This latest offering in the Montana Mavericks: Return To Whitehorn series is something of a disappointment. It isn’t a wall-banger, but it’s just kind of blah.

Dr. Carey Hall and J.D. Cade meet at the Hip Hop Cafe, the place to see and be seen in Whitehorn. They feel an instant attraction to each other and act upon it quickly in the time-honored manner. J.D. and Carey seem, at times, like ventriloquist’s dummies who, literally, have words put into their mouths. Obviously, this happens with characters in other books, but the trick is to not make it seem so obvious and forced. Carey, J.D. and their story suffer as a result of the often flippant, trite, and stilted dialogue. Their characters seem flat and their relationship lacks depth and intensity.

Dr. Carey Hall could best be described as Superwoman. She is a doctor who works long hours, but she is also the single parent of a young daughter. Is she tired and impatient, even just once, with her daughter at the end of a long day? Perish the thought! Amazingly enough, she has the energy to cook gourmet meals and be a super-duper mom with endless stores of patience. She also has a very annoying habit of misplacing pairs of gloves (lots of them). The sad part about her glove-losing propensity is that it is supposed to be an endearing character idiosyncracy, but, because of the way it is handled, it comes across as self-absorbed behavior. Apparently, it is supposed to be significant that J.D. is the only person who can ever locate these lost gloves.

J.D. Cade, as it turns out, is not who he says he is. In actuality, he is Wayne Kincaid, long thought dead in Vietnam, and the last of the Kincaid family whose ranch has been the object of escalating sabotage. He reveals his identity when he is the only person able to donate bone marrow for a little girl who turns out to be his half-sister. This revelation does cause a slight rift in his relationship with Carey because she feels betrayed. But this is a romance, after all, and she doesn’t stay angry long.

J.D/Wayne is also, unfortunately, the unwitting victim of “The picture on the front of the book doesn’t match the description in the book” syndrome. The man on the cover looks like the kid from Old Yeller all growed-up but with nary a gray hair or wrinkle. Wayne is forty-three. This incongruity between the picture of a character on a book cover and the description of the character in the book itself, is not that unusual in romantic fiction. It seems like false advertising nonetheless.

The resolution of the suspense that spans all of these Return to Whitehorn books is anticlimactic. For something that had such a big build-up, it fizzled, and the book seemed to fizzle right along with it.