2006 romance/SF/mystery; third of its series but effectively
stand-alone. Elly St Clair was engaged to the local Guild boss, Cooper
Boone, but things went wrong and she left the small town for the big
city. Now he has to go to the city, and getting her back is only part
of his mission.
A second chance romance has to do two things to work well for me:
convince me the breakup was for good reasons, and convince me that the
characters have now changed enough that while getting together would
have been the wrong thing back then, it's the right thing now. Alas,
this mostly convinces me that both of them, Elly in particular, were
far readier to leap to conclusions than to have an actual grown-up
conversation. (And when it turns out that not only did Cooper decide
to wait six months to "let her cool down", Elly left with the specific
hope that he'd follow… but of course neither of them could say this to
the other…)
So while I quite like the people I'm not convinced by the romance
plot. And two new psychic powers are being invented, and we're only at
book 3 in the series, which doesn't bode well for the later books
being about anything but the psychic powers.
So that's the stuff I didn't like. But I did like the mystery angle,
starting with a missing freelance excavator and going on to a major
drug bust, while also showing up just why the police aren't doing
their job in this case. There's good action here, and alien
archaeology, and if those psychic powers are new and shiny they don't
feel as though they were invented just to solve this particular plot.
This is much more of a piece with the first book, After Dark, than
it is with the rather more solid After Glow. It's not that
Castle/Krentz is bad at romance, but there's little departure from the
template here, and if I just wanted the template there'd be no reason
to pick this book from among the horde. And alas, it seems that book 4
moves to a new couple rather than developing this pair.