Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆
Despite the fact that all of the books of this series are written by different authors, they exhibit a lot of similarity in style, and also in literary quality. Since the quality tends to be wanting, that’s not a good thing. (My wife Barb really likes these books, which is why we read them together; and even I find the premise novel and intriguing. But it suffers from mediocre and even amateurish execution.) However, Williford has a bit smoother, less pronoun-averse and a trifle more textured prose style than her colleagues, and also a more realistic and less “vegetarian” approach to the realities of lethal force in law enforcement than the first two books displayed. There are situations that can arise where killing a determined aggressor is the only way to protect innocent lives; and she recognizes both the fact that a decent person doesn’t want to do that and may be severely torn up by the pain of doing it, and that neither the reluctance nor the pain change the moral necessity of doing it at times. In fairness to the author of the first book, Teresa Ives Lilly, her heroine realized this as well, but was able to make a decision to disable rather than kill in the particular case she had to confront. But circumstances may not always provide that option…
How much time has elapsed since the previous book isn’t explicitly stated at the outset; but there, the oldest Hardin sister Sam was newly pregnant and here she’s full term, so we can infer about nine months. Here, the focus is on the third-oldest of the quartet, Dan, who’s the sole viewpoint character – though, as always in the series, narration is in third person. Mutual attraction between her and circuit-riding preacher Joshua Plain was already established in the first book, so the romantic focus in this one is predictable, to the readers, the Waterhole townsfolk, and Dan’s sisters; she’s the only one with doubts about it, centering on whether or not her affection is returned, and on whether she’s cut out to be a preacher’s wife. The short length of the book keeps the angst over this from getting too repetitive and wearing.
There’s no single overall conflict here, so even with just 104 pages the plot has an episodic quality; attention passes from Dan’s venture of opening a café on the side, to allow scope for her cooking talents (Joshua, with 19th-century prejudice against women in business, is very opposed to the idea –though he’s had to admit that she and her sisters are very qualified peace officers!– and to her credit she sticks to the idea anyway), to Sam’s pregnancy and delivery, to the problem of a couple of newly-arrived underage saloon girls, and to the conflict with a tyrannical local rancher. And sometimes we shift back and forth among these. Williford doesn’t really develop the latter character enough to make his motives, and his drastic escalation of the conflict, really credible. On the other hand, the character of young Native American woman (and Christian convert) Morning Glory gets to shine here. Though I’m still not buying the secondary romantic thread provided for her! The role of prayer and Christian faith in God’s guidance in the main characters’ lives is treated positively, and I appreciated the point that combative fighting over Bible interpretation doesn’t please God. The Apostle Paul would agree!
There are a number of editorial issues here that simple proofreading and minimal attention to detail would have corrected, and that frequently took me out of the story. The rancher’s last name changes unaccountably from Dunner to Norton, and then to Newton, in different parts of the book, and sometimes between paragraphs. (Rolls eyes.) We’re told at one point that a circuit judge will arrive tomorrow; but that doesn’t happen, and a prisoner remains in jail with no realistic follow-up. Then near the end, a “district judge” from Dallas makes a quick appearance in response to a telegram. Dallas is in eastern, not western, Texas, and it’s not likely that Waterhole would have been in the same judicial district. We learn here that Morning Glory’s grandmother was of the Comanche tribe, kidnapped and raped by an Apache, among whose people Morning Glory and her mother were raised. But it was said in the second book that she was from Wisconsin, which is quite far north and east from the Apache homeland. There are several other clashing details, that show poor attention to the writing craft. Despite all of these issues, I do like the Hardin sisters as characters; I just regret that they weren’t blessed with more competent chroniclers!
Author: Cheryl Williford
Publisher: Lovely Christian Romance, available from Amazon, as a printed book or for Kindle.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.