Leaving Lonely Town. What a great title. The cover is striking and eyecatching too. Let’s check out the blurb on the back – ooh looks like a good one. Now to read it.

Dear readers, there are some books I pick up and don’t put down till the last page. This was not one of them. I picked it up and put it down so many times I lost count of the number. It took me a very long time to read it, I was never engaged by it, and there simply too many problems.

Sable Barclay is a forensic scientist. One day while doing a test on a strand of hair from a corpse that might me that of the long lost Langtry baby, she notices some uncanny similarities between this child’s history and her own, including birth date and first name. You see, Sable was adopted and knows nothing about her birth parents. So she takes a trip to the Langtry ranch, and when she sees matriarch Faith Langtry, she knows. Why? They have the same eyes. Sable then runs away.

When the Langtry foreman, Culley Blackwolf comes to Sable to persuade her to come back, she does. Sable stays with Culley and hangs around the fringes of the Langtry ranch. She knows Faith has to be her mother, (they have the same eyes), but since she looks nothing like Jacob Langtry, he can’t be her father. How does she know? She just does.

There are lots of secrets in the Langtry family. Culley has a past, Faith has a past, there’s a secondary romance between Sable’s friend Eden (with a past) and Roark Langtry who has – yep, a past – and there are lots of entries from Cleopatra Langtry’s diary that yield clues about (what else?) the past.

Leaving Lonely Town was very, very slow going, particularly in the beginning. There were times when I found myself in the middle of the reading equivalent of highway hypnosis. Pages had passed but I had no memory of what had happened. Then I’d go back and re-read, only to discover nothing had happened. So I would put the book down and pick it up later, hoping that it would get moving – it never did.

Then there are the charcters, who behaved in ways that made me scratch my head in wonder, or want to shake them, or step into the book and ask why there were behaving in such an annoying manner. At one point Culley lusts after Sable even though he thinks she may be his half sister. Essence of ick! So I would put the book down and pick it up later in the hope that they would begin to behave better.

Then there’s the writing style, which was rambling and awkward in spots. I’d read sentences, wonder what they meant, and then I would put the book down and pick it up later and hope that the magic editor fairy would fix it as it reposed in my purse.

Leaving Lonely Town is the sequel to It Happened at Midnight. From what I understand, the kidnapping of the Langtry baby and the mystery of her parentage is explained in the earlier title, although given its own horrendous review, I can’t say readers would benefit from reading the earlier title before reading this one. Better all around to skip both.