So I have enjoyed the previous books I have read by this author. This one fell short.

There will be some minor SPOILERS below:

This guy was an ex-SEAL. In this book that was a so what? kind of element. He might as well have been a dentist or a rodeo clown. She was a sheriff. If you're coming into this expecting romantic suspense, look elsewhere. There was a lame mystery in it. But pages and pages went by without a mention of the mystery. There were only two possible suspects for the killer so you had a 50/50 chance on guessing who done it. The whole book wandered aimlessly around. I found myself just not really caring. There was no suspense in the mystery plot and no heat in the romance. They admitted their love, although she didn't come right out and say it, the hero, heroine and reader knew it. Then the book meandered on for another 30 or 40 pages. With the author telling (not showing) you that they went to various tourist destinations and had a swell time falling in love.

Then there was a very surreal conversation that the heroine had with her mother where the mom tells the heroine about a fantasy that she used to keep herself calm in the hectic early days of her marriage. This scene went on and on telling every detail of how the mother imagined herself living June Cleaver's life. I could see absolutely no point in hearing this for 4 pages. Then suddenly in the middle of the book we shift into the mother's POV as she falls in love with her dead husband's best friend. So a couple of chapters of them bumping uglies. If you're going to have multiple storylines running, you need to start them all off pretty soon in the book so we don't go WTF? 2/3rds of the way through the book.

There was an obvious throw in of a character for a forthcoming book. He was introduced in a very heavy handed way. Not pertinent to the story at all. But then a whole lot of this book wasn't pertinent. I'm not real fond of series set in quaint little towns. There seem to be many, many on the market lately and this is sort of a ho hum addition to the crowd.

Finally, there were ghosts in the book. You weren't quite sure if they were real or part of the hero's PTSD. Since the dog could see them and the air got cold when they were there, I think they were meant to be real. I kind of liked them best of all the book. But she kind of didn't do anything with them and they were wasted.

Well I might give the next in this series a try but if it isn't substantially better than this one I won't go further than that. ( )

This is the first book in JoAnn Ross' new Shelter Bay series, which is a spinoff of her High Risk series, which I've never read. There are things that are referenced in this book that must have happened in the other series, but not in a way that made me think I needed to read those books to understand this one.

The romance was wonderful. I loved the hero. Loved loved. He was kind, considerate and protective without being creepy. I think what really grabbed me about him was the way he cared for Kara's child. He really treated Trey like his own, right from the beginning.

Kara was great too. She'd been hurt by her husband's death, but she didn't take the "I have to mourn" thing to an extreme. Yes, she loved her husband and regretted his loss, but she didn't feel guilty for having feelings for someone else, or decide she had to be a martyr to his memory.

This was a real and heartfelt novel. I was totally caught up in the relationships between Sax and Kara, and Sax and Trey. Not to mention the personal battles they faced.

4.5 out of 5 ( )

This book was slow for about the first half. I found myself skipping over some of it. I am not sure why I just couldn't get into it but it finally picked up some. I like Joann Ross a lot and most of her books I can read through in a night or two but this one took me a week. I normally think about the characters in a book when I am not able to read it but I didn't think about these characters at all. Not sure if I will read the entire Shelter Bay series or not. ( )

Note to authors. Romantic suspense-lite is NOT romantic suspense. Writing a series involving Navy SEALs and then suddenly transforming it into boring small town women’s fiction before it’s over is irresponsible, unfair on your readers, and a complete waste of time. People who like little cosy stories full of conversations about homework and cooking and all that mundane day to day stuff are not the same kind of people who picked up those original books. If you want to change your genre, do it in another series.

This book is so unbelievably boring and occasionally worse – it moved into the realm of stupidity when the hero, Sax (and please don’t name your hero something so close to ‘sex’) , started talking to ghosts. The widowed heroine returns to her small hometown – thus continuing the literary trend of ‘cities = evil, small towns = perfect’ – with her son. Of course she has issues with her mother; she has a son who wants to play with a dog; the place is populated by ‘sweet’ meddling old biddies; and everyone spends most of the story reminiscing about home cooked meals of their pasts.

I couldn’t even say this was any good as a quick, light read, as there was nothing in it to hold my interest.

Here are a few things that annoyed me:

#1 No heroes worshipping heroines’ “perfect” stretch marks. Especially not the first time they make love! Just, no.

#2 NEVER tell us about how a sixtyish man can make his erection "deflate". NEVER.

#3 The heroine puts on a pair of sunglasses so the hero can’t see the lust in her eyes. That is beyond silly. Unless this is the Black Dagger Brotherhood and someone’s giving off a bonding scent, covering up your lust is more than a little over the top – especially in such a sedate story.

If there is a list of the least sexy things a military hero could say, JoAnn Ross has plenty of phrases to offer. Top of the list for me are : “do the horizontal get-down boogie,” and “lookie loo”.
Note to authors take #2. If you are ‘of a certain age’, female, and on the conservative side and that’s all you feel comfortable writing, then stick to it. If you are ‘of a certain age’, female, and on the conservative side but still want to write about thirty-something military men, then make sure your characters aren’t speaking with your voice.

So why did I dislike this books so intensely? Here’s how the chapters go:

Chapter One
Sax walks his dog.

Chapter Two
The heroine – Kara – is the town sheriff. She’s at the house of one of those small town cosy Interfering Old Biddies. The Interfering Old Biddy has had her letterbox damaged. She’s so Interfering she’s telling them how to run the investigation while also reminiscing about her days as a schoolteacher. You can tell this book isn’t going to be romantic or suspenseful by this chapter alone. Things are not looking good.

Chapter Three
Sax and Kara check each other out and talk about dogs.

Chapter Four
Kara has a long and boring conversation with her mother, displaying some attitudes best left buried in a pre-feminist era. For a twenty-something heroine to say it’s natural for mothers to prefer sons to daughters – or something to that effect - wasn’t the most progressive of attitudes and thoroughly pissed me off.

Chapter Five
Sax spends the entire chapter speaking to ghosts. Yes, GHOSTS. In an unintentionally comical addition to this bizarre foray into the supernatural, the ghosts still carry their war injuries. I was left picturing all the Hollywood comedies where ghosts do just that. They tease Sax a bit about wanting to do the “horizontal get-down boogie”, and then that’s that.

Chapter Six
Kara’s mother supervises breakfast and they talk about ‘show and tell’ with Kara’s son.

On and on it rambled. The murder mystery with a military hero we were promised kind of eventuated eventually, but by then I did not care one bit.

I read some comments by this author that took the attitude that with the ‘state of the world today’ she felt compelled to give up suspense for this slow-moving women’s fiction. There seems to be an attitude ‘better’ people are now turning to ‘more appropriate’ fiction. I’m sorry, but that excuse infuriates me. The ‘state of the world’ is no different to any other decade. How about the Soviet Union or the Vietnam War? Or does ‘the state of the world’ only matter when it’s happening in the author’s backyard? The bad stuff isn’t going to go away simply because you put on a fake smile and only read sickeningly sweet small towns stories. If you plan on giving up romantic suspense for this stuff, then just do that. Just don’t try to explain it by insulting more adventurous readers.

Rant over. ( )