ORIGINAL SINNER

A young woman on the run from an abusive family falls in love with Lucifer.

The Originals are seven fallen angels, each representing one of the Seven Deadly Sins, who were cast out of heaven. Now Lucifer and his six siblings run New York, and Lucifer—pride—is the most elusive, despite being the CEO of Apollyon, a multinational conglomerate. Charlotte Bellefleur has recently escaped her fundamentalist Christian family in Topeka, Kansas, and fled to New York, landing an internship in the public relations department of Apollyon. When a body is found murdered in a club owned by one of the Originals, gossip and speculation targets Lucifer as the murderer. Apollyon’s PR wing has just begun to quell the rumors when someone breaks into Charlotte’s office and sends a private document she wrote about the situation to the press. Lucifer forces Charlotte into a fake engagement to distract the press and the two engage in a torrid affair. Meanwhile, Charlotte is receiving threatening text messages that she fears are coming from the family she left behind in Kansas. The start of a new series, Ballenger’s novel is a mishmash of tired romance tropes and archetypes. Lucifer reads as an immortal Christian Grey, a bland bad boy complete with a sex-dungeon playroom. He finds the prim, mousy Charlotte fascinating because she’s one of the few people who will stand up to him, and even though he can read the dark thoughts in most human minds, Charlotte’s is mysteriously closed to him. The ostentatious lifestyles of the Originals are valorized as more honest than the evil excesses of the fundamentalist church led by Charlotte’s father, while Lucifer is just a sad guy with a daddy complex looking for love.

Too shallow to be shocking.