8 June 2012

Review: Threat of Darkness by Valerie Hansen



Nurse Samantha has an unexpected run-in with criminals just when John, her ex, returns to her small town as the new Police detective. He is assigned to her case, and they are forced to re-evaluate their relationship as they try and solve the crime.

If you want me to believe your heroine is clever enough to be a qualified nurse, then make her act like it. Don’t have her continually doing things that put her in the TSTL (too stupid to live) category. For example, she lives in an isolated house, but doesn’t have a home telephone line (just a mobile phone, in an area where you apparently can’t always get a signal), she doesn’t have car insurance, she doesn’t bother to tell the police that she was accosted in the parking lot even though it’s obviously related to the case… need I go on? It makes her unlikeable, and it means that we find it difficult to have any liking or respect for the hero, because he is obviously lacking in judgement to find this woman so attractive (not to mention that he was a dimwit for leaving her in the first place).

As you can no doubt tell, I was disappointed by Threat of Darkness. I usually really enjoy romantic suspense novels, so I was looking forward to reading this. Unfortunately, it didn’t measure up to expectations. In fairness to Love Inspired authors, they are hampered by low word count limits (not more than 60,000 words where a regular novel is 90,000 plus) and indifferent editing (exemplified by the overuse of exclamation marks). But I have read and enjoyed other Love Inspired novels – just not this one.

Thanks to Love Inspired Suspense (an imprint of Harlequin) and NetGalley for providing a free ebook for review.

No comments:

Post a Comment