It is unfortunate when a solid storyline gets overwhelmed by too much going on, and damaged by characters the reader can’t relate to. The basic premise of this story – interesting. But the heroine was annoying and the story itself suffered from overload.
When Zane Montoya stakes out the motel room of a conman, he doesn’t expect to find a sassy redhead breaking into the place. So, he does the only thing he can think of with Iona MacCabe – grabs her, threatens arrest, and holds her personal belongings (including her purse and passport) for good behavior.
Iona, however, has traveled across both an ocean and a continent, following the con man from her home in Scotland to get her father’s money back. She has issues, understandably, with Zane’s high-handedness, but can’t stop herself from being attracted to him. Now she just has to work through his problems, to reach their happily ever after.
Let me start with this – Iona, you make me so mad! Iona spends most of the book jumping to conclusions and showing her poor decision making skills. I commend her dedication to recovering her father’s money, and towards developing her artwork, but when it comes to her personal life, she needs help. Let me give you an example: Zane brings Iona to a family event (against his will, I might add), and ends up dancing with a lovely woman. Iona, watching from the side, is convinced it is a former (or possibly a current) lover, and goes off on him, basically yelling at him in front of his whole family. Yeah, turns out the woman is actually his mother. And things like this happened more than once for Iona. It just made me want to shake her.
Zane was less annoying – his responses made sense to me in general. He has commitment issues that cause some problems, but with his past and family history, it is pretty understandable.
But there was just too much going on in the end. The capturing of the con man was anticlimactic, and there were so many little threads to the story that it was hard to keep track of them all.
Overall, this felt more like a novella than a fully fleshed-out story. With everything that was going on, it ended up being, again, more anticlimactic than anything else. The bonus novella, The Wedding Dress Diaries (apparently the beginning of a new series) felt like a more complete story, even though it was much, much shorter. I’d almost have to advise readers to try that rather than the whole book.
Grade: C
Book Type: Series Romance
Sensuality: Hot
Publication Date: 2013/06
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