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Started out Promising, but ended up Forgettable.

by Veronica Sternberg

October 1, 2012

@Shopgirl152ny

This novel started out promising, but ended up being a disappointment. Benjamin Brandt has been trying to find his wife and son's murderer for the past three years when a woman shows up at his crisis center with no memory and a strong resemblance to his dead wife. Is this a trick from someone out to get his money, his wife back from the dead, or an amnesiac as she claims to be? "Susan" has been on the run for a few years when someone grabs her, beats her badly, and leaves her for dead. When she wakes up, she has a cross necklace and a card for the crisis center in her pocket with the name Susan written on the back. All she knows deep down is that she is a woman of faith; everything else is a question mark.

The employees at the crisis center work to discover her identity when they're attacked and they realize the men have come back to finish the job. As Ben and his employees work to protect her and discover who she is, he finds himself drawn to her. Susan seems to fall for him immediately and there isn't much of a build-up to their relationship. Ben has turned his back on God after what happened to his family and I did like that Susan was determined to not get involved with him unless that changed. The story switches from Susan and Ben to the bad guys so you see what's going on with them behind the scenes, but it didn't really keep my interest.

The story is suspenseful at first with trying to figure out who Susan is and how she ties to Ben but the momentum seemed to die and I think it was partly because some of the mystery was gone when we saw what the bad guys were plotting. There just seemed to be too many threads in the story and almost too much explanation for what everyone was thinking. There are a couple sequels focusing on different characters involved with the crisis center that sound interesting so I'm planning to give those a shot, but I thought this book was just okay.