CADBURY

Cadbury is an agent for the British Secret Service

More specifically, she is an undercover agent and that term fits in several manners. It is her job to seduce, distract, and deflect targets of investigation, using every sexual ability or maneuver at her disposal.

Her origins are sparse to non-existent. The head of the division of the Service for which she works is a despicable man named Loyola for whom the words despicable and disgusting are just the beginning. He wanted a seductress to go into the worst places on earth, willing to do anything she had to to get the job done. He turned to one of his key agents, a man namved Valerian, to find such a woman.

She had to be beautiful, fairly young, well-versed in love making, and utterly without inhibitions. She also had to be able to have sex with someone and then kill or betray them without batting an eye. The woman that he found was renamed Cadbury. This young woman was raised without a mother and her father died when she was just becoming a teenager, leaving her feeling terribly abandoned and opening up the way just a few years later for recruitment by Valerian. She is trained to fight and love, kill and seduce, all without emotion while pretending any number of emotions. Either the training was superb or Cadbury was already open to the idea or both. Either way, the woman can dispatch a man or a woman with hardly a blink and she is quite addicted to sex.

These three novels, written by a noted Scottish poet and novelist, are incredibly intense in their depictions of sex, such that they are marked as adult-only by some booksellers, as they should be. The first two are also told in an almost poetic style, without normal quotations and with considerable free verse thoughts flowing in and around descriptions of scenes which makes following the activity difficult and taking some getting used to. The third book is more traditional but still confusing and definitely still filled with bizarre sexual activities.

I didn't like the style of writing. Although it was refreshingly different for a short while, it got old quickly. Not knowing whether a statement was spoken to another character or just thought by the owner caused me to have to reread passages on too many occasions. It destroyed the flow of the books.

I didn't like the characters, all of whom have little or no morals such that it was hard to find a difference between good guys and bad guys. There is nothing to make the reader like Cadbury. There is every reason to hate her boss, Loyola. Every other character is loathesome enough to make you not care if they live or die. There is absolutely nobody of any redeeiming nature.

I didn't like the plots which were shallow or the sex which was as cold and uninviting as a lousy porn movie. The cover of the third book, depicting a man and woman in swim clothes on a blanket in the outdoors looks like a romantic, steamy interlude. You'll find nothing romantic and little truly steamy inside the covers.

You can probably tell that I dislike this series because I grade it a "C-". In truth, I hate this series and would give it my lowest "D-" except that there are brief episodes of very good writing. Unfortunately, they are too few and too brief to make me want to ever read another Cadbury book.

And one final offense, though the author did not cause this. In my mind for some time I got Cadbury mixed up with Cody and I gave Cody a low grade when it didn't deserve it. I know that was my fault but I still blame Cadbury. That's how much I dislike her and the series.