Oddly enough, this book began for me as an F. But I kept reading and grudgingly began thinking of it as a D. Pages turned, time marched on. Okay, maybe a D+. I hit the final fifty pages, finished the book and closed the cover. Sigh. What to do, what to do. Okay. C-minus. That’s my best offer. While When Night Falls had a lot of potential, it had a lot of problems, too. Better editing and less confusing dialogue would have gone a long way to making it a pretty decent read. It’s being marketed as a romantic suspense, but the killer-on-the-lose subplot was really unnecessary. I’ll explain.

The book begins when four friends are out for an evening of fun in Madrid, Oklahoma. As Lauren, Uma, Pearl, and Shelley cross the street, a car drives by, a bullet is fired, and Lauren lies dead on the sidewalk. A year goes by and there are no suspects, no reason for Lauren’s murder.

Uma Thornton loved Lauren like a sister. They had lived next door to each other as adults. Now, a year after Lauren’s murder, Uma feels her friend’s spirit lingers on, that she is not totally at rest. When former town bad-boy Mitchell Warren returns to Madrid and buys Lauren’s house and begins renovations, Uma is both angry at him for disturbing Lauren’s “place,” and attracted to him – Mitchell has grown into one very sexy guy.

Mitchell Warren and his younger brother Roman fled town nearly twenty years ago. Their father was the town reprobate and “those Warrens” were nothing but trouble. In the last two decades, however, Mitchell has educated himself, and has quit his job at a huge company to return to his old home town to try to put some of his old demons behind him. Former race-car driver and womanizer Roman comes home, too, for much the same reason. But the town hasn’t forgotten the Warren brothers, and make things tough for the two men.

There is a lot of plot in this book, not to mention the demented-serial-killer sub-plot. This book would have been full enough without adding the dimension of suspense, which was often tossed in at odd times and seemed irrelevant for most of the book. Uma is divorced. Her baby daughter died of crib death. Uma still likes her ex-husband, Everett, who would like to marry Uma again and give their relationship a second chance. Everett is a nice guy. I saw no real reason why Uma rejected him. Mitchell is wounded. His parents were divorced. He hates his mother who he feels abandoned him. His father was drunk and was killed one night when somebody set fire to the house and nailed the door closed so Fred Warren couldn’t get out. Roman has no money. He rides motorcycles, has a bad knee and limps, and feels guilty about what he did to Shelley his last night in town, the night Fred Warren died. Shelley has a seventeen year-old daughter, Dani. Shelley has had sex once in her entire life, and it got her Dani. Yet the town (and Dani) thinks Shelley is a slut. Pearl and, oh, Clarence, and Rosy the pig, oh, there’s Grace of course, and don’t forget the murderer bent on wiping out every person in town who has ever hurt . . . I guess you can see we have a full plate here and I haven’t even touched on how Uma wants to reunite Mitchell with his mother and how Uma has written a book and reads fortune cookies daily, and is The Keeper . . . so much plot, so little time!

Problems I had with this book are many. The killer has taken a liking to Clyde Barrows (of Bonnie and Clyde fame) and dresses like him when knocking off folks. “Clyde” hates Shelley and has made several botched attempts on her life which everyone, including Shelley, sees only as a series of unfortunate accidents. “Clyde” has murdered several people, yet the local law is baffled. The dialogue in the book is abrupt, stilted, and often makes no sense. Focus shifts without a reason and a conversation can begin one way then go off in some other direction leaving the reader to wonder what the characters were talking about. The first love scene between Mitchell and Uma is so brief and unemotional, I made a note to myself inside the cover: Most boring, passionless three-minute f*** I’ve ever read. I didn’t even think these two people liked each other, let alone were on the road to true and everlasting love. Oh, and apparently, nobody in town has ever seen or heard of a little thing called a condom. Not even Shelley and Roman, who really should have learned their lesson eighteen years ago.

But the love scenes got better and so did my opinion of this book. What really saved it was Roman. He’s the secondary hero, but I liked him a lot. Mitchell’s okay, too, but takes some getting used to. Uma, eh, she never did it for me; I never connected with her. There’s not much humor in Madrid, Oklahoma, but the author was able to convey some realistically deep feelings, torments, and hopes and dreams through her characters’ eyes. When the identity of the killer is first revealed, I didn’t buy it at all. But, but the time I’d finished the book, things were explained more clearly and I got a better grasp of the situation.

Some readers are bound to like When Night Falls better than I did and some are probably going to like is much less. As I said, it does have its problems. But then there’s Roman . . .