I am really a tolerant reader. I can forgive a multitude of sins if I have a fairly decent story and some characters with character. I thought Night After Night would be interesting. It has a nice setting – California in 1868, where the heroine is a teacher, the hero is a loner, and they are both bookworms. It took me about half a chapter to get that sinking feeling. This book is a mess.

The plot is fairly simple. Maggie Gleason has come to California to teach. She settles in Shasta Falls, and gets a place in a boarding house where everyone thinks she is a real cutie and predicts that she will be married, and quickly. But Maggie doesn’t want to marry at all, she has a terrible secret in her past.

One of the boarders where Maggie lives is Alex Coburn. Alex is tall, dark, and mysterious. He has the best room in the boarding house and even has his own private bathroom. The other boarders either ignore or are afraid of Alex, but Maggie discovers that like herself, he is a bookworm. Soon they are spending time in the library together where they either insult each other, or bill and coo. Pretty soon Maggie discovers that Alex too has a terrible secret in his past.

Will Alex’ past come back to haunt him, and in a way that will hurt Maggie? Of course. Should Maggie’s horrible secret really prevent her from marrying? Of course not, and therein lies problem number one – when a Big Secret is nothing but a house of cards, it’s hard to buy into anything else the author is trying to sell in her book.

Here are some of the problems I had with Night After Night:

• Alex and Maggie were pure pasteboard. I felt nothing toward them, nothing at all, and their actions felt artificial. Instead of feeling empathy or anger or laughter or any other emotion, all I felt was manipulated.

• The book’s secondary characters were annoying and/or disappearing. Maggie’s friend, June, also the sheriff’s wife, was a giggly, wiggly, silly woman who acted more like a pre-pubescent than an adult. There was also a family of boys who were some of Maggie’s students, whose father was supposed to be beating them. Maggie goes to visit them, takes them a pie, the father says she is nice and then the family disappears.

• At one point, Maggie and Alex play chess. She is fixated on protecting her queen, and as the game progresses, Maggie thinks she’ll let him take the king, as long as she can keep her queen safe. Hello? The point of chess is to capture the king. To top it off, the day after the chess match, she gives a lesson in chess to her students. I hope they weren’t listening to her that day.

• And about her lessons…Maggie’s students are as big a bunch of matchmakers as the adults. She seems to spend more time answering their questions about her kissing practices than teaching them anything, highly unlikely in California in 1868.

• But here is the biggest problem with the book. The villain never shows up so we can see him. Alex tells Maggie about the dastardly fellow and what he did to Alex, but when the the dastard comes into town, he does his dastardly deed offstage, leaving a note behind. And when Alex goes after him, he also does so offstage, then returns to tell Maggie all about it. Hello? What’s that about showing, not telling as an important rule in the writing of fiction?

There was nothing to enjoy about this book. I’ve read my share of good/bad books where I could at least have some cheesy fun with them, but this book was beyond help. It needed resuscitation, transfusion, and surgery. It needed a genius editor. It needed massive rewriting. It needed – well, it needed to be pitched out and started over again.