TEST
Border Heat had the potential to be a good and quick read – until the subplots started fighting for attention. Unfortunately, the upshot is that the heroine’s most important goals are forgotten in the middle of a subplot involving the hero’s involvement Mexican politics.
Texas native Leticia Rodriguez has two main goals – to save her family’s furniture store and to run an organization, ACS, that helps women whose ex-husbands have run off to Mexico to escape child support obligations. She can’t get the business loan she needs from the local bank. However, she is able to enlist the help of Mexican attorney Ramón Villarreal to help ACS.
Leticia and Ramón are attracted to each other from the start. At first, Leticia doesn’t want to get involved, but her resolve eventually fades. What begins as a working relationship soon becomes a physical one. Their relationship may be destroyed, however, when Ramón becomes too involved in a race for political office. In addition, several ugly secrets threaten their love.
Both Leticia and Ramón are recovering from recent divorces. Both deal with those breakups in different ways. Leticia has a hard time believing herself desirable, and Ramón is reluctant to commit again. She is also slow to trust Ramón; her low self-esteem makes her a little too sensitive, sometimes driven to misunderstandings. Ramón has the additional burden of being driven by revenge against his biological father.
Unlike many other romances, Border Heat doesn’t have too many secondary characters. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to make of the heroine’s best friend, Mercedes. Her actions veered from helpful to distasteful. Still, it was refreshing to find a secondary character who wasn’t all good or all bad.
The love scenes in Border Heat live up to the title. Be warned that clinical terms are used frequently. (I haven’t read the word “penis” so often since the Bobbitt case was in the news.) Still, these clinical terms work where silly euphemisms would have fizzled. Too bad Leticia’s hurt feelings resulted in a petty misunderstanding after a passionate love scene. I felt as though I had been splashed with cold water.
Then again, Leticia often makes bad decisions out of either pride or low self-esteem. For example, when she first tries to get a business loan, the bank officer refuses to give her the loan unless she sleeps with him. Does she call the bank and complain about this extremely unprofessional behavior? Nope. She goes to the trouble of driving to another city to get a loan at a different bank.
The main problem, however, is that too many parts of the book remain unrelated. For instance, Letitia runs both a store and ACS, but the two remain wholly separate from one another. And later, when Ramón’s political interests take over most of the novel, the reader is left wondering what happened to Leticia’s store, not to mention how ACS is doing.
As its name implies, Border Heat takes place along the border between the U.S. and Mexico. This offers a perspective readers from the rest of the nation don’t often get to see – that of border communities. The reader gets to experience local food and charro riding. However, I expected the setting to create more conflict in the relationship between Leticia and Ramón. After all, even if they are both Hispanic, there is that national divide with which to contend.
For all its problems, Border Heat has a likable couple at its center, and it keeps its focus on the relationship. If you want to read a novel about different cultures featuring an intense love story, and don’t mind rotating subplots, some of which seem to disappear, you you might want to run to the border. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Grade: C-
Book Type: Contemporary Romance
Sensuality: Hot
Review Date: 28/03/00
Publication Date: 2000
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.