Rating: 3.5 stars
Genre: Western Historical Romance
Recommended for: Fans of the genre
Well, this book is an example of how a talented author can take a good book and ruin it by a couple of bad plot twists and decisions. She wrote a beautiful, emotional and heartwarming story of two lonely people healing each other for the first half, and had to turn it into a wallbanger in the second part, by making the heroine take one wrong decision after the other.
Kate Slade is running away from her outlaw husband, but first she has a promise to keep to a dead man. To do so, she must go to Fatal Bluff but she has no money at all. Thus, when she's mistaken for a mail-order bride, she goes along with the ruse and ends up being the housekeeper for the town's sheriff. The sheriff, who also happens to be the brother of the man who was shot saving her life and to whom she has promised to deliver a message. And that same sheriff, who's dead set on getting revenge for his brother's death by killing her outlaw husband.
I could see why Kate kept her mouth shut from revealing the truth in the first part. She didn't really know Connor and he obviously kept his own secrets. Their day-to-day life, along with little Jenny, the dead brother's silent girl became alive with vivid descriptions of the countryside, the small town of Fatal Bluff, its memorable citizens and Connor's and Kate's very real attraction. I could see them both fighting it, each one for his own reasons, and still the flame between them burned stronger every day.
And just when the book was so good I couldn't put it down, revelations about Kate's past started springing out. It soon became obvious that she was lying to Connor and she knew he knew it. On top of that, her husband seems to be closing on her tracks. And how did Kate handle all these threats? By staying put, like an elephant trying to hide behind a bamboo tree and hoping for the best. If that's not running straight into TSTL territory, I don't know what it is. I have to say, beautiful writing or not, I just couldn't care for the book or the heroine from that point on. Not when she got dozens of opportunities to speak the truth and squandered every single one of them.
So, it's 5 for the first half and a mere 2 for the second, thus an average of 3.5 stars. It's a fast and easy to read book, that I wished had not raised my expectations so high in the first part; perhaps then, I wouldn't have felt so let down.
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