I’m no big fan of time-travels, but Destined to Love managed to make the mechanics of the leap through time believable. Unfortunately, the rest of the tale suffered from a slew of coincidences that kept me from truly enjoying it.

Dr. Josie Reed is swept back from her single life in 1994 to meet the man she is destined to love in New Mexico of 1881. She walks in on the local doctor as he is bringing out a saw to cut off the man’s infected leg. The man is Kurtis Mitchell, a half-breed believed to be a member of Billy the Kid’s outlaw band, a man who faces a noose if he survives his injuries. After Josie removes Kurtis’ manacles, he promptly kidnaps her and brings her to his Apache mother’s village.

Josie wishes to return to her own time and Kurtis wants to keep infiltrating the outlaw gang to extract his brother Kyle from their clutches. Josie and Kurtis go their separate ways, but Josie turns back when the little lady that brought her into 1881 informs her that Kurtis faces injury and death.

Josie is a heroine with a serious intimacy problem, the reason for which was revealed gradually. As for her abilities as a doctor, I have some reservations, but generally she managed just fine. Kurtis, on the other hand, is a little too good to be true. He is a hunk, a supportive brother, and an excellent lover to such a degree that I could see why fate fixed him up with a woman from the future. He clearly needed a 1990’s woman, since he’s a prime hero of the 1990’s himself.

In Destined to Love, the travel-through-time is effected by a well-meaning little lady dressed in gray. I found this direct approach refreshing. At the very least, the time-traveler is given a reason for the transfer. Having someone to gripe at when things don’t work out is an added bonus.

Josie conveniently managed to bring her medical bag with her from our time. What amazed me was that its contents not only corresponded to her needs, but also that the supplies, providently enough, did not run out until her patients were healed. If there had been need of major surgery, would Josie’s bag have acted like the carpetbag in the Disney movie Mary Poppins, the bag which contained a lamp and a hat stand?

It is clear that Josie Reed is a wonderful pediatrician, but I sincerely hope her comment about staying away from chickens to avoid chicken pox was intended as a bad joke. Science freak that I am, I had a tough time suspending disbelief in her skills as an MD for the rest of the book.

Both Kurtis’ brother and sister, Kyle and Jess, are nice people, but I have the feeling their stories are told in other novels. They weren’t told in depth here, and I would have appreciated a bit more background to make the entire Mitchell family come alive.

While the time-travel aspects of Destined to Love are better than most time-travels I’ve read, there are just too many annoyances to make the whole book more than an average read for me. Maybe it would have worked better in conjunction with other books about the Mitchell family.