Cool Shade by Theresa Weir

Theresa Weir was one of those authors who always seemed to have a lot of potential. She wrote about unusual characters, and she was one of the few authors who wrote serious, thoughtful contemporaries. But her books were wildly inconsistent. Often, they have moments of greatness, interspersed with questionable plotting and characterization. But I wish she'd kept writing romances - I kept thinking she had a great book in her somewhere.

Cool Shade by Theresa Weir
(1998, Contemporary) 8/29/08
Grade: 3

After Maddie’s sister disappears, she decides to take a trip to Nebraska to find her - it’s the perfect chance to get away from her dead-end life. Her first suspect is the mysterious Eddie Berlin, who might have hired her sister as a prostitute, but attracts Maddie even though she can’t quite trust him.

There was a good book lurking in here somewhere. Unfortunately, it was overshadowed by a lot of not-so-good. For the first half of the book, I couldn’t figure out either the hero or the heroine. They hate each other, no, they boink like bunnies. She distrusts him, no, she wants to tear her clothes off every time he walks in the room. It made very little sense. There was nothing to these characters other than their overheated hormones. Finally, in the last third of the book, the characters actually started talking, and things improved drastically - for the first time, I started to care about what happened to them, especially Eddie. His characterization was much more consistent than Maddie’s, and I would have liked to know more about his agoraphobia and his past. But it was a long slog to get to that point.

I've now worked my way through the Weir backlist - the two best ones, in my opinion, were Long Night Moon and Forever.