I'm in No Mood for Love

In this uninspired follow up to Sex, Lies and Online Dating, Gibson layers cliche upon cliche and tops her confection with a heavy frosting of exposition. The result is a tale more sickly than sweet, filled with characters as lively as the figurines atop a wedding cake. The heroine, romance writer Clare Wingate, is your typical good girl who's itching to go bad, and globe-trotting reporter Sebastian Vaughan, a man's man who hates to see a woman cry (almost as much as he hates shopping), is the one person who can draw out her naughty side. Readers may detect a whiff of romantic tension after a less-than-shocking revelation-involving Clare's fiance Lonny, who's got a thing for pastels and a skill for flower arranging-leads a distraught Clare to a drunken encounter with Sebastian. But once Lonny is out of the picture, and commitment-phobic Sebastian agrees to become Clare's friend-with-benefits, the story spins its wheels waiting for Sebastian to realize his true feelings for Clare.