The Second Runaway Brides Novel

It’s been awhile since I finished the second book in Kaki Warner’s Runaway Brides trilogy, Colorado Dawn.  I guess what really sums up my feelings about this book is that I didn’t order the final book in the trilogy until yesterday, months after I finished Colorado Dawn.

Colorado Dawn focuses on Maddie Wallace, one of the town-ladies met on in the first novel.  She had married a Scottish officer some years ago and, felling abandoned by him, had fled Scotland for the US with a new career as a professional photographer.  Now, her husband has finally tracked her down and come after her himself.  His perspective on who abandoned who is a little different.

I had been enjoying Kaki Warner’s books as fun historical fiction with a bit of romance and adventure.  Colorado Dawn seemed to hop the fence to full-blown romance novel.  That’s not really my thing.  I just found it incredibly hard to believe that in the late 1800s, a young lady sitting at a dinner table with all her friends would have her hand under the table playing with her husband’s junk.

So, yeah, the descriptions get a lot more vivid, which sort of takes away from the rest of the story.  But, it is still neat to follow the main characters from Heartbreak Creek, and there’s still a good story in the book.  The new lover introduced in this book is straight from Scotland so it’s fun to parse through his thick accent. 

The action isn’t nearly as nail-biting as any of the other Kaki Warner books I’ve read, but that’s ok by me.  It was in some ways a nice break to be able to put the book down and go to sleep when bed time came.   We’ll see if the third book is more along the lines of the Blood Rose Trilogy or this book.