As Captain Harry Richardson is boarding a train, he finds a woman in need of help. Sarah Franklin is running away from an arranged marriage, and she begs him to help her. When they are followed onto the train, the pair decide that getting married may make the people pursuing Sarah give up, but they don’t realize what the men are really after, and how far they will go to reclaim what is theirs.
The action in this novel is great. It keeps you involved enough to keep reading. Unfortunately, aside from some humorous dialogue, the action is the best thing about the novel.
My main issue is that everything and everyone seemed prefect. The good guys were all very good, to the core. Seemingly flawless. The hero was completely selfless. The heroine was completely innocent. Their friends were all willing to risk their lives.
Even the marriage of convenience turns out to not really be so, because Harry and Sarah are madly in love in less than twenty-four hours. The novel does mention that the pair really know nothing about each other, yet they claim love so quickly.
My other issue is with the writing. There are several points where the author uses wording that completely gives away what is about to happen (the chapter titles are also guilty of this). For example, one line says that the Captain hears the dogs barking and assumes it’s for a specific reason. Well, use of the word assume tells us that’s not why the dogs are barking, and we now can easily guess what’s about to happen. This happens many times throughout the book.
There are also several points where characters have to be filled in on events as they come into, or re-enter, the story. Instead of the author just letting us now that they are filled in, the reader has to read the entire summary again through dialogue.
I also felt like the novel should have ended sooner than it did.
The story had a lot of potential, but it fell short.
1) Overall Plot =3.5
2) Characters = 3.5
3) Flow/Pace of the story = 4
4) Is the story easy to follow? = 5
5) Overall Enjoyability = 3
Average of score 3.8 out of 5
I received a complimentary electronic copy of this book from BookLook in return for an honest review.
Jess Boudreaux 