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Overall rating: 4.5 stars

Things I looked at:

Readability: how well was it written/edited. Did it flow well?

Story line: Did it catch and keep my attention?

Characters: Were they interesting and well developed?

Period accuracy: If historical, was the period obvious from setting descriptions, and were the period details accurate?

What It’s About

Ten years have passed since Molly Hart’s ranch was attacked, her folks murdered and she was abducted. Now, at nineteen, she’s finally returning home to North Texas after spending the remainder of her childhood with a tribe of Kwahadi Comanche. What she finds is a deserted home coated with dust and the passage of time, the chilling discovery of her own gravesite, and the presence of a man she thought never to see again.

Matt Ryan is pushed by a restless wind to the broken-down remains of the Hart ranch. Recently recovered from an imprisonment that nearly ended his life, the drive for truth and fairness has all but abandoned him. For ten years he faithfully served the U.S. Army and the Texas Rangers, seeking justice for the brutal murder of a little girl, only to find closure and healing beyond his grasp. Returning to the place where it all began, he’s stunned to encounter a woman with the same blue eyes as the child he can’t put out of his mind.

What I loved about this book

I found this read interesting because I haven’t seen too many romances that delve into that part of U.S. western history that deals with white children taken as captives during Indian raids. There’s a WHOLE lot of back detail in this topic that’s beyond the scope of this review, but the stories of people like Olive Oatman, and the questionable success of efforts to “rescue” white children from native tribes came to mind, so I wanted to see how this author handled the issue.

I thought she did very well. She keeps a neutral tone, admitting to the good and the bad on both sides of the fight for territory. This went a long way toward instilling a sense of authenticity to the tale for me.

The characters themselves were well rounded and kept me interested. I didn’t like the hero’s frequent patronizing of the heroine, but I have to take this with a grain of salt because it’s period accurate. The secondary characters were subtle enough not to interfere with the main story, but compelling enough that I now want to read the additional books in the series, so the author definitely did something right there.

The editing was done well, I noticed next to no grammatical errors and wasn’t distracted by any odd phrases or sentence structure.

What I didn’t

Ok, I snuck in a didn’t like above, but the only other thing I didn’t really care for was it seemed at times the characters were repetitive in their inner dialog. Both hero and heroine repeated the same theme different words a time or two too many for me, I don’t like to be constantly reminded of the character’s state of mind if it hasn’t changed from what was given earlier in the book. That said, it wasn’t horribly distracting, so I let it slide.

Conclusions

This is a very well done book, and if I remember correctly it was a first novel for the author and garnered several awards/honorable mentions. Since she successfully got me interested in reading the rest of the series that’s an automatic recommendation for me. For those who love historical westerns with a splash of Native influence, this is a great book to add to the collection.

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