Lauren is infuriated when Ramon tells her at her own engagement party that she does not really love her fiance Roger, and that they are meant to be together. But when she’s trapped in a horrible situation, it’s Ramon she ends up turning to for help.
Anne Hampson is one of the true OGs of Harlequin romances, having helped come up with the Harlequin Presents line with publisher Alan Boon (of Mills & Boons), as well as the historical imprint (for which I, an enormous fan of historical romance, am truly grateful). Between Mills & Boon, Silhouette, and Harlequin, she wrote over 125 romance novels. Autumn Twilight is a pretty random pick for me to first dip my toes into her bibliography, but it is the one that came with a big box of old Harlequins I got my hands on some years ago, and so that’s what I’m reading.
Sure, the first part of the book is a bit disjointed. Ramon comes on pretty strong at the engagement party, and then there’s a prototype of a romantic suspense plot which plays out, except I guessed pretty much right off the bat what the twist was (I wonder if readers back in the 1970s also saw through it, or was it a more innocent time?). Lauren insists on seeing only the good in her family and her fiance that I got pretty fed up with her. By the time we got Lauren and Ramon actually together, I was worried that Hampson had been phoning it in with this one.
But once we got into the second half, the story really hit its stride. The romance between the leads strengthens, and I started understanding why they were a good pair (it also helps that you get to see other sides to Ramon than the initial obsessive ‘we are fated mates’ side we have seen so far). At the same time, the relationship between Lauren and her sister, and that between Lauren and Roger, are more complex and more delicately handled than I was expecting – in the latter case especially I was surprised that I liked it, as I usually hate how authors resolve a lead in a romance being between two options. Add this to Ramon actually trusting Lauren, and I ended up enjoying myself.
Well sure, the plotline regarding Felice is left oddly unresolved. I don’t know why the author couldn’t have written another page and told us how that situation was handled. But if I had a twin who all the men flocked to while I was left a wallflower, even though we were completely identical, and I couldn’t understand why that was the case, I think I’d also have a complex of some kind.
