TJ Clementine has been getting increasingly threatening letters from somebody signing as True Fan, and decides to get out of the city after the latest threat, and return to her hometown of Whitehorse in Montana, where she can spend Christmas with her estranged sisters. Unfortunately, it looks as if True Fan as followed her home...or might have been there all along, waiting for her.
Normally, I love a good stalker story, especially involving mad, overly devoted fans. So it was very disappointing that one of Intrigue's better authors would deliver such a flat, uninteresting offering in the subgenre. One big no-no for me when reading romantic suspense is an author flirting with the idea of the hero as a red herring as the possible culprit. It just simply doesn't work. By the very nature of the genre, particularly category romance, that's just never going to happen. Never. So it wastes time when it could be beefing up the romance instead. Indeed, TJ and Silas Walker barely even cross paths until 70 pages in, when TJ (in one of her many TSTL moments) ventures to his isolated cabin during a snowstorm. He's tackling her with a hand over her mouth, she's kicking and screaming in pain and terror (the book's words), and just....no.
As they're stuck in Silas' cabin to wait for the snowstorm to pass, Daniels continues with TJ believing that he's True Fan. I never once believed for a second that Silas was True Fan, because otherwise this would have to be published by a company other than bloody Mills & Boon. Daniels should have a little more faith in her readers than try to foist off this sort of weak red herring on them. And I realise I'm sounding a bit like the True Fan character! Lol.
But, as such, I never bought into their romance. Once TJ has randomly decided Silas isn't a maniac who wants to kill her, it's all He's-Not-The-Killer-He's-My-Lovah, and she's pretty much desperately in Instalove with him. It didn't work. So, when the romance in romantic suspense is a bust, I turn to the plotting, story and suspense. Unfortunately, none of that could really make up for the lackluster romance. There are some further thin red herrings that TJ follows up in her usual TSTL manner.
Basically, for somebody who has a stalker threatening her life, TJ likes to go to an awful lot of places by herself, or go with characters she suspects of badness to various isolated locations.
Then, about 100 pages in, Daniels suddenly decides to thrown in a subplot involving former police department colleagues of Silas sending a hitman after him for exposing their dirty activities. Why was this included? It seems to be for little other than for TJ to make yet another TSTL decision, and head off to save him without telling her sisters where she is going. She really did my head in. But this subplot only emphasises how thin and dull the stalker storyline is. It took me nearly a week to read this slapdash effort.
Daniels thankfully doesn't include the viewpoints of 100 other supporting characters, like she usually does, keeping the focus on TJ and Silas' viewpoints only. So, once again, it's frustrating and disappointing that TJ and Silas' connection was based purely on Instalove, with little tension or conflict to carry it.