Gwen’s review of A Reason to Sin (Forrester Brothers Trilogy, Book 3) by Maureen McKade
Historical western romance released by Berkley on 4 Mar 08
Amazon.com has labeled this book is “Reading Level: Young Adult.” Trust me when I say, this is NOT a “YA” book. No matter what Amazon says. It is a Western historical romance with some suspense elements, some adultery elements, bigamy, gambling, murder and other violence, sex on a desk elements…
You get the drift. ARtS is NOT, I repeat, NOT a YA book.
The heroine, Rebecca/Glory, is, for all intents and purposes, a single mom of a 6-month old baby. A baby she left with the nuns while she searches for her gambler husband. A husband who spent all of her inheritance and abandoned her before he knew she was pregnant. Rebecca is forced to do some unsavory (to her) things to survive and that brings her into The Scarlet Garter, a frontier Kansas saloon and gambling establishment. The hero, Slater, is a professional gambler at The Scarlet Garter, and a former Union spy with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. He also has a hankering for the new saloon girl, Glory (Rebecca’s middle and stage name).
We see these two people come to know each other, and an interesting cast of secondary characters, over the course of a couple of weeks. Slater and Rebecca/Glory fall madly in love with each other, much to their individual chagrin. And there are a couple of bad guys, one of whom is extorting money, using the other bad guy as his blunt instrument, from local businesses. They beat people, trash places, and murder to make their point. All good Western-themes and nicely fleshed out in this book.
What I had difficulty with was the relationship between Slater and Rebecca. I didn’t quite believe Rebecca when she fell into love, and into bed, with Slater about a week or so after she met him. I think a woman in her position, and in this time period, would exercise more restraint and not jump a man’s bones so quickly. Make no mistake, jumping bones is what she does – in one scene she nearly tackles him and makes him ravish her on his desk. It’s a hot scene, to be sure, but completely out of character for the heroine. I felt Rebecca would have waited a bit longer to be intimate, particularly in her circumstances (destitute, looking for her husband, baby waiting for her). She certainly couldn’t afford to get pregnant again, and that would have been a very real concern in that day, given the lack of reliable birth control.
The writing in ARtS is quite good and the characterizations are all top notch. If you can suspend your disbelief enough to enjoy the book, perhaps my quibbles won’t bother you. I recommend this book for fans of the other Forrester Brothers books and of western romance. I read fine on its own, so reading the other two books in the trilogy isn’t a requirement to enjoy it.
Grade: C+
From the backcover:
A former well-to-do young woman winds up alone, homeless, and desperate to get her son back. Little does she know that she’ll encounter a man destined to change the course of her life.
I can’t find an excerpt (bad publisher! bad author! no bon-bons for you!).
Other books in this series:
