Cowboy Defender

I’ve been enjoying Carla Cassidy’s Cowboys of Holiday Ranch series, and have read five of the novels in the series–some have been 4- and 5-star reads, some 3-star reads, and Cowboy Defender falls into the latter classification, I liked it but for a number of reasons, I didn’t love it.

First, while the hero of this novel, Clay Madison, is one of the cowboys at the ranch, 99% percent of this novel isn’t set there, nor does the heroine, Miranda Silver, ever set foot on the ranch, although a couple of the other ranch cowboys get brief walk-ons, so in many ways, what we’ve come to expect in this series, drama at the ranch, plays no part in this novel whatsoever, which, for this reader, was a bit of a let-down.

Miranda Silver teaches English at the local high school, and when we first meet her, she’s exhausted, cranky, and with good reason. The school year is coming to an end, she’s divorced from her alcoholic ex-husband, Hank, who’d shown up at 1:30 a.m. that morning, drunk as a skunk and determined to repair the rickety front stairs, at what had been his and Miranda’s home before the divorce. In addition, she’s the mother of two children, a boy and a girl, ages 7 and 8. She’d spent a good part of the afternoon shopping for their summer clothes, and since Hank is perpetually unemployed, his child support payments are rarely made. As she and the children pass a cupcake shop, the children beg for a treat, but funds are tight and as she tries to explain that she’d just spent a lot of money on their new clothes, handsome and flirty cowboy, Clay Madison, shows up and offers to treat the children and Miranda, and there’s no way she can politely refuse and disappoint her children.

Clay has quite a reputation as the town’s serial dating Romeo, and Miranda has already heard all the local gossip about his involvement with most of the available women in town and doesn’t want to become another notch on his bedpost. But her treatment of him is rude and chilly enough to form icicles, and, at least for this reader, made her quite unlikable. Clay, however, is great with her children, and when her son, Henry, ask Clay to help him learn to play baseball, he accepts, and there’s nothing Miranda can do to stop him from showing up several afternoons a week for baseball practice. In fact, she’s so rude to this very nice cowboy, that she doesn’t even come outside to watch the first few after-school lessons for her son taking place on her front lawn, but, eventually during their third or fourth practice, she finally comes outside with cold drinks for them on a hot day.

The next time she can’t say no to her kids is when they ask Clay to accompany them to a local carnival. Rather than be pleasant, Miranda makes it really clear that she has no interest in the handsome cowboy, and that this is no way constitutes a date. Both characters are in their mid-thirties, and Miranda’s prissy behavior quite simply got on my nerves. While at the carnival there’s a rather rude encounter with several of her drunken students, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, Miranda gets shoved and ends up getting a cup of liquid thrown on her, but it’s not soda, it’s sulfuric acid, and Clay is quick to remove her cardigan, where the liquid landed, and calls Dillon, the town sheriff to report the incident, and there are more incidents to follow in short order.

This is the point at which we get to the suspense part of this romantic suspense novel, and after the brakes and airbags on Miranda’s car fail and she plows her car into a delivery truck, it’s clear that someone wants her seriously injured or dead, but who? Her concussion and ankle injury are just the excuse Clay needs to move into her guest room to step in and take care of Miranda and her children, which gives him the perfect opportunity to get to know Miranda better.

But who is after Miranda? She has no enemies that she knows of, and it’s hard to believe her high school students would want to hurt her, so who’s got it in for her? Could it be her ex-husband? Doubtful, since they are cordial to one another when Hank takes the children for the weekends, and since he has moved on and found a live-in girlfriend, Lori, who has always treated Miranda’s children well. Could it possibly be one of Clay’s former girlfriends who might want him back and sees Miranda as being in the way? The clues are so scarce as to be nonexistent, and the denouement is both surprising and scary.

So, what didn’t I like about this novel? It lacked depth. We get a lot of Clay’s backstory, but little on Miranda’s. Like the other men at Holiday Ranch, Clay was one of the lost boys, runaways who found a home and a purpose at Holiday Ranch. We learn about his past and why he’s never gotten into a serious relationship with any of the women he’s dated. Most of the people I know who’ve been divorced eventually start to move on with their lives, but not Miranda. It’s as if she’s frozen. I’d have loved to know why she married Hank in the first place. Considering his alcoholism, why would she want him to father her children? They seem to get along fine when he picks up and drops off their children for visitation, but why is he such a heavy drinker and was he always that way? What on earth does Lori see in a man who spends most of his time in a drunken stupor, and how are they managing to pay their bills? Why is Miranda so convinced that she never wants to marry again, or even want another relationship, even a casual one? There were simply too many holes in the backstory of these characters that really needed to be filled in and they simply weren’t there.

There’s one other issue, and just a warning–this novel contains a major spoiler, revealing the identity of the evildoer in the earlier Holiday Ranch novels, so I do suggest reading the novels in this series in the order in which they were written.

Cowboy Defender wasn’t a bad read overall, Ms. Cassidy writes well, but I’ve read many of her other novels both in this series and in some of her other series, and have found them to be more satisfying reads than this one.

I voluntarily read an advance reader copy of this novel. The opinions expressed are my own.