Samhain Publishing, $5.50, ISBN 978-1-60928-025-3
Contemporary Romance, 2011
I have not read the previous stories in Maya Banks’s Colters’ Legacy series, so I am reading Colters’ Daughter with a clean slate. All I know is from this book, so I apologize in advance if I get any pre-existing relationships wrong.
So, we have Callie Colter. She’s worldly, beautiful, and tad unconventional when it comes to the family. Her mother has three husbands who also happen to be brothers – the men are brothers, but no, they are not her brothers, don’t worry – and Callie’s three brothers also share the same woman. No, this woman is not their mother, some other woman that the three men happen to fall in love with… you know, I’m going to stop now before I inadvertently turn the series into some sordid tale of family orgy in the mind of some readers. At any rate, it is almost disappointing to have Callie end up with only one guy, Max Wilder. I’m half expecting her to rule a harem of twelve men or something.
When the story opens, these two meet again at Callie’s hometown Clyde. They had a history, but things didn’t work out and she is not happy to see him again. Max, however, is determined to get her back into his bed and into his life. Max has been keeping some things from her, though, things involving an unhappy situation between their families, and you can bet that Callie will find out about these things at the worst time possible.
Reading this story, I don’t know if Max is the biggest idiot in the world or just the worst when it comes to communication. He keeps dropping the ball and running after Callie to apologize and beg her to believe that he loves him, that becomes an unintentionally funny pattern in this story. As for Callie, she starts out a pretty strong heroine, a nice contrast to her sister-in-law who seems more vulnerable, but as the story progresses, she turns into a rather weepy creature who nearly breaks down when she realizes that love is not always about the unicorns and the pretty ponies.
And throughout it all, I feel that I am missing some pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. It’s in a way my fault, I guess, since I am coming into this series only via the third book, but I still think something is amiss when I understand the back stories of Callie’s family better than the story between Callie and Max.
But that’s just a small matter. I can still understand the story pretty well, and the sexual tension between the characters is great. Then again, it probably won’t be a story by Maya Banks if the main characters did not generate electrifying tension that makes all my hair stand at end. But the main relationship could have been shaken up a little from its predictable pattern of the heroine running away and the hero chasing after her, and it will be nice if Callie had put down her foot and face Max at least once instead of fleeing like a whipped puppy every time the going gets tough.
Colters’ Daughter is a decent read, but I believe I have read better from this author in the past.
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