Author: Allie Boniface

Publisher: Samhain Publishing

ISBN# 1-59998-536-5

Full Length Novel Heat Level: Sweet

BLURB

Can anything really change in 24 hours? Can everything? Maggie Doyle is about to lose her home, her business, and her last grip on sanity unless she comes up with fifteen thousand dollars to pay off the bank. Her only option? Forget the pain of one life-altering night, find the stepbrother she hasn’t spoken to in years and ask him for help.

Everything in Jack Major’s life is going according to plan. He’s rich, powerful, and about to marry Boston’s most successful attorney. There’s just one problem: he can’t seem to forget his first love, the one who left him in college after a whirlwind trip to Vegas with a secret she couldn’t trust him to keep.

When Maggie and Jack meet up at a high-profile charity ball, past collides with present and the sparks fly. But is it too late for a first love to ignite again? And if Maggie reveals the reason she left Jack all those years ago, will he be able to forgive her?

A single night in Boston takes Maggie and Jack from the glittering lights of the ballroom to the windswept city streets and back through the years to relive old memories. Will morning light bring new hope for their future together? Or are some secrets too deep to ever truly overcome?

 
REVIEW

This story reads like fiction meets the television show ‘Twenty-four’ meets the television show ‘Lost’. Take the title into account as this story truly is twenty four hours and the most interesting parts do take place at night. It takes a lot of patience to get there, but is worth it.

Glitches - Is it romance? Is it Woman’s Fiction? Is it category fiction? I’m prone to believe it is the last. Though, the story has elements of romance and woman’s fiction in it, unfortunately neither is strong enough to drive the story.

The biggest problem with this story is pace. I read the first chapter excited. The second going, okay, bring it on. The third through probably the next five to six were absolutely flat. I regained my excitement only to have more flat chapters appear. They merely read as set up and lent nothing to the actual story line.

I ran into all the cliche roadblocks of Woman’s Fiction and a few from Romance. The alpha hero comes off, most of the time, as having a little too much estrogen in his diet (one of my big pet peeves). Heroine’s big secret, which the reader figures out by the end of the first chapter, is so horribly hooked I wanted to tear my hair out. So many characters with so many individual stories - I almost wanted to say, ‘who is your heroine and your hero?’. The plot gets warped because I am trying to follow so many characters and none of them truly get to make their mark in the tale.

Kudos - there are times the characters surprised me. Albeit cliche, and the author could have done so much more with them, this is her true strength. I would give her another shot if she could do something other than the already overdone. Setting is fairly non-existent, but when it enters the story it is well done. Big Kudos for trying a new formula in romance. Adding a little more action or a stronger plot would have worked much better.

Personally, I’d like to see something else from this author that is outside the box. Hey, if she isn’t writing inside the proverbial limits in the first place, she might as well take a deep breath and jump.

All in all, I am giving this book a rating of good read, intriguing, mainly on characterization. She’s got style. I can’t wait to see what might come from her in the future.

Reviewed by T.J. Killian