Liquid Silver Books, $5.25, ISBN 978-1-59578-390-5
Romantic Suspense, 2007

Right Bride, Wrong Groom is actually a simple story, really. Jeffrey Shelton, CIA agent, loves Lynne Barnett, she who chooses sad songs for her wedding day because she loves heavy anvils like that, but she’s getting married to one Perry “Angel” Angelo. He crashes the wedding in a dramatic entrance, complete with gun-waving (really) even as Lynne is already weeping as she walks down the aisle. I tell myself that these people better have a good reason to indulge in such silly histrionics so early in the story.

If you can’t tell by his name, Angel turns out to be a reject from The Sopranos. He decides that if he can’t have Lynne, no one can so he sends his men to off the two lovebirds. Meanwhile, just as I feared, Lynne turns out to be this dim-witted woman who just happens to nearly get married to a member of the mob after her supposed true love went off to Hong Kong and didn’t call or write for two years.

After a rather shaky start where the author dumps a lot of information on me as if she’s writing a non-fictional account of some crazy runaway bride, Ms Morrison gets into the swing of things as the story begins to move in a decent pace as the lovers go on the run from Angel and his henchmen.

However, the character motivations in this story are vague. There is really no good reason given as to why Jeffrey stupidly abandoned his supposed true love for two years, just as I have no idea how Lynne somehow manages to accidentally hook up with a member of the mob to the point of wanting to marry him when she’s still pining for Jeffrey. The characters just happen to do the things they do to get the story going. For me, there is one too many “he or she just happened to do that, oops!” instance in this story that prevents me from taking this story seriously or finding it even a little believable.