After reading Morris’s Of Mice and Money (which I highly recommend) I was happy to learn that she’d written another novel. Just like Of Mice and Money, I enjoyed Bombed. Not only is it unique and peppered with humor, romance and suspense, but it is also well paced and full of memorable characters.
The main character, Annie, is the front woman in a band and a likeable drug dealer. Yes, that’s right, she’s an LSD distributor. This tidbit leads me to something that I love about Morris’s characters: They are realistically flawed, yet I can’t help but like them! (I even like the half-wits!) Besides Annie, there’s a hunky FBI agent sent to track down Annie’s suppliers (who happen to be retired, fun-loving hippie friends of her deceased parents), Annie’s paranoid uncle and an array of hilarious side characters.
There are a lot of moving parts in this novel, but Morris did an exceptional job of weaving the plot and subplots together. Everything flows nicely from scene to scene, which allowed me to picture what was going on as if I was watching a movie. In fact, I think Bombed would be a hit on the big screen.
One of my favorite things about Morris’s writing is the way she’s able to transition from:
Funny – “Wes had to wonder if his superiors were truly stupid or cunningly pretending to be.”
to
Touchy-feely – “She wasn’t clever in bed the way some women were. She wasn’t trying to impress him with her skills. She wasn’t manipulating him for her pleasure either. She was just fully there, going with him, taking him with her, so that he couldn’t think about impressing her, or manipulating her. He couldn’t think at all.”
to
Serious – “He seemed deliberately to leave a universe of frigid air between them.”
If you enjoy books that break genre barriers, then you are likely to enjoy Bombed. I truly look forward to reading more of Morris’s work!
A big thank you to Winifred Morris for providing me with an advanced reader copy of Bombed.
K. J. Farnham 