I forget who it was that recommended Mary Wine but I have been looking forward to trying her. And when I saw the next book was a western I was all sorts of shades of excited.
Sadly it wasn’t as good as I was hoping. Here is the summary from Samhain’s site:
Love is the last thing a lone woman in the West should believe in, but the heart doesn’t always listen to good sense.
With a spirit as wild as the West, Brianna Spencer faces a hard life in the small town of Silver Peak. Her father has not returned from spring hunting, but no way is she listening to anyone who says her father is dead. He’s delayed…that’s all.
When Sloan McAlister finds Brianna walking the docks to pay down a bank note, she grabs his attention. The docks aren’t meant for her caliber of woman. Yet the West is ruled by one thing, the need to survive. Sloan soon finds himself right in the middle of a claim-jumping family that considers Brianna easy prey while her father’s out of the picture.
His better judgment says to walk away. But after one stolen kiss, Sloan refuses to do anything of the sort. If she’s going warm any man’s bed, Brianna will marry him. However, Brianna wants more than his strong arm to back up her father’s property. It’s his love or nothing.
You can find an excerpt here.
The story opens well and does a great job of introducing the hero and heroine without them ever ‘meeting’. Yes, Brianna has no business being on the docks but it is daylight and she handles the situation. And best of all when Sloan shows up to help, she lets him. I love a strong female character but nothing is stupider or more dangerous than a woman who doesn’t acknowledge or accept her limits.
I liked Sloan, Brianna and the handful of secondary characters that are introduced. The story starts to unravel because the author wasn’t able to introduce conflict into the story without stripping Brianna of the traits that first make her stand out.
Maybe the point was suppose to be ‘sex makes Brianna stupid’. She knows she is in danger. She chooses to be alone in the middle of no where, far from people because life must go on and there is work to be done. Then after a speech about how she knows how to use a gun and can take care of herself, she leaves it inside so the oh so very evol man can kidnap her. And the bad guys are oh so over the top, caricatures of every western cliche.
Brianna does keep it together while chained, informed she is going to be ‘broken’ and will soon enough be begging for food, warmth and water. She doesn’t lose it while Jr. is planning her rape and their marriage or her soon to be daddy-in-law is licking his lips and counting the whores her Father’s Mill is going to buy him. But the whole time reads like ‘paragraphs waiting for hero to save heroine’. And the story never recovered.
I won’t even mention the whole after the ride to the rescue, sex, sex, more sex, throw on a dress hon we’re gonna marry up, they ride to the jail and he ORDERS her kidnappers be released. Or the out of the blue ending, which you so saw coming but really did jack for the story but add page count.
The h/h were written well enough that I wanted to finish the book and had hope it would get better. So I would read her again but if you skip this book you aren’t missing anything.
Grade: D-
