Sherry Lewis tries to do a difficult thing in Only Time Will Tell. She starts out with two deeply flawed characters, and tries to show how their love strengthens them and makes them both better people. The problem is that they are both initially so unlikable that it’s really hard to care whether or not they get their HEA ending.

Courtney Moss is a woman whose life has been one long series of disappointments. She has not learned how to deal with it gracefully. She’s in Virginia City, Montana to set her recently-deceased grandmother’s affairs in order. In grandma’s attic she finds a beautiful ball gown which, at the urging of her friend, she wears to the city’s annual Victorian Ball. Before you can say “bright pulsing light,” she’s sent back in time to 1864, when Virginia City was a gold rush boom town teeming with prospectors, gamblers, prostitutes, and ne’er-do-wells of every description.

Courtney is taken under the wing of a mysterious man named Heath Sullivan. Heath isn’t much more savory than the rest of the locals. Due to a tragedy in his past that still gives him nightmares, Heath has spent the last several years drowning his sorrows in whiskey and hookers (and isn’t that attractive). Driven by some buried gentlemanly instinct, though, he wants to see that Courtney is safe before he leaves town.

Courtney tells him that she’s from the future. Evidently a fan of Quantum Leap, she believes that she’s been sent back in time for a purpose, and that when she solves some problem she will zap back home. She decides that Heath is the thing she’s meant to fix. Of course, Heath doesn’t want to talk about his problems. They fall into a pattern of bickering: she harries him to tell her about his past and he is rude and obnoxious in response.

I didn’t like these characters much and didn’t feel any of the tension that was supposed to be building between them as they quarreled. They are both prey to self-pity, a truly unappealing quality. Heath spends a lot of time thinking things like, “His own weakness repulsed him. Made him long for the oblivion that would only come at the bottom of a bottle.” There are lots guilt-ridden heroes out there, but we usually don’t get all the pathetic details of their alcohol-laden lives. Not so with Heath – we first meet him waking up, hung-over and broke, in a prostitute’s bedroom. We soon see him slither down to the bar and beg for another drink. Yuck. Let me assure you that this is not the story of Heath’s struggle with alcoholism. He can take it or leave it – but in the early chapters of this book he always wants to take it.

Courtney, by way of contrast, is starchy, whiny, abrasive, and sometimes completely illogical. She spends so much time dwelling upon all the bad things that have happened to her that I became very tired of her very quickly. Her belief that she will go home if she fixes problems lends her an unattractive tendency to assume she knows what’s best for people. And if I suddenly found myself in a frontier boom town and had a guy offering to teach me to shoot to protect myself, I’d say thank you and learn. But Courtney hates guns and will never, ever, under any circumstances touch one. That’s just dumb.

Things do get better. Heath cleans up his act and talks to Courtney about his past. Courtney learns to live in the nineteenth century. The attraction between them grows and they fall in love, and their love redeems them. Classic stuff, but I just didn’t care. Though they became nicer, they didn’t become more interesting.

We spend almost as much time on a secondary romance as we do with Courtney and Heath. Unfortunately, the secondary romance is equally uninteresting. I was not compelled by any of the secondary characters, and one of them, the wise old miner, was downright annoying.

Only Time Will Tell left me cold. The setting is reasonably interesting, and the writing is competent. But the characters were hard to care about and their interactions with each other just didn’t grab me. If you like Westerns and time-travel you could certainly find worse books than this. All I can say is that I felt no compelling reason to continue turning the pages, and if I hadn’t been assigned this book I would probably have put it down in favor of something else.