This was a nice story. I feel bad not giving 5 stars. For one, I don’t like getting inside the bad guy’s head. Second, for some reason, I kept scan-reading which normally is 2 stars. But this had more going on. This was just so mild-mannered.
**Next morning.** I woke up thinking about this book and why it wasn't five stars. I am a huge fan of Abramson and I have read pretty much everything she's written. She is one of the bright lights of LDS fiction. I was looking forward to this book. Sometimes that can set me up to be disappointed but I don't think that was it this time. I have tired of certain tropes within the romance genre and, unfortunately, dating royalty is one of them, so I think that tempered any unrealistic expectations. However, I also don't think that bias had an effect on the star rating.
My thoughts this morning, with particular clarity given that I had awakened from deep sleep to that clarity, focused on the author's inclusion of Julian's point of view. Normally, my dislike of reading the bad guy's POV is that he is creepy. That wasn't the case here. Julian was a garden-variety bad guy. The real problem was that his inclusion totally wiped out any mystery and any suspense in the plot. I am not even going to list my discussion here as a spoiler because the inclusion of Julian's POV was a spoiler. Who shot at Cassie? Well, we knew that immediately--someone hired by Julian. Why did someone shoot at Cassie? Well, immediately it was revealed what Julian's motivations were. Why was there a theft accompanying the shooting? Well, we knew that, too. What was going to happen next? We knew that, too. All that sleuthing by Levi at Garrett's home was just a form of showing off Levi's extensive contacts or prowess--because we knew everything before he did. We as the reader had nothing to gain by wading through all that. There was nothing he discovered that gave us any sort of "Ah-ha!" moment--we already knew what he would find--over and over and over. This is the same for the ending (and you can choose not to read the rest of this review) because you knew Julian was there at the castle and you knew why he was there and you knew how he got in and you knew who was with him. And, and, and. The fight was just a series of mini-skirmishes, not one big blow out. Levi and Cassie merely chatted behind a rock. I had no worries that they would be caught because they were chatting full-voice behind those rocks.
Then there was the romance that wasn't very romantic. For the first . . . what . . . half of the book, I liked both characters adequately but there was no spark and no attraction until there was the almost inadvertent romance. Yes, I knew I was reading a book labeled "romance" but did Levi and Cassie know they were in a romantic novel? I couldn't tell it, not until that mid-point when they did somehow veer in that direction. And even after that, their romance was so calm and business-like that it just wasn't romantic. The romance was like a people mover at an airport. At the airport, you step on the people mover and you stand there while it moves you along to the end. No curves or twists, no ups or downs, it just keeps moving steadily to the end. I kept feeling like I was reading about an already married couple rather than the discovery of new love.
I believe these two reasons (Julian's POV and the staid romance) were why I scan-read. Truthfully, scan-reading is normally a two-star rating--automatically--but I just couldn't do that to writing royalty (Abramson).