Customer Reviews

Bed of Lies

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In Memphis, engaged couple Julie Morrison and Steve Land go to the fanciest restaurant in town accompanied by his parents. To her chagrin, a blast from the past, attorney Zach McRae is also there. Zach is in town defending a teen in a capital punishment case. Zach asks Julie where she has been for the last eight years and realizes she has lied to her fiancé about her background hiding that she fled Baxter, Ohio and an ugly family situation.

Zach informs Julie that her mother and stepfather are going to be arrested for stealing money leaving her half-brother thirteen years old Peter in trouble. When Zach becomes despondent over losing his case, Julie offers solace, but that soon turns into lovemaking. Julie breaks off her engagement and returns to her hometown to care for her disturbed sibling. Zach also comes home to regain his equilibrium following the harrowing trial and to deal with his biological father who murdered his mother having been freed from prison. Though neither wants this, Zach and Julie fall in love, but the baggage each carry may prove to powerful for a lasting relationship.

The two lead protagonists and his adopted family keep this engaging somewhat maudlin contemporary romance crisply moving forward. Zach is a dedicated individual who displays how emotional draining a capital punishment case can be on a lawyer. To escape her past, Julie builds a house of cards that collapses rather quickly. This angst-laden duo is bad for each other except Teresa Hill demonstrates that love can overcome many negatives if the individuals make the effort as this pair does.

Harriet Klausner

This story was okay. But I found Zach a hypocrite telling Julie not to be running from her problems. He never even really knew all of her problems. Seemed to me that she grew up with an alcoholic well alcoholics and sometimes she was hit and sometimes she watched her mother get hit. She finally had enough and left at 18 never to hear from this so called family of hers again. Zach runs into her and of course he has to play on her conscience about her lying about her past and the fact that her drunk no good mother and step father were in trouble with the law and oh who will take care of poor Peter, her half brother? Granted if you read the previous book in this series you would know that Zach's father was an abusive alcoholic who eventually beat his mother to death, but I don't think he was ever hit and his mother got him out of the situation at the age of 4. Who helped Julie? She lived with it until she ran off at the age of 18. How dare he play that angle up. He willingly wanted to put her back in that situation again. He didn't know if her mother and step father were even in jail when he told her she should go home and he didn't have any plans of going home to face his problems either. Perhaps if that could have been cleaned up some this book would have been better as there was great chemistry between Julie and Zach and it was nice to revisit some of the previous characters.