She's my baby, now.
Written: Apr 07 '02
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: A happy ending, and the bad guy was actually a surprise.
Cons: Wow. I've heard of a baby in a hurry but this was a speedy book.
The Bottom Line: The mystery about who the bad guy is isn't as cut and dried as it seems. Reading to the end to figure it out may not be worth the effort.
|
|
|
| spalmero's Full Review: Another Woman's Baby (Harlequin Intrigue, No. 639)... |
(Yes, I've been a reading fool this weekend. It's good for me, or so I'm told.)
Another story that might have been taken from the pages of a newspaper or off an Internet site. 'Woman agrees to be surrogate mother for best friend and husband. Best friend dies in tragic explosion.'
That's the setup for Ms. Wayne's Another Woman's Baby. Megan Lancaster is the surrogate mother in question. She's a successful businesswoman, and maybe a little bit of a workaholic. When the story opens, it's December 4th. With a due date of December 27th, Megan has decided to take her maternity leave, and return to the town of Orange Beach, Alabama, right on the coast of the Gulf. She graduated from high school here, she has a house left to her by her grandmother here, and she's still got the occasional friend.
Friends who clean her house. Friends who keep her company. Friends who accept the fact that she's eight months pregnant but not married or involved, and friends who try to set her up with dark and handsome strangers.
Dark and handsome strangers who act more like stalkers than harmless passersby. Enter Bart Cromwell, mystery man and FBI agent who, understandably, has Megan a bit creeped out when he turns up on the beach outside her home, and then invites himself to eat with her in a local restaurant.
The truth is, Bart tells her after rescuing from being forcefully drowned at the hands of a masked assailant, he's in town to protect her from the someone who wants her dead, someone he believes is after the child she carries because of its ties to her dead friend and husband.
All valid reasons for the FBI man to move in and pretend to be an old college lover, right? I'm not buying it.
This is another series romance that, to me, suffered for the constraints of the length of the book. Maybe it's because of the fact that Ms. Wayne's story covers 23 days, rather than the usual week or few days. Maybe it's because there's not a lot of time given to developing secondary characters, or to fleshing out the relationships between the heroine and them. There are a lot of secondaries tied to Megan; there are very few tied to Bart. As a matter of fact, Bart isn't very well developed himself.
I will give the author credit for surprising me with her choice of villain, or the bad guy whodunnit. With so many unlikeable choices, I thought I had it figured out twice. I was wrong. I take that credit away for having the bad guy use the ages-old reveal before he gets around to doing the final dastardly deed. This pouring forth of wicked plans inevitably results in the badguy being caught.
*yawn*
Recommended:
No
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
spalmero
|
|
Member: Sarah Palmero
Reviews written: 58
Trusted by: 10 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.