Jove, $5.99, ISBN 0-515-12874-0
Paranormal Romance, 2000

Katherine St Clair and Iain Mackintosh once had a very mad one-night stand in an atmospheric castle. The trouble is, she’s a 21st century woman while he’s a 15th century Scottish hunk. When she left him the morning after in a burst of typical “I’m so embarrassed for behaving like a sexual being!” morning-after blues, the time continuum thingy went back to normal, and both lovebirds couldn’t find each other anymore.

And it seems the one-night stand is so profound that both would spend the next eight years mourning after the other.

Sounds heavenly. Unfortunately, due to the author’s inexperience and unpolished prose, both Kathy and Iain come off as positively neurotic. “Get a life!” would be an advice both would do well to take to heart. The main problem is that the one-night-stand affair is described in such a cursory manner that I am hard-pressed to see the magic or the spark that would have both lovers hanging on for eight years searching for the other.

Still, that’s around the prologue. By Chapter 10 or so, when they finally meet (Kathy goes back to the castle one fine day eight years down the road and gets zapped back in time), they have lots of catching up to do in-between the usual treachery antics by a jealous relative. The usual.

I find Everything in Its Time rather cold, probably because Iain and Kathy are very dull characters. Dull as in Kathy is a pretty predictable neurotic heroine (she goes eek-eek for all the usual wimpy reasons) and Iain can be a bit too perfect to be interesting. The setting and the premise promise to be hot and magical, but the final product is another thing altogether.

And don’t get me started about the story’s final descend into operatic melodrama of a miscommunication problem in the end. That cements my opinion that happy time-traveling heroines are probably as rare as a circus clown dodo in a sea of weepy, perpetually frigid and moaning, mourning lachrymose heroines.