Three Lake Books, $3.99, ISBN 978-1310378324
Contemporary Romance, 2016
After ten years of doing his thing in the Cheyenne Frontier Days, three-time champion bronc rider Tom Colton has decided that he will call it a day after this latest CFD. He’s going to take his battered and bruised body back to his family ranch, the Triple Star Ranch.
You know, maybe it’s because I’m not from cowboy land and hence I never get immersed in the whole going bareback with a four-legged farm animal thing that these people are all about, but I feel that it’s rather… tragic, somehow, that a grown-ass man like Tom that’s far from being a teenager has no direction and no purpose left in his life after he’s decided to give up the horse. Then again, what do I know? Other guys spend their lives trying to whack a ball with a stick and then run around in a square, and I don’t get that either.
Triple Star Ranch is also a haven for people with PTSD, and one of the former clients, Amber Hillcrest, is now staying there as its full-time massage therapist. Her emotional support dog is there too, because every cowboy romance needs a cute dog, and the dog goes well with the heroine’s cute trauma accessory that will make her all vulnerable and what not.
It’s all a perfect excuse for big strong Tom to smack her in her rump and say, “There, there, sweetheart, my big cowboy love stick will be the D in your PTSD, so that your PTSD now stands for Passionate Thrusts of Sexy Dongs, instead of the bad, bad thing it used to stand for!”
Then she will scream in tearful joy, the fears that keep her trembling and awake at night finally washed away by the hero’s armpit musk-scented passionate post-coital sweat flood. “Yes! Yes! I am saved now! I love and accept my PTSD because there is now a big, big D pressed up against the S!”
Of course, we need a conflict. After all, how else will the hero prove that he’s more than a just a big D tight with the S? So here’s the nasty ex-husband of the heroine.
It’s all so predictable, a part of me wonders whether this one was a finalist in some kind of Let’s Write the Most Trope-Engorged Small Town Cowboy Romance You Can Think Of competition.
On the bright side, Siobhan Muir’s narrative is fine, and this story is a readable thing.
Still, when Rope a Falling Star reads like every other single story of its kind, I don’t know whether I can recommend that folks go grab this with my conscience clear. Maybe wait until it’s on sale or bundled together with a few other stories in a cheap box set, perhaps, as it’s very highly likely that fans of cowboy-stuffed romances have owned and read a few stories with this plot and similar characters already. I don’t feel that there is anything here that sets it apart from those other similarly-themed and similarly-populated stories.
