Cassie Bowers is a Colorado journalist working on articles involving drug trafficking, money laundering, and white-collar crime for the Denver Tattler. While on this assignment, she receives an urgent message from Judge Thomas Wainright, an old family friend, requesting that she meet him at the Boulder Justice Center for some information. When she arrives, Cassie finds the judge dead, and is herself attacked by the killer. When she wakes up in the hospital she can’t remember the incident enough to identify the killer, so she is placed in the protective custody of a local detective, a man who also happens to be her ex-husband.

Luke Slater has just returned from spending two years in Texas. Now he’s put in the position of guarding his ex-wife from the bad guy, whomever that may be. He doesn’t particularly want the assignment but convinces his boss that he can be objective since he and Cassie have been divorced for two years. Lucky for them there’s nobody else around to do the job.

This book is extraordinarily predictable, and that’s not an exaggeration. The killer is obvious, the murder weapon is obvious, the “man sleeping with his secretary” is obvious, the nosy neighbor is obvious, the relationship between the hero and heroine is conventional. And I won’t go on. Witness. . . and the Wife can be divided into two parts – the things that work and the things that don’t.

What works? Well, fairly well-developed protagonists for one. As routine as the storyline is, Luke and Cassie are interesting. They both suffered scars in their marriage, including the loss of their child. Their reactions to each other were believable for the somewhat unbelievable circumstance that brings them back together. Unfortunately, their past relationship wasn’t developed enough for this reviewer. I would have liked to see more emotion, more discussion of the conflicts between them that separated them in the first place. There needed to be more reason for the reader to believe it would work between them this time.

What doesn’t work? The rest of the book, unfortunately. It’s filled with cliches. After the first 100 pages I stopped marking them. Although Ms. Stevenson is a good writer, the book felt like a very generic read, like a cliche of a romance novel. For instance: Cassie’s eyes were emerald green, also described as the color of an Amazon rain forest. Luke had condoms in his nightstand, but Cassie hadn’t been with a man since her divorce two years earlier. This seems a bit far-fetched since Cassie is an independent women, who evidently returned to her maiden name, divorced, not widowed – not a nun. Other cliches? Luke becomes aroused by Cassie’s scent a lot. Cassie kisses Luke passionately as he wakes up in the hospital after three days of unconsciousness. Morning breath, anyone? Then there’s the “built” secretary, the jealous wife, the dog who saves the day, the bad guy who makes threatening phone calls and leaves a threatening note on Cassie’s car, that she, an investigative journalist, doesn’t recognize as a threatening note.

And then there’s the writing. For all it’s “romancy” feel, it was stilted and again, predictable. Sentences fell into place as if the author tried too hard to make them work. An example?

“Watching their every move.

“Goose bumps pebbled her skin. . . Heat seared her cheeks while the rest of her body remained chilled.

“Curiosity killed the cat.

“Her stomach flip-flopped. In the distance an ambulance siren rose and fell and blended with the disharmonic sound of passing traffic.

“Curiosity. . .

“The odor of gasoline fumes and car exhaust set a pulse throbbing behind her eyes.

“. . .killed the cat.

Did I mention the cliches?

It took me a long time to decide how to grade this book. A C book means it might be worth a look. But I just can’t recommend this one as being even average. I will give Ms. Stevenson’s next book a try, only because her talent for characterization is apparent. Hopefully her next story will be a little more engrossing.