Lone Heart Pass by Jodi Thomas

As a romance reader I have admitted that I tend to sway more in the erotica direction than I do in the proper romance direction.  There’s something addictive about literally feeling the blood in your veins heat up while you do nothing more than read a book.  Sometimes though you get the craving for something more simple, more… innocent.  Jodi Thomas’ Lone Heart Pass is that sort of book.

Jodi Thomas’s novel is well-researched and well-written with an accompanying slow burn of a romantic story.  Jubilee Hamilton is an exhausted campaign manager with three losses to her name.  Her boyfriend leaves her, she’s suddenly unemployed, and she finds out that her grandfather has passed away leaving her his ranch.  Jubilee doesn’t know a thing about running a ranch, but she’s desperate to make it work.  Thankfully a seasoned ranch hand, Charley Collins knows what it takes.  Together they attempt to build a successful business, fight attraction for one another, and somehow find themselves wrapped up in a murder investigation.

The love between Charley and Jubilee builds slowly.  The way that you or I might fall into love.  It doesn’t happen at first sight, or even overnight, or even in a couple days.  It doesn’t happen in a flourish of drama, either.  It’s all very… normal.  It’s a cute, mostly conflict free, relationship, which is preferable given the amount of non-romantic drama swamping the novel.

I am used to reading romance novels with mysteries.  Lone Heart Pass doesn’t have a mystery in the sense that you spend effort trying to guess who the murderer is.  You follow the story, you’re curious about the ending, but you aren’t really invested in solving the case with the characters.  I do not think this is a fault of the novel, however, it is just the type of novel that Thomas wrote.

I learned quite a lot about ranching from this novel.  Thomas did her research or has lived the life, it’s honestly hard to tell.  While many novels gloss over the unfamiliar, Thomas explains it so well that I may even be able to hold my own in a conversation with a legitimate rancher.  I might as well have been reading a woman named Jubilee’s memoir.

One complaint I had though was that the amount of facts overtook the amount of romance by a lot.  Maybe it was because I was expecting a romance romance novel, which would be my own fault, and thus this complaint wouldn’t count as a genuine complaint.  The romance could have been eliminated completely and it wouldn’t have impacted the overall plot in the least, which is atypical for a romance novel.

This novel was not exactly my taste.  I probably would not seek out another novel by Jodi Thomas, but that’s not really her fault.  It was a pleasant, comfortable read, but as I have always known, I lean more towards dramatic, erotic, exciting novels that keep me on the edge of my seat.  Lone Heart Pass was the book I read before I went to bed because it was that relaxing.