sweet.
  ...
  His anger was making him as mean and nasty as a rattler kicked up from the bush.
  ...
  He wished she didn't look so vulnerable when she dropped her guard like and smiled. Cops weren't supposed to smile like that, like sunshine fire burnishing the gulf with radiance.
  ...
  White dust sugared the surface of the shelves...
  
  You get the idea. I was eating it up, it was a lot of fun. I don't feel like Longford crossed the line into unreadable cheesiness, but there was enough cheese in this book for me to enjoy myself.
  
  
  THE BAD
  
  ONE Longford tends to get really weird when she writes couple-banter. A lot of authors struggle with this. I've read books where the 'witty banter' between the couple makes me tear my hair out because it's so stupid. Here, it's not at that level of stupidity, but it's bizarre enough to make you scratch your head and wonder what kind of drugs the protagonists are on.
  
  "Trust me. A little. Please." She lifted her face to his, ...
  
  "I'll try," he muttered into the curls tempting his mouth. "It's not the answer you want, Maggie. It's the best I can do."
  
  "That's all I want, Tin Man," she whispered. "I never wanted to live in Oz, just find my way home to Kansas."
  
  WTF? o.O
  
  TWO Sullivan is a bit of a stalker. They chalk it up to his reporter job here, but he frequently follows Maggie around and even once spies on her through a window while hiding in the bushes. Ick.
  
  THREE "Drink it." He held the can to her mouth.
  
  Some of the cola dribbled onto her chin as she sputtered. "I don't want - "
  
  "You need it."
  
  Fucking force-feeder. 'For her own good.' Instant relationship DNF for me.
  
  FOUR Longford expects me to believe that it never occurred to Sullivan that the car bomb that went off could have hurt the children at the nearby day care center. BULLSHIT. He can't possibly be this stupid, and he's never this stupid again during the book, so...
  
  
  THE WEIRD
  
  I know I usually do The Ugly here, but we have to address the bizarre things that are happening in this book.
  
  ONE On the night Lizzie died from natural causes at the very second she was in the process of committing suicide, Maggie was lying shot at the Quik-Deli. Sullivan was with Maggie because he was a reporter on the scene.
  
  When Maggie wakes up in the hospital recovering from being shot in the chest, she feels different. She ends up breaking up with her boyfriend and partner (wow, no ethics in this PD, huh?) because she can't summon any sexual interest in him. She can no longer fire a gun without shaking hard and feeling tons of anxiety. She's also attracted to Sullivan.
  
  If you guessed that this means that she is possessed - at least partially - by the ghost of Lizzie, you'd be correct! The book never really explains it. There is one scene where Maggie is shot - for a second time! Jumping in front of Sullivan to save his life! - where Lizzie's spirit takes over and turns Maggie's brown eyes gray and talks to Sullivan for a minute. She was also the one who threw Maggie's body - which she was possessing - in the path of the bullet.
  
  Now, Lizzie isn't erasing Maggie's personality here. For the most part Maggie is still Maggie. With some HUGE differences. She can't shoot anymore, and at the end of the book she gives up being a cop and becomes a day care worker - the EXACT job Lizzie had at the EXACT same day care. Creepy. Also, ostensibly it is because of Lizzie that Maggie finds herself sexually attracted to / ready to love Sullivan and suddenly unable to feel romantically or sexually to Royal (her boyfriend/partner).
  
  "But I was so different when I finally surfaced through that drug fog and stayed conscious for longer periods. I felt as if I'd been reborn and had a second chance at life.
  ...
  It's like the gun doesn't even belong to me anymore. ... Certain parts of my life don't mesh anymore."
  
  
  TWO Longford tries to inject - at the last minute - some cockamamie story about their two souls having tried to be together for thousands of years but never succeeding, always 'destroying their love' or some shit. I don't understand, it comes out of nowhere, and it doesn't make any sense or have any basis in the previous pages of the books. Personally, I think Longford should have just stuck with the ghost thing. And wouldn't Lizzie and Maggie have two separate souls? Unless she expects me to believe that Lizzie COMPLETELY possessed Maggie's body, this doesn't make any sense.
  
  
  How's the sex, Carmen?
  
  Sigh.
  
