As soon as I arrived home with this novel from my granddaughter’s front yard lending library, my wife predicted that I would not like it, but I was not familiar with the author’s style and took a chance on it.
Boy meets girl or man meets woman, both seeking nirvana. Various obstacles prevent that happening until they are all resolved and then they live happily ever after. Such stories fill the shelves of the romance sections in bookstores. What makes this tale work, by the prolific modern author is not the trite formula, but the obstacles to that happy ending.
Set in small town North Carolina, the two would-be lovers are a wealthy war-damaged orthopaedic surgeon with PTSD and a deputy town sheriff with secrets of her own. The impediments include the man’s quest to take up a new career as a psychiatrist and a need to solve the mystery of his ninety year old reclusive grandfather’s strange out-of-state trip and his death there, as well as his former relationship to the surly mysterious teenage girl who has shown up in town.
The medical mystery of what ails the secretive lone teenager is well described apart from the assertion that her pupils dilate in response to light. The details of the lives of bees and beekeeping are very vividly described and reminded me of my childhood experiences living next door to my beekeeper uncle.
The pathos of the deeply emotional, tentative, timid interactions of the would-be lovers is unrealistic and overdone, reminiscent of old Victorian romances, but there are no graphic descriptions of intimacies.
The happy-ever after ending, although predicable, is arrived at late, only after complex unpredictable plot twists.
This is best read as a mystery rather than a romance, and taken as such is a quite enjoyable read. I suspect it will be enjoyed more by women readers than by men. Small doses of this genre are quite enough for me.
The Passionate Reader 