Heidi Hart

I'm trying out new-to-me contemporary authors/series, having run myself out of favorites (Jill Shalvis, Ruthie Knox, Jennifer Crusie, Mary Ann Rivers), and this is another one to chalk up to the "Meh" category. I liked the concept -- grieving widow, after a respectful mourning period, falls for late wife's best friend -- but I found the plot dragged down with a lot of repetitive scenes hashing out the heroine's insecurities (and she has many, many insecurities -- body issues, abandonment issues, daddy issues, grief issues, trust issues, etc.), and I found the hero to be a flat, static character who didn't seem to have much emotional depth (though I appreciated both his grief and his readiness to move on from his late wife).

Also, the hero had a dialogue tic that made me crazy: he makes declarative statements with no subject. "Not going anywhere. Not giving you a break." "The hell you talking about?" "Gotta tuck you in, baby." Now, I'm not such a stickler that I get all shirty when someone says offhandedly, "Love you, babe," instead of "I love you," but in this book, everything Evan said was a sentence fragment with no subject pronoun, and sometimes it was confusing as to whether the missing subject should have been "I" or "You" or something else entirely. I found it distracting and annoying.