It's an improvement on the last one of Mathewson's I read, in that the two main characters aren't completely awful people, although the hero certainly tries. Claiming, of his family, that "we don't humiliate women" and then stripping his girlfriend's swimsuit off in the hotel pool so she has to walk back to her room naked is the action of a jerk who thinks humiliating his girlfriend is funny and my mind is not changing on that. That I can call him "not completely awful" even so is a tribute to just how terrible the hero was in said last book.

It's also irritating in a number of other places. The whole food thing that keeps going on in these books, where they're all banned from restaurants for acting like spoilt brats, is not funny or entertaining in the slightest. It just makes me think they're spoilt brats, and the kid that pops up briefly in this volume is clearly being raised in the same ill-mannered way. The one thing I did like here is that Jodi, when medicated (and it seems she's medicated for most of the book, because even after only two of them I can tell when Mathewson hits on a character trait she hammers it to death) acts in exactly the same way towards the Bradford family as that idiot family acts towards others - thoughtless, combative, self-centred, and horrifyingly annoying - and they hate it. They don't realise the parallels, of course, but they hate it all the same so I got some amusement out of that. Also, why do these people never talk to each other? Perhaps if they stopped stuffing their faces for two minutes together, they wouldn't have so many misunderstandings.

Finally: "vile" and "vial" are not the same things. Once is a typo, twice is not knowing the difference. (This doesn't irritate me as much as the conscience/conscious confusion, which Mathewson is absolutely not guilty of, but if you read as much fantasy as I do the vile/vial thing comes up ridiculously often and I hate it.)