Troublemaker by Linda Howard is 1.99
I love Linda Howard novels. I also hate them. The author has produced a mixed bag of books for me, some of them being favored DIK’s and others teetering in that no man’s land of low C or high D. When I heard she had a new novel coming out I was both eager and trepidatious about reviewing it. On the one hand, this could wind up being my best book of the year. On the other, it could represent a lot of hours wading painfully through a bad read. It was neither. While Troublemaker didn’t keep me up all night, make me laugh out loud or set my pulse to racing I found myself liking, if not loving, it. Easy to read, with strong prose and pleasant characters, it actually represented everything I think about when I think – “beach read”.
Isabeau “Bo” Maran had her life turned upside-down and inside-out when the client she was flipping a house for (a barn, to be more exact) reneged on their deal, leaving her deeply in debt with a home she hadn’t wanted in a small town location she would never have chosen for herself. Turns out Fate sometimes knows what’s best because Bo has put down deep roots in her new community, serving as Paper Pusher in Chief (aka Chief of Police), adopting an adorable, lovable golden retriever named Tricks and for the first time in her life having serious friends. She may not have made the choice to live in Hamrickville but it’s home now and she’d never go back to the way things were before.
Which is why she is far from pleased when she receives an unexpected blast from the past. The ex-step-brother she loves to hate sends her a birthday card, on a date that is most assuredly not her birthday, advising of a present to follow. The card bursts into flames while she is still reading it, typical of the psychotic sense of humor Bo associates with this ex almost-sibling. The gift is waiting for her farther up the driveway. A man who can barely stand advises her that he’s been sent to her remote location to recuperate. Then he hands her a phone so she can speak to her annoying “relative”.
The phone call both does and doesn’t go her way. It does in the sense that she is $150,000 dollars richer at the end of it. It doesn’t in that it leaves her and Tricks with a sickly houseguest.
Morgan Yancy had gone out for a day of fishing and wound up being shot, needing open-heart surgery, getting pneumonia during his recuperation and now being exiled to Hicksville, USA. He just wants to recover and get back to his paramilitary unit so he can find out who did this to him and exact some vengeance. The powers that be almost agree. They definitely want him recovered, but they’ll handle the vengeance just fine without him. He’s sent into hiding so he can be safe while he convalesces.
After a few days of settling in, he finds himself quite content with that situation. While Bo is no great beauty something about her draws him in. Before he knows it, he is falling for his landlady, her prima-donna dog and the cutesy small town they live in. He’s even toying with the idea of giving up looking for trouble and settling down. The question is, has trouble given up looking for him?