Indigo Moon has a very promising beginning that sadly devolves into a clichéd and melodramatic ending. Rebeka Randall needs to hire a gunslinger and guide to help break her brother out of prison and escape the town where he’s scheduled to hang the next morning. Unfortunately, she turns to Chase Hawken, who unbeknownst to her was instrumental in bringing her brother to justice in the first place. Chase wants to see Nathan and his gang hang for the bank robbery they committed because he believes they also raped and killed his wife two years before. He has no desire to help Rebeka until he sees her without a veil on and realizes she is the spitting image of his late wife. Coerced at gunpoint into helping her and her cohorts, he won’t rest until he discovers the truth about her past, even if that means helping the Lawton gang escape prison.

I thought this beginning was fascinating. Instead of having the hero fall in lust at first sight regardless of the heroine’s character or past, the image is of a tormented man chasing a ghost. It makes sense that he can’t get her out of his mind. Requiring Chase to aid men he believes murdered his wife also heightens the tension. If Rebeka wasn’t in the picture, he would rather die than help them, but once he sees her, he is chained by indecision.

Unfortunately for Rebeka, in her efforts to save her brother she has allied herself with some of his untrustworthy gang members. She slowly begins to realize that they don’t have her best interests at heart.

Until Rebeka, Chase, and Nathan managed to escape from the rest of the gang, I was hooked, but at that point Rebeka became an irritating character. She has no trouble trusting any number of untrustworthy outlaws, but when it’s time to trust Chase, she refuses – again and again to a frustrating degree. It’s bad enough that she can’t seem to see that he’s got “romance hero” plastered all over his hunky chest, but it’s worse that she is quick to trust all the wrong people. Even after he has proven himself several times over, Rebeka not only refuses to place her trust in him, she betrays him once too often. If I were Chase, eventually I would have killed her regardless of who she looked like.

Other oddities began to be bothersome as well. Several of the sexual encounters don’t make much sense. Despite not trusting Chase, Rebeka suddenly decides to sleep with him after he comes back to their hotel room drunk. And when Rebeka finally does start to trust Chase, he inexplicably starts to get cold feet. The final climax was confusing; I couldn’t figure out how the right people stayed alive and the bad people ended up dead. And the backstory which is supposed to explain why Rebeka looks so much like Chase’s dead wife is very poorly explained.

All of these problems were made even more disappointing because I liked the beginning so much. I even wrote to another AAR reviewer when I was halfway done with the book wanting to share my excitement about the great book I was reading. And then it all just tanked and I was really in mourning over the great book that was lost. Despite the plotting and character problems the overall quality of writing remained pretty good. The story moved along at a good pace and included a number of interesting three-dimensional characters. It wasn’t immediately clear who the ultimate villain was going to be. Some of the supporting characters walked the line between good and evil, making them better developed characters and more plausible suspects. However, as the story approached the end, the identity of the real bad guy is telegraphed very clearly, and so the mystery aspect is lost. And once the all-around bad guy is identified, the character is suddenly revealed to be a caricature of evil, although before there had been some shades of gray. Consequently the ending was both disappointing and derivative, and ultimately the book is not one I can recommend without serious reservations, which is a real pity given its promising beginning.