undifferentiated characters

Only a Kiss by Mary Balogh.  I only got a handful of pages in, and I don't care about the character used to introduce the story.  This series is officially dead to me.

A Poisoned Season by Tasha Alexander.  The male character, carried over from book one, gets a little more personality in this one.  However, there are two supporting characters who are shallow, similar, and whose names start with the same letter.  Why?  OK, I'll try one more.

The Devil's Detective by Simon Kurt Unsworth.  The blog post does not apply to this title.  I didn't get very far, though; I read several great reviews for this, but had started this as I was entering my Jim-Butcher-induced funk and this is darker than what I needed.  Maybe some other time?