Title "Whisper Falls," setting a small town called Destiny -- I confess, I went in expecting this to be pretty derivative and generic. It was a great surprise when it developed into a real page-turner.In the last small town book I read with a bike-riding, tattooed hero, he turned out to be the mayor or something. Here we have Lucky, a man with a genuinely dangerous past, who is genuinely scary-looking and out of the norm and knows it. Lucky is reluctant to get involved with his neighbor Tessa, because of the class differences between them, and out of fear his past might come back to haunt her; the relationship between them unfolds plausibly, because Tessa, who is trying to live life fully despite having Crohn’s disease, reaches out of her comfort zone to him.Lucky is tough and seemingly uncomplicated, but he has an irresistible vulnerability and takes responsibility for his past. Here he confesses the worst of it to Tessa and made me love him: “‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘You didn’t have a choice.’‘But I had a lot of choices before that. And if I hadn’t made all the wrong ones, I never would have ended up there.” He shook his head, the shame oozing like a freshly reopened wound inside him. ‘When I think of all the shit I did in those days -- from stealing cars to what happened with Hammer... damn, babe. The world can be pretty fucking ugly sometimes. And I just hate that I added more.’”Tessa is also well drawn, especially her feelings about her illness. And their relationship develops realistically, including some believable commitment anxiety on Lucky’s part:“It’s that damn love thing. It felt like a chain in a way, and not the daisy kind. More like a big, heavy, steel contraption that pressed on him, and pulled on him, and took away the freedom inside him, in his head -- which was maybe the last freedom he’d retain after coming back here.And yet... it wasn’t fair to describe it that way -- because it wasn’t an ugly thing. It wasn’t something he would give up if he could. It felt like something holding him tight in its grasp -- but also like something warm, good.”I have a few criticisms: I thought the story occasionally pulls its punches and I was a bit disappointed in the ending, which was a little too convenient and fairy-talish for a story that otherwise seemed so well grounded in reality. There were also some stylistic issues that annoyed me -- I know this is a... pot-kettle... situation, but Blake way overuses... ellipses. On the positive side, there's quite a bit of steam, but not too much IMO, and the small suspense element didn't unbalance the book as I feared it might. Best of all, almost every time I thought something about the situation, that thought was addressed in the book -- how often does that happen with romance?! But mainly I gave this a high rating because I was really invested in Lucky and Tessa and eager to find out what became of them.
