I have read most of Sandra Brown's novels and like them very much but this is not one of her best. I remember Dodge Hanley from Smash Cut and liked the character. I often like the male better than the female characters in Sandra Brown novels. They are what they are, no excuses made, take me as I am. They may be crude, rude and on the edge of the law but they are basiclly good men. Like Dodge they are often dieing inside but won't let you know it.

Dodge first meets Caroline King when he answers a domestic disturbance call and it is lust at first sight. Everything with the young Dodge was lust. Caroline is determined to marry a rich spoiled socialite but Dodge is determined to have her instead. He eventually gets her but screws it up, literally, while getting information from a suspects girlfriend at the time Caroline is having their child. We learn all this in flashbacks. Now 30 years later Berry Monroe is being stalked.

I didn't care much for Caroline. She's more appealing in her youth but seems to have shut down her personality in later years. Berry comes across as selfish, a striver who wants to out-do her mother's success. Caroline was on her way to a good career in real estate when she threw Dodge out and then married the boss. Something Berry jeers at as a way to get ahead when she over-reacts to a minor set back at work and throws a hissy-fit. She really needed a strong hand like Dodge's as a child rather than a pleasant complacent adoptive father and an adoring mother.

I might have given it a higher rating if not for all the stops and starts to break the action. Sandra Brown uses my least favorite literary device--episodic flashbacks.

The first flashback is the beginning if Chapter 4, after Dodge Hanley's fist meeting with Caroline King in thirty years. Time to sit back and have the earlier story roll out and bring us up to date, as Mr. Brown has done in other novels, but it doesn't happen. After 12 pages we are back to the present until another opportunity triggers episode 2 at Chapter 7 for another 13 pages. On it goes for 5 flashbacks. After Caroline confirms to her daughter the Dodge is her father and was Caroline's love of her life you can almost hear the soap opera organ music as the next flashback begins. I barely skimmed the later ones.

When released in paperback I will get a copy and read it again after paper clipping all the flashback pages together and reading them first, as I've done with other novels, or forget them and concentrate on the rather contrived present story.

Sandra Brown's stories may sometimes be contrived but you can't quarrel with her writing style--it flows.