Three years after her divorce, Brianna has made a place for herself in Conard City, WY, as a nurse in the small community hospital. Sure, she doesn’t have much of a personal life and doesn’t make much money, but she’s doing what she loves, and that should be enough, right?

Until an accident brings Luke back into her life, and all sorts of repressed feelings surface again, for them both.

Beware: stalking; equating violence and criminal behavior with mental health issues; emotionally abusive parents; explicit sex on page.

Because of the shorter word count in category romances, authors have to be hit the narrative beats at the right moment in the story, and with romantic suspense, they must find a good balance between the development of the relationship and the external conflict. When this works, nothing beats a good category romantic suspense.

Here, the author reveals the identity of the stalker in the first chapter, and includes passages from his point of view all through the book; this eliminates most of the tension and foreboding that would increase the stakes.

The romance and suspense elements of the story aren’t balanced at all; in fact, the scenes with the stalker feel tacked on in between far too much internal monologuing from both of the main characters, about their feelings for each other and the unresolved issues in their marriage.

Every other chapter, we get the same thought loops–Luke wondering if his need to look her up was really just because her thinking he had cheated on her rankled “his honor”, and Brianna going back and forth between “what’s the point, it’s over” and “but the sex was so good”, with almost identical phrasing.

By the time I read the last word I was unimpressed; I believe that the years apart allowed these two to grow emotionally so that they now have a chance at building a better relationship, because they were never truly horrible towards each other, but there just wasn’t enough romantic conflict for the length of the book.

It seems the reason these two divorced is that Brianna doesn’t know how to identify, let alone express, negative feelings, so she bottled up resentment over the long separations brought on by Luke’s work, until all it took was a phone call from a conniving co-worker of Luke’s, to convince her he was cheating on her.

While it’s true that there are relationships in which one party is entirely to blame (narcissists, for one), it made me quite uncomfortable that at one point both of them essentially blame Brianna’s emotional struggles for the divorce; and while Luke felt helpless to “fix” things because she wouldn’t open up, he also was happy to go with the flow and enjoy the sex, for as long as it lasted.

That said, Brianna could use some counseling; her parents seem to have been the kind who would have been happier with a Stepford child or an automaton stuck in “happy childhood”, than with an actual, imperfect, human offspring.

As for the setting of the story, there is a nod to the hard reality of most small rural towns: there are few jobs, and where there are no jobs, poverty hits everyone. There’s also an acknowledgment that people often act against their own interests by valuing their identity (“salt of the Earth rancher/farmer”) over their own welfare (not wanting strangers who “don’t understand our way of life” to move in, even if that means more and better jobs for locals and newcomers alike), and a passing mention of climate change (the winters “keep getting longer”), but neither are really explored in any depth.

The nursing stuff is, as always, realistic.

Snowstorms Confessions gets a 6.00 out of 10