Review
In book 8 of the Raines of Wild Canyon series, Ben and Claire travel
all over the country to find Ben’s missing son, Sam. Even though
they’re attracted to each other, they keep saying they shouldn’t
sleep together because they don’t want to fight or have the
distraction of an affair, which could prohibit them in finding Sam.
They do sleep together, however, and everything is fine between them,
as I suspected. Aside from the missing child plot, there’s a drug
subplot with Claire’s pushy ex-boyfriend. Claire doesn’t want him
back but keeps giving him mixed signals.
Ben is pretty macho
in the way he carries on with women and refuses to love. (The one
woman he’d loved betrayed him years earlier, and he can’t move on
and love again.) Don’t get me wrong, I like this kind of plot and
it worked for the story, but I found it frustrating that he would
give Claire a chance, then back-peddle and push her away, and she
wouldn’t leave. That doesn’t sound like a strong female character
to me even though Ben kept thinking she was. Their romance just
didn’t seem real to me, and I didn’t understand why Claire moved
from LA to Houston to be close to Ben without talking to him about
what she wanted and needed from him since they were only having a
fling.
Meeting the
secondary characters (couples from the previous books in this series)
were some of the better parts in this story.
This is the first
novel I’ve read from Kat Martin, and I’ve heard a lot of good
things about this series. While this was a good story with a good
plot, I think it would’ve been better as a novella.
For a Harlequin
book, I was surprised by the typos. Besides a few obvious
misspellings, there were three instances when the wrong name was used
in the sentence.
All in all, I liked
the story, but it had potential to be better.
3 Stars