Mr. Perfect

Mr. Perfect is a novel by Linda Howard, published by Pocket Books in 2000, and it mixes romantic comedy with a suspense plot.

Jaine Bright and three friends eat together regularly at Ernie's, and one evening the conversation turns to the qualities a perfect man would have. What starts as a joke becomes a detailed checklist, funny and deliberately racy, and the list escapes the table in the way such things do: it spreads through their employer's offices, then along email, and eventually into the wider world, where it makes the four of them briefly notorious. The novel is a comedy about the consequences of being publicly frank about what you want, and then it becomes something else, because the attention the list attracts is not all friendly. Jaine is the one who has to work out who is taking it seriously, while also dealing with a man who does not appear to fit her own specifications at all.

Howard writes brisk, funny suspense with a well-matched couple at the centre, and the invention of the list gives the book a motive that grows naturally out of an ordinary conversation.