Review: Playing for Keeps in Starr's Fall

Playing for Keeps in Starr's Fall by Kate Hewitt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Maggie is a widow, she and her son have decided to move to Starr's Fall and open a Board Games café, which is far cry from their consumeristic, McMansion, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses lifestyle encouraged by her late husband's high-flying job. Her son is an introvert, happier playing online games than participating in team sports, which led to him being bullied at his last (private) school and they have agreed that he will be home-schooled for the foreseeable future.

Zach has a reputation as the town lothario, having dated every woman under forty within a 20 mile radius (allegedly). He and his sister inherited the family store after their parents retired to Florida but he is finding it an uphill battle to get his sister to agree to any changes to make the store more profitable. Overall, he feels firmly pigeon-holed by all and sundry and no-one can allow him to change. Sure, he was an entitled jerk of a jock in high school but he also gave up his college plans to nurse his mother when she got cancer.

Maggie doesn't have the bandwidth for romance, especially not with a guy ten years younger who looks like a male model, especially when her new-found friends tell her he's a player. But Zach is a good friend to her son, confessing that he too plays online games (in fact the same one) and they start to fall in love.

I enjoyed this. I thought the backstory with Maggie's son was obvious (but I won't spoiler it in case others don't) and the tension/disagreement between Maggie and Zach felt a bit manufactured, I think if Maggie took a step back she would have realised that it felt wrong.

Overall, however, another sweet small town romance.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.

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