Never Walk Alone is nothing so much as it is quite a let down. After all, this is the sequel to Taming the Night, a very enjoyable read. Unfortunately, the characters in this book seem all to have come from Central Casting, and the serious conflicts Riggs raised all seemed to melt away for no reason.

Rhys Hazard, once known as Mick Sullivan, is a phoenix – he has raised himself from the ashes. When he was a 17-year-old boy, he was involved in a car-bus crash that left three dead and resulted in his serving a jail term. His friends, his community, and his family all turned against him. No one believed that the bus he hit ran a red light. Consequently he’s never returned to Osuma, Washington. Not in 22 years. But when he hears that the town was almost financially wiped out after a terrible flood, he decides to open up a new northwest market for his successful trucking company, North Star. He doesn’t plan on getting personally involved until his right hand man gets into a car crash and he has no choice but to head the venture himself.

Brina Sullivan was the sister of one of the boys killed in the crash. She grew up to marry Rhys’s half-brother, John, and had two kids with him. Unfortunately, John revealed his true colors when he dumped her for an aerobics instructor. Since the divorce, Brina has opened her own B&B, but times got very tough in Osuma after a flood swept through, and she’s barely hanging on. When Rhys arrives on her doorstep with the news that he will be her guest at least temporarily, Brina doesn’t know what to think. She finds Rhys attractive, but she can’t forget her brother. And, yet, it looks very much like Rhys is a changed man and has more than served his sentence. Are forgiveness – and love – possible with her brother’s murderer?

The central problem of this book is that most of the conflicts Riggs develop peter out into nothing. Either they are resolved too fast or not resolved at all. And what’s left just isn’t very interesting. Very little beats the Dead Brother Conflict for emotion wrenching potential. I mean, if someone killed my sister, even accidentally, I really don’t know if I’d be able to “get over it.” But Brina gets the hots for Rhys every time she sees him, despite the death hovering between them. And they never truly sit down and have The Talk – you know, the one where he tells her in detail what he thinks happened and she, in return, talks about the emotional fallout from the accident. It’s like one moment their relationship has all of these barriers and hurdles, and the next minute the open road stretches before them.

A similar thing happens with the secondary romance between Rhys’s father J.T. and his long ago flame, Lucy. Riggs tells us that after something went wrong between them, J.T. dumped her and married his incredibly bitchy and pretentious wife, Marceline. Why he made this decision is never revealed. This is terribly disappointing; both the characters are interesting and it’s a great mystery why he married Marceline. Instead we see J.T.’s sappy courting gestures and hear plenty of his “charming” Irish brogue-isms. J.T.’s refusal to believe in his son’s innocence is also never explained either. Yet, by book’s end, they are reunited and the familiar bond is renewed.

Problems with characterization abound. John, Brina’s ex, is so slimy, manipulative, and out of control that it’s completely inexplicable 1) why Brina married him in the first place since she’d know him for years and presumably had time to witness his character flaws and 2) why she chose to have children with him or, in fact, stay married to him at all. Brina is such a he-done-me-wrong ex-wife; Sherri, John’s new honey, is such a tarty other-woman; and Rhys is such a tormented hero. Nothing is new here. Add in the precocious child (Marcy) and the book begins to take on the aspect of a paint-by-numbers piece. Of course, the kids have emotional problems that only a new daddy type can solve, and, of course, Rhys is a better father to his never-seen- before niece and nephew than John ever was.

A final, and personal, nitpick was the constant lust-think going on between Brina and Rhys. Okay, okay, I get it. They’re attracted to each other. It’s not necessary for Rhys to think over and over and over and over how much he loves looking at Brina’s hot fanny in her tight jeans. Once is enough.

The book picked up in its last third because the fairly unnecessary suspense sub-plot kicked in right about then. Usually suspense sub-plots are my least favorite part of a romance, but by then I was so tired of Rhys and Brina’s mental petting and the sheer tediousness of this second chance story that I was up for some action. I’m not sure if that’s much of an endorsement, but there you have it.

Never Walk Alone took me well over a week to read and I had a whole holiday weekend to finish it. I kept putting it down to do things like clean my toilets and fold laundry. I wish I could recommend this book since I so enjoyed my last visit to Osuma, Washington, but this offering is simply too flawed to like.