Dana Newell has just moved to Rock Harbor to take a job as a sheriff's dispatcher and is settling in next door to Bree and Kade Matthews. The abusive relationship she left behind seems a distant memory in this perfect place.
Her first day on the job, Dana receives a call from her friend Allyson who screams "He's going to kill me too" before the phone goes dead. Dana immediately dispatches a deputy, but it's too late. Allyson's death is ruled an accident, but Dana just doesn't believe it. She knows Allyson—an investigative reporter—was researching a new story. Did someone want to keep her quiet?
Dana continues to look into the accident with the help of Bree and also Allyson's cousin Boone. Romance quickly blooms between Dana and Boone but the game is much more complex than either of them imagined. When Dana's ex-fiance locates her, she's caught in the middle. It’s a game of cat and mouse as she and Boone fight to catch one killer while evading another.
My review:
I am not sure why, but I became a Colleen Coble fan late in her writing career. I had sporadically read some of her books, but didn't get into them that much. That has changed over the last few years, and I have become an avid reader of her books. In fact, I have gone back and read around 20 of her books in the last month, many that I had read before.
Her best series, in my opinion, is her Rock Harbor Series. The characters are impossible not to like, and everything about the series is just top notch. It has been several years since the series ended, so I was a bit dubious about another book in the series so long after the rest.... but I was wrong to be dubious. It probably helps that I just re-read the other books a few weeks ago, but this book seamlessly fell in with the rest..... and was a totally awesome 5-stars read.
The suspense and drama was great in the book, but there was a message throughout the book that Coble got across, of true beauty being what is inside. The hero of the story, Boone, is a man who got one side of his face scarred in a fire. As a result, his fiancee left him. He thinks no woman could ever love him, yet the heroine of the story is attracted to him largely in part because of who he is inside. The message is there that we work too hard to impress people with what they see of us outwardly, and too often don't work on our character and everything else inside enough. On the flip side, the bad guy in the story had perfect looks, but was an evil killer.
This paragraph sums up the theme and message of the book:
"Scars and all, his face was so handsome, so beloved. Her experience had taught her of how the soul was the repository of beauty. Unlike the Phantom (of the opera) who was as ugly on the inside as he was on the outside, Boone's scars hid an astoundingly beautiful soul. She had spent too much of her life worrying about the face she presented to the world, and much too little time on the character she needed to be developing every day."
Thanks, Colleen for writing not just a great suspense novel that was hard to put down, but also for including this great and needful message.
** I purchased this book, and was not given a copy to review, but thought it deserved a review.
About the author:
Best-selling romantic suspense author Colleen Coble’s novels have won or finaled in awards ranging from the Best Books of Indiana, the ACFW Carol Award, the Romance Writers of America RITA, the Holt Medallion, the Daphne du Maurier, National Readers’ Choice, and the Booksellers Best. She has nearly 4 million books in print and writes romantic mysteries because she loves to see justice prevail. Colleen is CEO of American Christian Fiction Writers. She lives with her husband Dave in Indiana. Visit her website at www.colleencoble.com.
0 comments:
Post a Comment