Kristin Gabriel won two RITAs for her romantic comedies and I really enjoyed some of her stories for the Harlequin Duets line. Sadly, her humor is sorely missing from Strangers in the Night, a book that really could have used it. The latest edition in Harlequin Temptation’s The Wrong Bed series, it has an interesting premise, but the hero is bland and the heroine’s foolish choices seriously weaken the story. 

Denver librarian Josie Sinclair always played it safe, until she decides one night to take a risk and seduce her boyfriend, Adam Delaney. Using the key he gave her, she sneaks into his apartment, slips into racy lingerie, and climbs into bed with him. Terrific sex ensues. But when she wakes up the next morning, she finds herself in bed with a stranger.

When Adam Delaney was roused in the middle of a night by a woman in his bed, his booze-addled mind assumed she was someone he’d picked up in a bar at his homecoming celebration the night before. But not only does he not know her, she doesn’t know him. He’s definitely not the Adam Delaney she’s been dating. The globetrotting photographer just returned to Colorado from a three-month shoot abroad, and it looks like someone else has been using his apartment and his name while he was gone. Adam and Josie both want to find the counterfeit Adam Delaney for different reasons, and they need each other to do it.

It’s an interesting idea. I like impostor plots and this is one of the better variations on the “wronge bed” theme I’ve seen in a while. Josie’s a little stereotypical – in romancespeak, of course, where the equation is prim and proper repressed spinster equals librarian, but not in such an overblown way that it’s annoying – though some of my AAR colleagues who are librarians may be less tolerant. She has an interesting back story, and I liked the hero’s unusual career. So far, this book sounded like a lot of fun. But despite Josie and Adam’s respective histories, they were pretty bland characters.

Since they were so bland, it’s probably no surprise that the romance is a little lifeless as a result. Oh, there are a few moments that spark. The opening scenes are pretty good. Josie hosts a book group that discusses classic English literature, and there are some interesting sections where the characters use Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights to comment on their own unfolding relationship. But while the story was readable and has a nice ending, the characters don’t have all that much chemistry. The romance developed in such a lackluster way that my reaction when Josie realized she was in love with the real Adam was, “Huh. Really? Why?”

The mystery had the potential to be more interesting, except that it’s solved way too soon and the rest of the story unfolds in an irritating manner. Midway through the book Josie makes a stupid choice that drives the rest of the story. The author tries to justify the decision by using Josie’s past as motivation, but anyway you look at it, what she decides to do is simply idiotic. I lost all patience with her, and the way her choice drags out for the rest of the book really made this part of the story less enjoyable. The author tells us, “Josie still wasn’t convinced she’d made the right decision.” That’s because she didn’t.

Strangers in the Night is a slightly less than average series romance: bland, inoffensive and uninvolving, with a particularly foolish heroine. It’s not bad. It’s blah. It really could have used the spark of the author’s better books, like Annie Get Your Groom (whose hero shows up here briefly) and The Bachelor Trap. I can recommend those books, but not this one.