Natalie Dean

Ida East is a young widow with a young daughter, running the boarding house her late husband had started--and then advertised for a mail-order bride to help him run it. Their business was a success, and their marriage was becoming a success, and then he died. It was one more loss for Ida, who has lived through too many, and now she wants no more risks and no more losses. She only wants to run her business, and keep her daughter, Adaline, safe.

Jake Cranston, until now a US Marshal in Dry Gulch, Texas, has just been transferred from Dry Gulch to Cypress Springs. He gets recommendations to go to the East Boarding House for lodging, and then nearly talks himself out of getting a room in the town's only decent boarding house, with his teasing and pushback against a woman who has learned to be strong-willed and firm.

In this story, unlike others in the series, there's no major crime gang creating the tension. It's nature in the form of a major storm, and the human tensions growing out of Ida and Jake's mutual attraction their past experiences making them cautious.

I really liked both Ida and Jake, as well as Ida's brother-in-law Calvin, who has been helping her out but isn't really cut out for a career as an innkeeper. I suspect we might be seeing him again in a future installment.

This is an enjoyable addition to the series. Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley from the publisher, and am reviewing it voluntarily.… (més)

Samantha VanHellen is living a privileged but very boring life in Boston. She wants marriage and children, but Charles, the man she once thought she'd be marrying, keeps behaving like he's courting her, and never quite proposing. She's closing in on old maid territory, Charles is also paying court to a much younger woman, and Samantha is tired of being treated as a brainless appendage by both Charles and her father. When she sees an ad for a mail order bride from Beau Tibbets, a man in Cypress Springs, Texas, she decides to respond.

Tom Wilson is a deputy federal marshal in Dry Gulch, Texas, but he's been sent to Cypress Springs to fill in for a marshal who is off visiting his wife's family. Tom is happy to get away from Dry Gulch for a month, because he's feeling increasingly harassed by a widow in town who is a very nice lady, but who is determined that he is going to be her second husband.

When Samantha gets off the train in Cypress Springs, Beau Tibbets is not, as expected, there to meet her. The marshals soon discover that Tibbets is dead--murdered.

What follows is a a criminal investigation intertwined with Samantha and Tom working through their respective romantic issues while also getting acquainted. I don't find Dean's books to be altogether realistic about the American Wild West, but they're not meant to be. This is, per usual for her, a story of likable, believable people having a somewhat storybook romance. You'll feel better at the end. Or at least I do.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher, and am reviewing it voluntarily.… (més)

Ten years ago, Chastity Parker, tired of the pressure to just marry and have babies from her parents, and assumptions about her because she was half Native from others, left her small Montana town for New York City to pursue her acting dreams. Her visits home got painful enough that finally she stopped going home.

Now her father has died, and she's back, to help her mother cope with the funeral and get settled into the new phase of her life.

Unfortunately, her parents' financial situation is worse than she realized--and there's something wrong with her mother, too. Sometimes she's clear, focused, and lucid--and sometimes she calls Chastity by the names of long-dead relatives, and wonders when her husband will be home.

Also, one of the first people Chastity meets at the wake is Ben Miller, her old boyfriend, who broke his promise to come with her, and in the process broke her heart.

But from his viewpoint, she's the one who broke his heart. The only girl he ever loved left town for no reason he can understand.

What follows is two people working their way through both their own mistakes and challenges, and their understanding of what the other is really thinking and feeling.

I really feel for Chastity, having myself had a mother who loved me, but had in many ways no understanding at all of what mattered to me and often made me feel undermined when she thought she was supporting me. I like Chastity and her mother, and Ben and his family. These are good, solid people, not always doing right, but doing their best.

This is a Christian romance, and unlike one I reviewed recently, it's the kind I like and enjoy. Even though their denomination is pretty far afield from mine, the substance of their faith is something I recognize. Unlike that other book, it doesn't have that smug certainty about who the Good People are, who is Saved and Not Saved. Their faith gives them strength and guidance, not a belief that theirs is the only right way.

So, okay, it still won't be for everyone, but I really enjoyed it. Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley from the author, and am reviewing it voluntarily.… (més)