Ann Maxwell (aka Elizabeth Lowell) knows how to hook her reader. In The Secret Sisters she drops the reader right into the center of high powered, archeological intrigue, peopling her novel with larger than life characters who experience larger than life emotions. But more often than not her writing bubbles well over the top. There are those moments where the dialogue is so banal or cutesy as to make the reader cringe, those spots where the sudden plot twist just seems too impossible or too easily resolved, and those places where a given character’s reaction is just too strange to be believed. But the overall momentum of the story tends to help gloss these glitches, and it wasn’t until the I finished reading the book that I began to feel as though I’d just eaten too much junk food.

Christy McKenna is a New York’s “smartest fashion writer.” Her sister, Jo Jo, is the world’s most famous fashion model. Despite their two prominent positions in what must be a somewhat small-world industry, they have not seen one another in twelve years because of a family feud that is never fully explained. However, when Jo Jo calls Christy out of the blue to ask her to come to Colorado, Christy sees the visit as an opportunity to mend fences. When Christy arrives in Colorado, Jo Jo has disappeared leaving behind a mystery surrounding a cache of potentially stolen Anasazi artifacts. Instead of enjoying a reunion with her sister, Christy finds herself on the run with Aaron Cain, an ex-con with a PhD in archeology and a score to settle with Jo Jo. It sounds like a reasonably exciting read, and it is, particularly when you add the sexual tension between Christy and Cain, the resolution of which is delayed by Maxwell longer than seems humanly possible.

But the larger problems with the novel intrude more often than they should. The Secret Sisters occasionally reads like a history lesson in Anasazi culture in particular and archeology in general. Maxwell seizes on certain buzz words and over uses them to such an annoying extent that I was ready to take a red pen and strike the term “Moki poacher” violently from each sentence in which it appeared. And Christy sheds the illusions of her former life too easily for my taste. First she breaks up with her boyfriend over the telephone, then she lets go a lifetime of hopes for her sister, and finally, she falls hard for a man she’s known for only two days – even if that man is Aaron Cain.

Cain’s pursuit of the Anasazi artifacts is based on that most pure of motivations – a real love for the past. He only sells pieces to dealers and collectors when he needs the money and he would prefer to leave everything in its undisturbed state for study and research. He is noble, capable, adventurous and incredibly sexy. Sounds perfect, right? Not quite. He’s done prison time for murder.

At nineteen Cain killed a man in a bar fight over a woman, which puts a pretty major black mark on his character in my opinion. And to make matters worse, the “incident” is never really explained. Did Cain knife the guy? Shoot him? Beat him to death? Was the death accidental, or did Cain just get carried away in a murderous rage? What happened to the woman involved? Somehow, Cain implies, the situation was all really her fault. Has Cain really changed and if so, how do we know he has? These questions are non-issues to Christy. Cain’s criminal past exists in the novel only to provide conflict in the present. It makes him an outcast, a rebel. And it does present a large obstacle to the developing romance between Christy and Cain, although more for Cain than for Christy. For Christy the idea that Cain has a record seems only to add to the excitement of being with him. In her mind she is always “On the run WITH AN EX CON” and the potential danger this might present to her never enters into her head.

But of course The Secret Sisters is more adventure story than psychological exploration and it delivers what it promises with few complications or surprises. Despite a few unbelievable plot twists the basic shape of the novel becomes quickly predictable. Even the sisters of the title are never really very secret and ultimately the misdeeds of the past which drive the narrative prove insubstantial and easily overcome as the story grinds to its inevitable happy ending. I got what I expected from this novel, and nothing more. But I was left feeling like that wasn’t quite enough.