Reviewed by Cheryl
TITLE: Ride the Whirlwind
SERIES: Love Across Time #4
AUTHOR: Jackie North
PUBLISHER: Blue Rain Press
LENGTH: 350 pages
RELEASE DATE: September 17, 2019
BLURB:
Soulmates across time. Two hearts, stronger together.
In present day, Maxton is good at finding trouble and bad at everything else.
In 1892, Trent Harrington, sheriff of Trinidad, Colorado, lives a respectable but lonely life, devoid of any closeness.
Trying to escape a past that keeps chasing him, Maxton drives south to avoid getting arrested. When his car spins off the road, he is swept up in a desert whirlwind and finds himself in the year 1892. Lost and alone, unused to the laws of the wild west, Maxton gets arrested anyway.
Trent is tasked with escorting Maxton to Trinidad. The request isn’t unusual, but the miscreant is. Maxton draws Trent’s heart out of its shell with his flashing green eyes and lush head of hair. It isn’t right. It isn’t natural. It’s illegal. Yet Trent cannot resist the impetuous young man.
As the two men travel through the vast, empty desert to their destination, will they find in each other the love and companionship they never thought they’d have?
A male/male time travel romance, complete with the scent of desert roses, brilliantly colored sunsets, starlit nights, bitter campfire coffee, growing honesty and trust, and true love across time.
REVIEW:
I have beef with this book. I generally dislike books with half naked men on the cover, but that’s a personal preference. If the author is any good, they will build a written picture of the characters and leave the reader to picture them as they will. No author is every going to completely peg the character that the reader imagines. However, the cover should at least make some effort to depict at least a representation of the characters. In this book it quite clearly states that Trent has blond curls and Maxton has long, golden hair. Neither of those models is even close.
That beef off my chest, I can look at the meat of the book. I got hints at the beginning that things had happened before the book started, and as I progressed the suspicion grew that the book was part of a series. I deliberately didn’t look until the end because I wanted to see if the book was readable as a standalone. It absolutely is. The author does a great job keeping the story relevant and giving us only as much of the history as we need to make sense of the current narrative. Even when history is given it’s in a very natural way.
I later discovered that the two couples who jump in half way through have previously had their own books. That wasn’t an issue at all. All four of them – Laurie, John, Zach and Leyton – had their place and filled it well.
I was a little surprised that the two men from the current time had managed to maintain close relationships with their partners from the past. I don’t think it would be possible to fit in that well, no matter how many westerns they’d watched. That being said, I was more than happy to allow for poetic license as they all fitted together so well.
The book focuses on Maxton, a modern day bad boy with a rap sheet as long as your arm, and a drug running biker gang out for his blood, and Trent, a sheriff from 1890 who couldn’t have been more clean cut and by-the-book. They were poles apart, almost too good/bad to be true. Despite that, they were very well fleshed and the way the gradually came together was unhurried and natural. There was no sudden I Love You moment, but a series of moments that got them both thinking and dragged them along the right path, one dragging step at a time.
The pace of the story was unhurried and unfolded naturally. It didn’t drag at any point and it sped up in all the right places. There was plenty of angst but not so much that it stopped being a beautiful love story and a rose-tinted biopic of an 1890 frontier town. I don’t know if there are to be any more books but I have a lot of suspicions about the true nature of the town and those clouds on the horizon.
Apart from the cover there really isn’t much to criticize about this book. Sure the grammar slipped slightly here and there, and there was a bit of head-hopping going on, but you’d have to be in the know to spot it and the vast majority of readers will just find a beautifully crafted love story that is absolutely perfect for this time when you don’t have enough spoons to work hard at reading a book. It’s a satisfying and easy read, with engaging characters (including Laurie, John, Zach and Layton) I have a particular soft spot for Layton.
I have sat and wondered about the whirlwind – whether there’s a deeper meaning as a metaphor or psychological comment, but I won’t bore you with that. It’s the kind of book that could spark off deeper thought but it doesn’t need to.
I would really recommend as a good coffee-time read and a must for all those who like their historicals with a contemporary flavour. The first book I read by this author was Heroes for Ghosts. If you liked that you’ll love this and if you like this you’ll love that.
RATING: 
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