Erotic Thriller Review: My Problem with Paul Levine's "Impact"
It's a sexy and funny fast-paced thriller, but the female lead lacks purpose.
I’ve been reading Paul Levine’s Supreme Court thriller Impact (affiliate link), and I’m enjoying it for what it is. It is fast-paced and highly entertaining. It is also a good example of how an author can blend sex, scandal, and mystery. It’s not erotica, but it is erotic. At heart, all mystery and thriller—and maybe all good stories—should include an element of the erotic.
For Impact, the erotic is a pretty large element of it. I’m going to explain the basic outline of the plot so as to let you, the reader, understand my commentary.
A young woman, Lisa, who ran away from home and became a stripper after being abused, has become a clerk for a Supreme Court justice. One of her customers at the strip club, an airline company CEO a couple of decades her senior, encouraged her to study and go for the highest court in the land. He had his own motives for getting his lover in a position to influence the court.
Later, she breaks it off with the boring old CEO and starts dating an exciting (slightly less) old retired Air Force pilot who joins the airline and is piloting a flight that crashes and kills everyone. (Not a spoiler: The flight crashed in the prologue and is the primary plot point mentioned in the jacket copy.)
So there are a lot of tropes, some of which may be annoying or even cringe-inducing to certain readers. The old man saving the stripper, for example. The men who are having relationships and affairs with her and some other women in the book are twenty years or more older than the woman. Yeah, it’s a thriller written by a man. That kind of thing is par for the course.
And there are other aspects that are completely unrealistic, but you let it go because you want to be entertained. Why would a single SCOTUS clerk on a team of three to four who is working for the newest justice on the court wield that much influence over nine justices?
Fine, I’ll suspend my disbelief. What I can’t so easily bring myself to accept is why she wants to work for her ex-lover, Max, the airline CEO, at the risk of jeopardizing her career.
Lisa sincerely praises Max for helping give her the strength at a tough time to believe in herself, become a lawyer, and eventually get hired as a clerk. But she also comments that she finds him unattractive, especially compared to the pilot, Tony, she left him for.
Tony died in a crash that may have been caused, at least in part, by gross negligence committed by Max’s company and by Max himself. Not only did Lisa miss Tony, but she was also close with Tony’s son, whom she had babysat; Tony’s son was working to expose Max’s airline while Lisa was working with Max to protect it.
Other complications come up later in the book that would force Lisa to continue down the path she started on. But she was already plotting to help Max before any of that happened.
From Chapter 1:
Max had been wonderful. If it weren’t for him, where would she be now? But what he had given her—the education, the belief in herself—had changed her.
The narrator (often through Lisa’s POV) describes how Lisa feels indebted to Max. Max seems to view the relationship largely in transactional terms, too.
Even the sex is kind of presented transactionally—as something Lisa “owed” the older man for all the money he spent on her and the guidance he gave.
Even the sex is kind of presented transactionally—as something Lisa “owed” the older man for all the money he spent on her and guidance he gave.
He had supported her, nurtured her, helped her grow into an adult. In return, she had been his lover for most of the past decade.
Perhaps I’m putting too much emphasis on “in return,” but there’s at least one way of reading it that says Lisa had sex with the man as some kind of obligation for his benevolence. Did she not make love to him to gain pleasure? But then, in basic men’s writing about sex, female pleasure is ignored, sometimes even thought to be nonexistent.
But let’s play with that idea that it was transactional for a minute. There certainly are relationships between wealthy older men and hot young women that are transactional. Then, if their relationship was one of those, why, again, does Lisa still feel indebted to Max to go along with his plot to shield his company? She would have “paid” the debt with her body.
Oh, she says she still feels for him some, and she says she is unsure of herself at times. So she still has some need for guidance, which could make her vulnerable to her past and once-again older lover’s influence.
But I felt the justification was too little—that Lisa lacked a believable motivation that a real person would have. Her motivation as a character was more to keep the plot of the book moving.
I didn’t mean this as a takedown of Paul Levine or his book. Lisa is generally a strong and sassy lead female character. She “read Dostoevsky in the dressing room between sets, picked up her high school degree in night school, and was about to enroll in community college” before she even met Max. But Max was the one who “suggested Berkeley instead.” And Max praised her for being “smarter than me.”
So even the morally reproachable old man isn’t a completely hatable character. The woman isn’t her puppet.
The banter between the Supreme Court justices is funny. The characters are characters. The way Levine easily works sexual tension into scenes and carries it over across scenes until it reaches its climax chapters later is well done.
So take a look if it sounds interesting to you: Impact (affiliate link). It’s available on Kindle Unlimited for free download, as are my erotic novellas. The links to Impact in this article are affiliate links. I will earn a commission for any sale, and it helps support my writing.