Review: Closer to You

Closer to You by Jill Sanders
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The three McGowan brothers, Tyler, Trent and Trey inherited equal shares in their father's business, McGowan Enterprises in Haven, Montana. Tyler, as the oldest was named head of the company and with reluctance he returned home from the city.

Kristen Howell works for JB Holdings and she has been sent to Montana by her boss to persuade the McGowan brothers to sell their company to JB Holdings. A city girl with Gucci luggage and Jimmy Choo shoes, she is like a fish out of water in small town Montana. But there is an attraction between her and Tyler which only grows as her boss insists she stays in Haven until she gets the brothers to sign, even if it means digging up dirt.

There's bad blood between the McGowan brothers and their Uncle Carl, between the McGowan brothers and their secretary Rea's son Brian and between McGowan Enterprises and the protesters who have set up camp protesting the oil fields and the oil pipelines owned by McGowan Enterprises.

Writing this review there are a lot of things going on in this book: the mystery of why JB Holdings wants to buy McGowan Enterprises so desperately; the mystery of who is behind the sabotage on site; the mystery of who trashes Kristen's room at the hotel; the mystery behind the unpaid invoices; even the mystery of who is behind the kidnapping. And yet, the overwhelming impression I was left with was of a book which sagged in the middle with scene after scene of fairly greige sex, I just skipped pages and pages of same-same looking for a story. In fact I don't believe that some of these plots were ever tied up properly, as if the author just threw them in for a bit of mystery but couldn't be bothered to make up a real motive. Frankly the 'baddies' were such cardboard cutouts that I couldn't really tell them apart.

I felt that this book suffered from a genre crisis, it had too many plots for a small town romance but not enough plot development for a mystery romance.

Overall, it was okay, I didn't hate it and I would probably read Trent and Tyler's books (I expect Trent will have been in love with Addy, one of the protesters, since they were at school) but it didn't make me want to go and look up Jill Sanders' previous books.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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