I can’t remember whether I’ve ever read a romance novel set in Chile. The atypical setting was enough reason for me to snatch up Charlotte Maclay’s romantic adventure Make No Promises, though the promise of a strong heroine and tortured mercenary hero certainly didn’t hurt. This is Maclay’s single-title debut after a long run of series romances, and it’s ultimately a pleasant, inoffensive, and unremarkable read.

Taylor Travini came to Chile in search of her twin brother Terry. When she last spoke with him six weeks earlier, he said he was planning to travel from Santiago to Patagonia to photograph wildlife. She hasn’t heard from him since. But when she arrives at the hotel in Santiago where he last called her from, the manager claims Terry never stayed there. In short order, she finds herself nearly run down in the street, arrested by a police officer who finds a planted bag of cocaine in her backpack, and nearly stabbed to death in her jail cell that night. Obviously, someone wants her to stop asking questions, something Taylor has no intention of doing.

After she manages to escape from her captors, Taylor makes her way to a bar Terry had once mentioned. There she meets Rafe Maguire, a former U.S. Army Ranger training soldiers for the Chilean army. After her pursuers catch up with her in the bar, Rafe helps her get away. He thinks the smartest thing for her to do would be to get out of the country, but when it becomes clear she’s not going to go and something strange is at work, he agrees to help her. Together, they make their way south following the route Terry might have taken, with the bad guys in pursuit.

This book fits squarely in that average category where there’s nothing really wrong with it, but nothing particularly right either. I breezed through it easily enough in just a few hours. The author’s prose is smooth and the story is eminently readable. While the setting isn’t overly detailed, Maclay seems to know it well enough to give the reader a nice sense of the place. At the very least, the locale was consistently interesting.

The plot features enough action to keep things moving along at a decent clip, but on the whole, the story is seldom as exciting or suspenseful as it could be. For one thing, there’s little real tension about Terry’s fate. Is he dead or alive? I have to say I really wasn’t that invested one way or the other. One annoying aspect is that some of the chapters are very short, lasting only a page or a page and a half, making for some choppy transitions.

The main characters are bland. Taylor gets off to a promising start: dodging out of the way of a speeding car that’s trying to run her down, deflecting an attack in her jail cell, and escaping from the corrupt police officers trying to force her out of the country. The initial scenes set up the idea of a tough heroine. But once she meets up with Rafe, he pretty much calls all the shots, despite her token protests that she’s strong too. Her issues with her father, who favors her brother over her, seemed tacked on and underdeveloped. The same can be said of Rafe’s issues. He’s supposedly tortured due to an incident in battle where a number of men under his command died, as well as the deaths of his wife and daughter while he was away at war. This could have been really powerful, but isn’t explored with any depth. As a result, his pain never really came across in an affecting way.

The villains are stock characters, and the romance is underwhelming. The author tells us they have these feelings for each other, but the comments seem perfunctory and those emotions never come across on the page for the reader to experience with them. This is primarily a plot-driven book, and the romantic elements pop up every once in a while, not always in the most believable moments, never really picking up enough steam for the relationship to be all that convincing.

Make No Promises was decent while it lasted, but nothing I expect to retain for long. It held my attention and had its moments, and that’s about it. While I’ve certainly read worse this year, it’s simply an average read.