Dangerous Stranger – 3.5 stars
Melodie, home to her grandfather’s farm to look after him, becomes engaged to Jed thinking that it will be a safe and certain thing. However, sparks keep flying whenever she meets Keith, her infuriating neighbor.
I bought a big lot of old Harlequin romances recently – after all, I do prefer my romance to have been published between the sixties and the nineties. This is my first foray into the box, and it wasn’t a bad one at all. Despite the brevity of the book, the characters are all well-sketched out and the situations engaged my interest.
The hero was commanding without being arrogant. Sometimes the heroine irritated me with her willful blindness to her situation, but for the most part I liked her as well. There are some complications in the central relationship with the intrusions of Jed and Maria, but it all is sorted out well enough.
I’d read more by this author – which is a good thing considering I’ve one more of her books in the lot!
~
The High Valley – 3 stars
At an embassy party in Brazil, Morgana meets a mysterious man called Luis who seems rather out of place. Two weeks later, as she is flying home, her plane is hijacked – and the leader of the guerrillas is Luis.
This is also from that lot of Harlequin romances – you’ll be seeing a lot of those I supposed. Again, I quite liked the leads, especially Morgana who tries to hold her own in a difficult situation. I found the set up of the story quite intriguing, with Morgana being the only passenger being seized off the hijacked plane and not knowing why – it added a touch of mystery, though my speculations were far wilder than the truth.
I liked the scenes between Luis and Morgana, as you could truly feel the attraction between them. However, I felt that we did not really see them fall in love, especially they spend only limited time together. Morgana was certainly drawn to him, but his love for her was not as evident so I was not sold that they’d earned their ending.
Still, I enjoyed how adventurous this romance was.