  So, the first time they have sex, these are the conditions:
  - In a rowboat that is covered
  - They are hiding from bad guys who are chasing them with guns
  - They are sweaty and icky and covered in unidentifiable fluids because they have been running through a swamp
  - A swamp in which they JUST SAW carcinogenic and mutagenic material being dumped
  
  I don't think this is a good idea. Filthy sex (not in a good way) in a filthy rowboat while fearing for your life sounds neither comfortable nor fun. And it isn't like this is an established couple. This is the FIRST TIME they are having sex with each other. Good gosh, man. It's called a bed. Can't you wait until you have a bed available?!!?!?!? Or at least somewhere with blankets or other soft materials?!?! This sounds SO uncomfortable and SO spider/dirt/cobweb filled and SO stinky.
  
  There's also horrible writing like this:
  
  Where he thrust, she yielded; where she retreated, he followed in a dance as old as time, as new as innocence.
  
  Also, things are really vague. On page 144, it says Sullivan, vulnerable and aching, lay tensed beneath her, his hunger as great as hers and unsatisfied. He had eased the ugly memories for her, denied himself. That seems to indicate she orgasmed on the previous page, right? As if she's already had an orgasm in this scenario? Well, I hadn't thought she had orgasmed, so I went back and read the previous page. It's full of extremely confusing sex-writing and I'm still unclear as to whether she orgasmed or not and if she did, exactly how that shit was happening. It would HAVE to be with his mouth or fingers, because he definitely didn't stick his penis inside her. But the text reveals nothing about what he's doing to her and even less than nothing about whatever he might have been doing resulted in her cumming.
  
  I hate vague and confusing sex scenes. HATE.
  
  I do like how Sullivan lays it all out for her: this will be fucking and nothing more.
  
  "Maggie," he said, his voice rough as he lifted her away from him, "are you sure?" He held her absolutely still. "Do you understand what this would be?"
  
  "Yes," she murmured, "heaven."
  
  "No. Nothing more than two bodies coming together, nothing else. Not love, not friendship. Lust, sex, call it what you want but that's all this -" he pointed to where they still touched "- will be. Don't kid yourself. We won't be 'making love.' We'll be screwing." He spat the word out, making it as ugly as it could sound.
  ...
  Through gritted teeth he said, "I can give you pleasure, Maggie. I can do that for you. I can even make you forget for an hour or two that all I'm offering is technique. Not my heart. Not my soul. They're gone."
  ...
  "There's nothing left for you, sweet Maggie. Will you settle for technique? For skill?" His hard grip on her waist conveyed his anger. "Is anonymous, wild sex good enough for you?"
  
  For one thing, I'm not sure that the sex is going to be as amazing as you keep talking about considering the horrible conditions under which you are choosing to have sex. For another thing, while I appreciate you making things clear for Maggie - seriously, I do appreciate it - you only need to say it once, hombre. No need to beat a dead horse. She gets it, okay?
  
  So fast she wasn't prepared, he flipped her onto her back and he was over her, his face dark and determined. "You don't want this, Maggie, believe me."
  
  Flipping her over suddenly. In a dark, covered rowboat. Without hurting her or capsizing. RIGHT. SURE. I'm skeptical she can even see his face under these conditions! Also, does this rowboat have no seats?!?!?!?! This whole thing makes no sense.
  
  This is about as unbelievable as the scene where he PUTS HER JEANS ON HER UNCONSCIOUS BODY IN THE DARK, IN THE BOAT, WITHOUT HER WAKING UP. Totally impossible, I call bullshit. Serious bullshit.
  
  There is some good in here, like
  
  He cupped her in the softest, most yearning part of her body, and his stroke wasn't anonymous at all, it was familiar and very personal.
  
  That's sweet. And
  
  His calloused fingertips snagged on the silk of her panties,...
  
  Totally accurate. Callused fingers DO snag on silk panties. Good reporting.
  
  Also, mega mega points for him stopping short of penetrating her because they don't have condoms. SUPER POINTS. MENSCH.
  
  Regardless of what he said he wanted, it wasn't anonymous sex. Caring in some fashion for her, he'd pulled back. He'd stopped when some men would have complained that they'd gone too far to quit.
  
