Recent Read

Once a Rebel by Debbi Rawlins

Why this one: I quite enjoyed the first book she wrote in this series and my reading is way down so I needed a book I could read quick to make my reading stats look better *g*

Steam Level: It took a while for this one to boil, specially for a Blaze, but once it did, it had a nice rolling boil to it.

Blurb: Time travel has done its uncanny work once again. Folks best be watchin' out for stuntman-turned-private-eye Cord Braddock—a tall, gorgeous fella with a touch of Navajo blood. He's spent his entire life shunning his ancestral beliefs and fighting his way into the world—until he finds a strange old camera in an attic…

Now he's a sexy twentieth-century hunk stuck in 1878 and Maggie Dawson can't get enough of the stranger. He's exciting. He's exotically dangerous. And he makes her want to do the most unladylike things! Is this about to be Maggie's last stand?

My Thoughts: While I don't read a lot of series books, I do quite enjoy reading one once in a while and I enjoyed the first book I read by her, Once an Outlaw. I did get the second book about the sister of the heroine in Once an Outlaw, Once a Gambler but it was written by a different author and I didn't enjoy it nearly as much. In fact as of right now it's a DNF. But when I saw the third book in this series was again written by Debbi Rawlins, I wanted to give it a try.

I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as Once an Outlaw, but certainly quite a bit more then Once a Gambler. I thought Cord was an interesting hero. Being part Navajo, while quite startled to find himself back in the past, he was more accepting of this odd phenomenon and thought his native grandmother who had died when he was young somehow managed to have a hand in his journey to the past. He was a former stuntman, sidelined due to injuries who is trying to make a living as a private detective. His latest case was to try and locate the Winslow sister who had mysteriously vanished when he himself vanished.
Maggie was an equally fairly good heroine, though a bit too innocent. She's living alone, trying to hide the fact that her father had recently died when she is accosted by Cord who needs her help in trying to find the missing sisters.

The problem I had with this book wasn't with the writing, but more the fact that the word count is smaller then in single title books. As a result, we didn't get to know either character as much as I would have liked to. And again because of the shorter word count, there were jumps in the story that would have been better with a longer word count.

But still, if you like something quick, if you are ready to suspend belief and go with a time travel story (which I can do quite easily :) then this is a book to read. I enjoyed it enough to read the next book I see by this author.

Grade: 3.75 out of 5