If High Country Bride were a mainstream novel, some of its story elements would be laughed off the page. We have an only-in-a-romance will, wild west prostitutes who stay beautiful and never come down with STD’s, and a heroine who is supposed to have gone to good schools, but comes off as a clueless simp….
The Colonel’s Daughter is set mostly in the Dakota Territory in 1879. It’s a thoughtful book with a lot of attention to detail, and I came thisclose to recommending it. But while I loved the setting and found the characters realistic, I just never felt very attached to the hero and heroine. Suzanne Bonneaux has…
Every once in a while the tried and true is set slightly askew to great effect. Carla Kelly is famed for her ability to take oft-used regency characters/settings and make them fresh and thought provoking. She’s able to make you think of the people and the times they lived in a different light. Yvonne Jocks…
There’s got to be a set of handbooks somewhere for writers to consult when they’re plotting their books, one titled The 1001 Stupid Things An Allegedly Smart Heroine Will Not Do, and its companion tome, Rules A Villain Must Never Break. Disregard for the wisdom contained in both these guides spoiled what was an otherwise…
I’d never read an historical romance set in Canada before, so I was looking forward to reading The Third Daughter. Unfortunately, this book turned out to be a real mixed bag for me. Fox paired a likable hero who had an interesting job with a thick-skulled, overly tomboyish heroine, and those two did not strike…
Everything about The Texan’s Dream was average. The hero and heroine were acceptable but not remarkable. The same was true of the plot, the secondary characters, and the pacing of the story. It certainly wasn’t hard to read stylewise, but nothing about the book stayed with me once I put it down. Karina O’Riley is…
I’ve enjoyed other books by Linda Devlin, who usually writes as Linda Winstead Jones. Something about the way she writes appeals to me, even when, as in Sullivan, the story she’s telling isn’t actually all that good. Eden Rourke is an ever-so-nice young lady from Back East who has come to Texas to find her…
I’ve been gamely trying nearly every Western romance author in sight lately, hoping that someone besides Lorraine Heath and Maggie Osborne is writing readable books. I continue to be mostly disappointed, and this book is no exception. His Unexpected Wife isn’t really a Western; set in 1894 with barely a horse or a shootout in…
I’ve heard a lot of buzz over a movie in which a man has a condition that renders him unable to remember anything for longer than 10 minutes. The movie is called Memento, and I’m told it’s thrilling. In The Renegades: Rafe, none of the characters can hold on to a thought or behave in…
You say you’re in the mood sink your teeth into a Big Misunderstanding? How about a wagonload of them. You say you believe in wild and unlikely coincidences? We have a couple of doozies. You hankerin’ for a good kidnapping or two? Well, step right up. Oh, and we mustn’t forget several incidents of mistaken…
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