Like a kid in a candy store, author Victoria Bylin can’t stop herself from using every simile and metaphor she has ever encountered, and her story – a simple romance between a troubled man and a gentle, brave woman – gets bogged down in her narrative. Of Men And Angels has the kernel of a compelling romance, but Bylin’s writing is as corny as an old-fashioned Saturday matinee.

Alexandra Merritt is making the perilous journey from Philadelphia to the Western Colorado Plateau. Her father is ill, and although they have been faithful correspondents, she has not seen him in five years, nor been home to Colorado in ten. Her coach gets swept up in a tremendous rainstorm, leaving Alexandra and a very pregnant woman as the sole survivors. Alex helps the woman through childbirth, and is further assisted when Jake Malone arrives on the scene.

Jake is just coming off a bender, and he doesn’t feel much like helping people at the best of times, which this decidedly is not. Still, even though he has spent his life drinking, chasing women and making his older half-brother’s life difficult, Jake is struck by Alex’s bravery and helps her despite his natural inclination to leave her to her own devices. Jake winds up escorting Alex and her entourage to her father’s peach ranch.

Because Alex’s father is ill, Jake is hired to pick the peaches for this year’s harvest and, not surprisingly, Alex is immediately attracted to the tall, dark, dangerous stranger. But Alex is engaged to a man back in Philadelphia with whom she shares mutual respect, rather than love. Much older than Alex and the widower of her best friend, the two work together for a foundation that helps orphans. Since she is 27 and hasn’t yet found anyone to her liking, Alex is reconciled to living without romance.

Jake doesn’t know what to make of Alex. He calls her an “angel” and appreciates her goodness, even as he relishes his own badness. He kisses her (just after he throws up, yuk!), then immediately regrets the transgression. And while he tries to do the honorable thing by leaving her alone, at the same time he finds himself growing fonder of her parents. He decides to quit drinking and eventually becoming a better person under Alex’s influence. Jake is the classic reformed bad boy, with the roots of his behavior lying in his past.

Alex is alternately brave, strong, smart, sensitive, gentle, loving, confused, and weak-kneed. She is also beautiful and aware of her own shortcomings. Jake is brave, strong, smart, commanding, sexy and surprisingly gentle. The two are stereotypes whose individual characteristics – those things that make them different from all those other similar “characters” – are not well-defined. Author Bylin keeps using her metaphors and similes to create a sense of character, but it only serves to point up the stereotypical nature of the story. Picking a sentence at random will demonstrate her heavy-handed writing: “Jake wasn’t enough of a gentleman to feel honor-bound to stay, but he was enough of a rebel to pick a fight.”

Of Men And Angels works to some degree as a morality romance, since the morality is not as heavy-handed as Bylin’s narrative style. To her credit, the flavor of the period is well-done, but as the characters are two-dimensional and the storyline offers nothing new, the book is ultimately a cookie-cutter disappointment. All of which makes for book that’s not only stale but hard to read.