Sandy’s Review of The Salt Maiden by Colleen Thompson
Romantic Suspense published 27 Nov 07 by Dorchester

Blurb:

Deep beneath the desert lies a woman’s body, mummified by salt, abandoned by those who ought to seek her. With her rests a secret that someone will kill to keep buried.

Devil’s Claw

It’s a barren wasteland, the dead center of nowhere, and the last place Dana Vanover wants to be. But it’s also the last known address of her missing sister. Determined to locate Angie, Dana won’t be deterred by suspicious rednecks, snakebite, or even the grim prognosis of Sheriff Jay Eversole: no woman could survive more than a week alone in the burning heat of Rimrock County . But the endless sands aren’t the only thing hotter than the chili served up in the Broken Spur café. Despite small-town dirty politics, a deadly car chase and a dangerous paternity search, Dana and Jay can’t keep their hands off each other. In the least populated area of the country they’ve managed to find love. Now all they have to do is stay alive long enough to uncover…The Salt Maiden

Read an excerpt. 

I discovered Colleen Thompson last year when I read her book Head On.  I instantly fell in love with her writing and her characters. Dana Vanover’s resistance at having to chase after her older sister and haul her back home away from the trouble she’s once again gotten herself into is shattered when she meets Angie’s daughter.  A daughter her sister gave up years ago.  A daughter who is now dying of cancer.  A daughter only her biological mother can save.  

When Dana arrives in Devil’s Claw, the only town in Rimrock County, Texas, and finds her sister missing, she knows this time it’s definitely more than Angie just up and leaving for the next town with the next problem to solve in her own unique way.  She would never leave her loom, her weaving the one thing that gives her peace in her troubled and mostly solitary existence.  But when Dana begins to ask questions of the townsfolk, she gets nothing but hostility for answers.  The only person willing to help is the local sheriff, but he also believes Dana should just go back home and leave the investigating to him.  Not likely. 

Sheriff Jay Eversole is a man who is tortured by the fact he came home from Baghdad and his men didn’t.  After wounding an innocent bystander when his waking nightmares roared out of control in Dallas, he lost his position with the PD and has ended up back where he came from, the middle of nowhere in the hottest part of Texas.  He’s taken over as the law of Devil’s Claw just as his uncle before him, the man who raised him, because he knows no other department in the country would ever hire him with a psychological record like his.  So now Jay has to deal with an unreasonable, although beautiful, sister of a missing woman who stirred up nothing but trouble the whole time she’d been in town.  He tries to send Dana home with a promise he’ll keep investigating.

Something sizzles between Jay and Dana the second they clap eyes on one other.  Neither of them is ready for a new relationship.  Dana’s ex-fiancé left her days before their wedding by text message, for heaven’s sake.  Jay still suffers post-traumatic incidents from the war and no sane woman should ever want to be part of his life, such that it is.  But nothing prepares them for the impact they have on one another, and when it looks like someone is out to rid the county of Dana just like it did with Angie, Jay knows he’d do anything to keep her safe, especially because he would never fit into the upper echelon of Dana’s world.  Fighting the people he’s known all of his life, Jay begins to uncover murder, fraud and other crimes he never expected to find in his own backyard, betrayed by people he thought he could trust forever. 

This is a book full of mystery and twists and turns that every time you think you have it figured out, it tosses you head over heels so you never know which way is up.  While it’s a great story, I don’t think it’s as good as Head On.  Of course, that may not be a fair comparison since Head On is just an exceptional book.  

But it’s always Ms. Thompson’s characters that give her stories that extra something to make them extraordinary.  Jay and Dana are no exception here.  You feel for them both in what they’re going through in their own worlds, but it’s the immediate pull they have for each other, a pull they want to deny, that jerks you into their lives so completely that you know as well as they, no matter what they do there’s nothing on earth that can keep them away from each other.  Secondary characters are just as complex, wanting to take care of their own with laws of their own.  

I wish, however, the cover for this book had been more thought out.  Don’t like it all.  Good thing Ms. Thompson’s the author she is and people will buy and read the book anyway. 

Grade: A-