As Highland Obsession opens, Alan MacDonald and his new bride Sorcha Stewart are enjoying their wedding night when Sorcha is kidnapped from their home by the Earl of Camdonn. Alan soon discovers that not only has his old friend betrayed him by kidnapping Sorcha, but that Sorcha and Cam were previously lovers.

For his part, Cam is still obsessed with Sorcha and wants her to be his. Though he and Alan have been friends since childhood, his desire for Sorcha overpowers him and he acts without regard for the consequences to the friendship. Not surprisingly, the kidnapping enrages Alan and he is determined to get Sorcha back. When he learns of Sorcha’s previous relationship with Cam, Alan is also angry at Sorcha for letting him believe her to be a virgin.

At its best, Halliday’s (who also writes as Jennifer Haymore) writing style is beautiful and she manages, especially in the second half of the book, to convey great emotional depth. However, the most successful relationship building in the book comes more from Alan and Cam’s tentative moves to rebuilding their friendship rather than from either man’s romance with Sorcha. Sorcha has a few good moments, but she seems more like a toy the men are fighting over rather than a person in her own right. This isn’t because of any inherent weakness in Sorcha – she actually seems like a strong woman – but more a result of the author not focusing on her or getting inside her head to the same degree as with the men. In addition, as Alan works through his anger at Sorcha, he treats her very badly – badly enough that I had trouble forgiving him quite as readily as Sorcha.

As an erotic romance, this novel definitely brims with sex scenes. The best of them are very hot indeed and toward the end, one could see couples growing through them. However, the book also features scenes with too little give and take between the characters, and certainly very little concern shown for Sorcha’s feelings or desires. The manner in which Alan and Cam speak to her and the manner in which they treat her when involved with her made it very difficult to warm up to the idea of either man as a hero or to believe that either man actually loved this woman. The fact that these two in their younger days left no brothel unvisited and apparently slept with a good chunk of the female population in England doesn’t really help either.

The major problem that I had with this book is that it just isn’t very romantic. Unlike other love triangle stories in which one wonders who the man or woman at the center of it will choose, this story didn’t really center on Sorcha. Sure, two men want her, but the main story revolves more around their power struggle and the drawing of boundaries within their friendship than on a love for Sorcha. While perhaps truer to the time period than many of us would want to admit, Sorcha holds little power of her own in the story and in far too many scenes, she appears as an object in a power struggle or a prize to be won.

So, the bottom line? Highland Obsession is written in an engaging style and has some very steamy scenes that I suspect many will enjoy. On the plus side, the author also does a wonderful job of working the historical setting into the story. This isn’t a meaty historical, but the setting isn’t mere wallpaper either. However, while it succeeds as an interesting study of a male friendship, it ultimately just doesn’t work as a romance for me. Both of the main male characters intrigued me, but Sorcha paled somewhat in comparison and the multitude of scenes in which men wanted to possess her without regard for her feelings or mention of love for her left me cold in the end.