I am sorry to be so very late posting this. I never connected with the charters or the story so I never left a review

I really, really wanted to like this book. I met this author years ago-- she was a local, living in the county where I was librarianing, and she did a program with us and was lovely and sweet and wasn't upset when there wasn't a great turnout. I tried and tried to read her first book [cannot find review right now but tried several times to read it] and it was bad. Like, baaaad. When I saw this, I had hopes that, with a dozen titles under her belt, she had maybe mellowed a bit, found a groove, and had a good book.




It's... better. Still did not finish, because it's not that much better. Before I got through chapter 2, I'd checked two different places to make sure this wasn't part of a series, or maybe first in a spin-off series: the author makes constant references to past events. She must explain all later, maybe she's trying to set up tension to draw in the reader and establish the characters' histories, but it's too much and the reader just feels lost. Furthermore, the characters and the book itself are like parodies: the bad constantly smirky and snappish, the good always wounded and selfless, the entire format and story structure what you'd get if you took a regular romance novel and exaggerated all the proportions.