Sweet River Publishing, $4.99
Contemporary Romance, 2021

April Murdock’s True Family Values is the fourth entry in the Texas Redemption series. Don’t ask me what “redemption” we are talking about here; at this point, it’s all about throwing buzzwords together to sell things to people like me. 

I mean, the story isn’t even set in Texas. Yes, it’s set in Dallas instead. 

This is a smalltown romance, of course, and our heroine Kylie Cormier is just 21, just at the right age to marry and bear babies for the rest of her life in true family values style. 

She’s an accounting student that is doing everything by hand because it’s still 1961, and she’s also running the family dry cleaning business that is super slow at the moment. The author doesn’t state it outright, but I’m pretty sure the business slowdown may be linked to the heroine. Anyone that has read at least three smalltown romances should know by now that these heroines and successful businesses go together like water and turpentine.

Oh, and Kylie’s Uncle Kyle has dementia.

Family was why Kylie had moved with her mom and dad, to support them as a worker at the dry cleaners. It was why she’d transferred from the Freeman School of Business at Tulane University to the UNT (University of North Texas) School of Business there in Dallas, despite losing a handful of her college credits.

Gee, thanks for letting me know that UNT stands for University of North Texas. I’m worried that this story may have accidentally sent the heroine to University of North Timbuktu for a second. Note to the author: it’s fine to cut and paste names and things from Wikipedia or whatever but maybe tweak the result a bit after to make the cut and paste job not so obvious.

Also, I guess the T makes this story okay to be part of a series called Texas Redemption then?

Meanwhile, our hero is 22. Antonio Menotti is part of a family that does organized crime, because that’s what Italians do these days in a romance novel. Oh, don’t worry, this isn’t some real organized crime thing, it’s populated by people that look like they had been rejected from clown school for trying too hard to be comical caricatures but fail. No danger of the hero calling for people to be assassinated or pushing for more intense drug sales in the local neighborhoods! 

Anyway, as one can probably guess by now, the dry cleaner of Kylie’s family is in the way of the Menotti real estate expansion, so Tony here will arrange for date with the cute Kylie, maybe wag his thing at her a few times, and she’d be charmed enough to get her family to move out without any clown drama necessary.

Of course, one may think a failing business and an uncle needing expensive caregiving facilities would compel the Cormier to sell their property but had anyone in this story been halfway intelligent or even pragmatic, this story would end in six pages.

Instead, the heroine is fast to fall for Tony only to then grasp at straws to declare that HE HAS BETRAYED HER AND SHE WILL NEVER TRUST HIM AGAIN nonsense to prolong the story unnecessarily, Tony decides that what he is done is somehow enough to atone for his family’s crimes, like the family had merely been selling mediocre hot dogs or something, and in the end, any concerns about Kylie’s problems magically erased by the power of crime boss money is conveniently overlooked.

Sheesh, what a mess. The author has the hero be part of a crime family but acts like crime and clown are interchangeable. The family members of both the hero and the heroine act more like addled loonies than genuine humans, and the entire story is powered by the propulsive abilities of dumb and dumber. The heroine acts so high and mighty and virtuous, but at the same time she seems to pick and choose where her goalposts lie.

Also, the heroine and her family love to act in ways that make their situations worse, so thank the wise and benevolent patriarchy that once again, a hero swoops in to save a poor dumb woman from herself. Now the heroine can stop acting like she has any serious ambition and spend the rest of her life popping out babies just as dictated by universal true family values.

God, I feel like I’ve become even more stupid after reading this thing.