  His refusal to give into his baser instincts and have unprotected sex with her is SO romantic. IMO this is romance. <3
  
  Later sex scenes reveal some truly bad sex dialogue, like this:
  
  "I don't want technique, Sullivan. I want you. With me, burning together." ...
  
  "Sweetheart, I can make you burn so hot you won't care about anything except what we're doing here tonight. I want to see you like that, blazing for me. Let me do that for you, for me. Let me watch you explode into cinders and burn again like the sun, again and again until you swear nothing else exists."
  
  Pretty sure not many people talk like this in bed. At least not with a straight face. I could be wrong. I guess?
  
  
  Tl;dr - A strange, yet well put together well-written interesting romance novel that I was rather surprised that I enjoyed so much. Longford was strong on the character development and didn't skimp on shaping these two's personalities. Of course, the book was far from perfect - full of metaphors and similes (fine for me, but might annoy others), silly couple banter that didn't make a lick of sense, and bad sex talk. Confusing and vague sex scenes - my pet peeve - and stalkerish tendencies in the hero didn't help either.
  
  I really liked that Sullivan really loved Lizzie. He didn't easily get over her, he was plunged into depression by her death, and he didn't have sex with anyone after Lizzie until Maggie came along. That is nice and well done.
  
  That being said, I can't resist giving this a 4. A 3 sounds too low for this little gem, considering how much fun I had reading it. :)
  
  ROMANCE CATEGORIES:
  Romantic Suspense
  Contemporary Romance
  Paranormal Romance - Ghosts
  Non-Virgin Heroine
• 
  Saly

  Sullivan's Miracle was filled with love and grief so profound that it can cripple and I lapped it up and loved it.
  
  Sullivan is a reporter, an ex-Navy SEAL who adores Lizzie who is dying. He wants to marry her and cherish the time they have left but Lizzie is afraid, she is seeing the pain she is putting Sullivan through so she tells him to go, Sullivan goes for a story but promises he will be back. Then Lizzie feels blackness descending and realizes that she should not have been afraid to voice her feelings and that Sullivan is in danger.
  
  Fast forward nine months and Sullivan doesn't care about anything even the threats he is receiving because of the story he is doing. He misses Lizzie and feels a hole in his heart, Lizzie was the only person he connected to.
  
  Maggie a cop and newly promoted detective, comes to see Sullivan about the death threats he is receiving and also the bomb that ripped his car but Sullivan doesn't care and is intentionally rude and obnoxious to her but Maggie instead of being put off, stands up to him and tells him to take a seat. Maggie somehow reminds Sullivan of Lizzie through some of her mannerisms.
  
  Maggie is still recovering from almost dying, she died, the night Lizzie did in a shoot-out and ever since doesn't feel herself. Her partner seems like a stranger and she can't seem to make a gun fit her, it feels all wrong. Being around Sullivan calms her. Maggie knows that Sullivan isn't taking the threats seriously and it is later that she berates him that even if he doesn't care about his life he should care about those who may be caught in the cross-fire like the kids in Lizzie's day care.
  
  Sullivan doesn't trust Maggie but she calls out to him when he doesn't want it. He only wants to live in his memories but he is unable to. Maggie follows him around for the case. I loved seeing them together, the way Sullivan can't help but touch her, even if it is only to comfort her. I loved how Maggie save him and how he sat by her bedside and how Maggie refused to accept what he was offering and instead demanded more.
  
  I don't know still if Lizzie was Maggie or not but something makes me think yes there were parts of Lizzie in her but Sullivan finally accepts her. I am not making full sense but the book was just so well written and emotion filled.
  
• 
  Angie Engles

  
  (I read this years ago and still remember how haunting and beautiful and it was...wish I had my own copy of it!)
  
  Breaking beyond the mold of the 'typical' Silhouette novel, Longford delivers a wonderful romance free of candy coating or eye-rolling oh pleases! This is the kind of book that shatters genres. With characters you can almost touch and settings as vivid as any painting, _Sullivan's Miracle_ is truly a surprise, full of emotion that's devastating and complex, something I most definitely wasn't expecting when I first opened it way back in the 90s. It's long been out of print, but I would love to stumble across it again someday. It's a haunting read that captures grief better than any other romance I ever read and almost certainly worth five full stars!