Once we see that he also gets protective of Kelsey, almost against his will, when the first interview between her and Dillon goes very badly, he becomes likable. When Allie appears, she soon takes Jack down a peg. It does not help that this policeman is decidedly good-looking.Ĭhief Jack Martin first comes across as more interfering and suspicious than the situation really warrants, but we soon find out that the bar belongs to his sister Allie and that he is worried by her employing the ex-convict Dillon, anyway, and Dillon’s sister, arriving out of the blue, looks like trouble, albeit very attractive trouble. Although Kelsey has led an exemplary life during the last decade, she was often in trouble with the police as a teenager, and does not trust them. When she enters the bar to speak to him, ignoring the “closed” sign, she is accosted by a policeman in civilian clothes who seems to believe he has caught her robbing the cash register. Dillon pushed her away while he was in prison and vanished after he’d been released, but now she has tracked him to Serenity Springs, New York, where he works as a carpenter and is currently renovating a bar. Ten years ago, Kelsey Reagan’s older half-brother Dillon killed a man because she was in deep trouble.

I am delighted to have the opportunity now to discover such a promising new author. The novel, then still titled All or Nothing, won a Golden Heart award at RWA in 2007, by the way. This is what happened to me with Not Without Her Family, the debut novel of Beth Andrews (not to be confused with the other Beth Andrews, who writes Regencies and historical mysteries for Robert Hale). Sometimes you pick up a romance, expecting pleasant entertainment but nothing special, reading a well-known plot, and – wham! – you end up curled in your bed into the small hours, braving your husband’s grumbling because your reading light is still on, sometimes dabbing a tear from the corner of your eye or smiling, because what you have stumbled across is a treasure.

I Miss You! by Beth Andrews