Customer Reviews

Cowboy Pride (Code of the West) (Silhouette Desire, No 1034)

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#5 in McAllister's Code of the West series.

I am a big fan of both the author and this series; I snatch up her backlist as soon as it goes digital. But this book was a great disappointment.

Most of the usual elements were there: light humor, well drawn setting (something McAllister does deftly whether we are talking New York City or Cattle Country), interesting secondary characters, etc. The heroine was also OK; in fact, my only problem with her was her "relationship" with the hero. And all the problems with this book lie with him.

Category Romances are short and quick reads, but this one seemed to go on forever. That is because time with the hero became more and more onerous. What we have here is not the standard self-inflicted emotional conflict so common in Cats, but something that comes across more as a pathology. Since you don't find out until the VERY end what his problem is, there is no chance to feel sympathy for him. And since there isn't, you have no investment in the heroine's feelings or their romance, either.

Leaving aside the unrealistic RESULT of the catalystic incident, what we discover at the end is that this character froze developmentally at the time of said incident. You can see it throughout the book in his relationship with the nephew he is supposed to be raising - which really looks the other way around. Our heroine and new mother has just ended up with a 30 year old man who is basically a teenager.

I cannot recommend this book, but I strongly recommend almost everything else by the author.