Maybe it's just due to the sheer volume of them, but I've come to doubt the happily-ever-after of every Harlequin Presents novel I read. There's always such a large disconnect between what the characters know of each other and who they really are. I grant that this is probably a necessary set-up for 99% of the conflicts out there, but I really don't think that bodes well for their future together, since the HP world is so fraught with malicious, conniving evil-doers bent on splitting couples up. Most of the inflammatory evidence that usually accompany such misunderstandings can be defused with a simple knowledge of someone's character, long enough for a logical, reasonable person to seek further explanations anyway.
But really, I have a lot of issues with HP novels, this being the least of it. The problem with category novels, in this scenario, is that they're like a formula within an already formulaic genre. What might work as a character study confined to a single story, when multiplied by the thousands of books you have in the same line, just seems like a glorification of the alpha-asshole behaviour (and various other stereotypes and double standards) so prevalent in them. Because of that, when I read a HP novel, its similarities (or rather, identifiers) with the other HPs I've read makes it hard for me to isolate my experiences with them from my experience with this single individual work. So yeah, my probability of enjoying a HP novel progressively declines with each successive HP I read. I guess that means I should only take them in small, spaced-out doses : /
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