Julie Garwood - Murder List

Hotel heiress Regan Hamilton Madison is flirting with danger. She agrees to help a journalist friend expose Dr. Lawrence Shields, a shady self-help guru who may have been responsible for the death of one of his vulnerable devotees. Hoping to find some damning evidence, Regan attends a Shields seminar, where the doctor has his guests make a list of the people who hays hurt or angered them over the years and asks: Would your world be a better place if these people ceased to exist? Treating the exercise as a game, Regan plays along.
The experience is all but forgotten--until the first person on Regan's list turns up dead. Shock turns to horror when another name from her list surfaces as a corpse. While brutal murders seem to stalk Regan's every move, her attraction to the detective assigned to protect her grows. As the menace intensifies and a serial killer circles, Regan must discover who has turned her private revenge fantasies into grisly reality.

Comment: This is another story closer to my completion of the books I have by the author. This time it was the story of Alec Buchanan and Regan. Alec is another sibling in the family getting his tale and romance told, after his older brothers.
Alec is finishing his job in the police to start working as an FBI agent. He also wants to get closer to home and his family. It helps that he's getting tired of his job because some people in the force are lazy and don't do the right thing. As a last assignment, he has to act like a body guard to Regan because she's been threatened by some guy and he wants to kill her.
Regan is the youngest of 4 and with three older brothers she feels her position is always being challenged because they are overprotective. One day she attends a conference with two friends to help unmask a con man who deceives women and gets their money. In an exercise they have to write down a murder list with all the people they would erase from their lives in order to make them less important and Regan writes down real names. When the villain gets that list he kills the people in there for her...

I'm reading these books because I have them and I'd feel like wasting the time I put before when I got them, otherwise I'd have given up already. The books are entertaining, but...bland. Tasteless. Neither the romance or the thriller parts are good enough on their own, much less together.
The characters seem fine and have several traits that are appealing and interesting to focus on, but in this book I have to confess I was more interested in the (few) tidbits I'd read about secondary ones. It's just that the main couple was so...boring. Alec had his life planned and then met Regan, he felt attracted to her but I wasn't convinced o his feelings for her. Yeah, he loves her but the author didn't write in a way that I felt passion between them, even when she said so. I just didn't feel it. Regan was more interesting but not enough for me to really care for her. I was more curious to know if her older brother would ever notice her best friend... so no, the romance didn't swept me off my feet.
Then the thriller part was just so...so...boring. I didn't feel curious or even eager to know more about the bad guy or why he acted like that....why? Because it become pretty obvious very soon and after that it was just waiting to see if anything happened. I think the author missed to pinpoint the really main points in the story and gave more focus on things I really wasn't interesting in. Oh well.
I don't even know what else to say about the book, just that although it allowed some entertainment, it surely didn't fulfill my romance needs or even my mystery ones. Let's hope the next one isn't like this.