This is the first book in a romantic suspense series from Bethany House, which means that it's very likely to be a trilogy. It has another laughably generic two word title and it has the usual Christian mindset that shapes and restricts how the story progresses. For the first time in my experience, it also happens to be a debut novel, which shouldn't bode well. However, this is one of the best books I've read in this genre or from this publisher and most of those facts end up being misleading.

The most accurate part is that this is romantic suspense. For the first half, it's primarily the latter half of that, with Corina Roberts suddenly finding herself the target of, well, someone. Initially, it feels like a burglar at her dad's house, but then she's deliberately rammed by a stolen truck while driving home from the Western Outfitter store she runs. Of course, this continues to escalate and it doesn't matter how much the cops are involved or how well-armed they happen to be. It doesn't take too long before someone's shooting at her through the windows of her store.

This is a good setup but there's another crucial detail that makes it even better. That's that Corina has absolutely no idea who or why this someone could be. She doesn't have any enemies and she's pretty sure she hasn't wronged anyone. This comes completely out of the blue for her and that's a great way to escalate suspense. The best decision the author had was to underline this by keeping us in the dark too. We don't know anything until Corina starts figuring it out. We learn as she does and that's the perfect approach.

The romance angle is there immediately, because circumstances have led her ex, Bryce Jessup, to be on the other side of the street when this begins and so he helps out in every way he can. These are good people, even if their relationship ended five years earlier. I appreciate Carlisle's decision to have exes to treat each other like human beings just because they're good people, all the more so before a gradual suggestion of rekindled romance. The spark doesn't really show up until past halfway, as they eventually look at the reasons why they split up and think about a second chance.

The title is a little misleading, because Corina isn't the secondary target for a particular bad guy; she's one of a number of them, the rest of whom are long dead. Corina knows the others because they're from her past life in Texas, before her father moved them to Kincaid, Kentucky when she was much younger. However, she didn't know that they were all dead and  she didn't know that the ones who she did know were dead, like her mother and brother, were dead because someone had targeted them. She didn't even know that she moved to Kentucky to effectively hide from a killer. She has a lot to learn in this book.

I don't have a problem with the Christian angle either, which I have on occasion with other novels from the same publisher. For one, religion is kept almost entirely out of the first half of the book. We know that Bryce is religious because he prays before he eats, but we only see it once and it's a way to highlight that Corina doesn't follow suit. She was religious but lost her faith and there's a fair reason for that which flavours the second half, as she reevaluates what faith means to her as she opens back up not only to a fresh relationship with Bryce but to a fresh relationship with God.

For another, this is personal for them. We can guess that a couple of other characters may also be Christian, but it's not dwelt on and not even touched upon for most of the cast. That's refreshing and highly believable. I get that Christian novels are going to have Christian leads and that's fine. There are plenty of novels with atheist leads, too, and, through the advent of diversity, a growing number of novels featuring characters with completely different religious beliefs. What tends to annoy me is when Christian novels emphasise that every single character is Christian because it's simply not credible. This doesn't go there, even if God gets dialogue in one scene, which is a little extreme.

The fact that this is a debut novel is surprising. I've enjoyed many of the romantic suspense books I've reviewed from Bethany House and their Revell imprint, albeit some more than others. There are a lot of commonalities between them, suggesting that the publisher expects them to work to a relatively set formula. Carlisle follows suit, but avoids falling into the traps that got some far more experienced authors. The suspense remains paramount and the motivations in play on every side make sense. The relationships make sense too and I liked that Christian characters, arguably due to their faith, trust a little too easily.

The flipside to that is that there are perhaps too many good people here. Other than the bad guy, who's clearly the bad guy, I don't believe that any characters from Kincaid are given real character flaws. Sure, they're not perfect, but are we really supposed to believe that their only assholes in this town are visiting from the next town over? Nobody even annoys anyone else? If it's so utopian, why are cops stationed there? This novel put me in the strange situation where I appreciated that good cops exist in Kincaid, something darker novels can't seem to acknowledge in their equivalent towns, but was disappointed that all the cops are good cops. That's failing in the other direction.

The only other downside for me was that the connecting of dots didn't seem particularly strong in anyone outside the core cast. Corina digs through her father's file cabinets to find out what might be behind these attacks. After all, he was a private investigator in Texas and he was attacked too, on a trip to Cincinatti, which left him unconscious in hospital. Bryce helps and so does Allye, who's his sister and Corina's roommate. That's believable. What isn't is that their investigations are the only investigations. Why aren't the cops asking questions of other residents on the street?

Maybe those are debuting novelist problems. Maybe Angela Carlisle is such a good Christian that she doesn't like to think ill of others. That may work great in real life but it doesn't work as well in a suspense novel. I'm happy she's writing characters who are good people. I hope in further books, she continues that but branches out to also writes more characters who are bad people and, more than anything, characters who are somewhere in the middle. That's reality, after all, where most people are shades of grey, good people doing bad things or bad people doing good things.

To wrap up, I should add that, while this is the beginning of a series, it's also a complete novel. The story generated here is resolved and doesn't seem to need to continue into the next book. Instead, I believe that it'll feature a new story with new leads, albeit perhaps ones we met here. It appears that it'll focus on Allye Jessup and Eric Thompson, who's one of those good cops. ~~ Hal C F Astell