Brazen

I’m sorry to report that Alyssa Milano does not forego her long-standing ‘no nudity clause’ in Brazen — and I’m more sorry for her than for me (after all, I’ve seen Embrace of the Vampire), because that’s about the only thing that could save this mess. Milano is Grace Miller, authoress of thriller novels. Here is an excerpt from her most recent masterpiece, titled Brazen Virtue:

"She did not expect to die that night. Sara Bowman was precise in everything, and dying was not on her agenda. She had no enemies that she knew of. In general, his life was quite ordinary. Yet there she was, lying in a pool of her own blood. The manner of her death violent, even deranged. Who would want to kill the ordinary Sara Bowman? And then it dawned on her. What if she wasn’t ordinary? What if she had a secret life?"

It would have to be a very secret secret life indeed if not even “Sarah” herself was aware of it. It turns out that Brazen is based on a novel also called Brazen Virtue by Nora Roberts; I’m not familiar with her work, but I wouldn’t be surprised if her books opened with the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night” or some variation thereof.

In addition to a purveyor of purple prose, Grace is a dispenser of clumsy exposition, like when she tells her sister Kathleen (Emilie Ullerup) that “Last I heard you were addicted to pills and you abandoned your son.” Something tells me this is not news to Kathleen, who is an English teacher at an upper-class boys’ high school: “Next week’s essay will be on Hamlet. How would Hamlet feel in our digital age?

I’m pretty sure Ethan Hawke already answered this question, and the answer wasn’t very compelling (besides, a better question would be how would Romeo feel in the digital age, considering that a simple SMS would have saved him a lot of trouble).

Would you believe that Kathleen herself just happens to have a double life of her own? Well, she does; her alter ego is Desiree, a web cam dominatrix. Wait, what? I guess all her...