Western Romance Novels

If there's anything I like to read it's a good Western romance story. I used to like them set in the old West, but now, stories about the modern West are my preference. And no one is better at the latter than my favorite author, Jeannie Watt.

Jeannie has a new modern West novel slated for release in February 2009. It's titled A Cowboy's Redemption and already I like it. In the first place, the cover has a cowboy and a girl nuzzling and the two fit my imagined perfect partners to a tee. In my mind, the cowboy is me and the girl is the spitting image of the girl I have dreamed about for years.

And they're leaning on what looks like a beat-up old pickup truck. Men like pickups, so they'll be drawn to this book right away. And women like men who drive pickups. How's that for capturing an audience?

But that's the marketing department at Harlequin Superromance. What about the good stuff, like the plot and the characters? Secrecy is the name of the game in the publishing business. The plot of this book hasn't been revealed yet, but if Jeannie writes true to form, it's going to be filled with twists and turns with a surprise ending. She's good at keeping her readers' eyes glued to the page.

However, despite the secrecy, I've managed to dig up a hint of what's to come. The front cover of the book includes a single descriptive sentence: "He won't let her family ruin him... again." Already I'm interested and in my demented imagination, I'm trying to fill-in the blanks. But on reflection, I'll wait for the book to hit the book stores. Jeannie is very talented at surprusing her readers.

The book is available for pre-order from Amazon.com, as well as from a British outlet that I ran across by accident called Fantastic Fiction. I know that the Brits have always liked to read about the American West and they've been enthralled with the cowboy image of America in general. I'll bet Jeannie has a nice number of readers over there.

By the way, the main difference between Old West romances and Modern West romances is simple to figure out. If you've read some Old West romances, you'll notice right away that they didn't have sex in the old days. The cowboy kissed his horse and rode off into the sunset.

Doesn't work that way in 21st Century America. Men don't run around kissing pickup trucks and then burning rubber across a rolling prairie.

Cop on Loan

That's an enigmatic title for a book, isn't it? But all will come clear when you read Jeannie Watt's latest superromance novel by that title.

You've heard me say this before, but Jeannie is one of my favorite writers and I eagerly look forward to her latest effort. I fully anticipate a top-flight read when the book is released in October 2008. I'm definitely getting my advance order in ASAP.

In the meantime, you can learn a little bit about the story from Jeannie's website and from an excerpt from the novel at eHarlequin.

Men (especially me) aren't good at summarizing the words of others. We tend to re-state in the male jargon, which sometimes alters an author's meaning. Suffice to say, then, that Cop On Loan is about a big city cop on loan to a small town police force for 30 days, where he meets a library technician under mysterious circumstances.

He rents her basement, another oddity that Jeannie makes clear later, and matters proceed from there. This is a Superromance novel which holds out the lure of a mystery, a slant sure to appeal to men. That's all I'm gonna say until I read the book.

Okey, dokey. Have a good read.

The Horseman's Secret

I've just finished reading my third Jeannie Watt romance novel, The Horseman's Secret. I said my third, not Jeannie's third. Her third was The Brother Returns, a sequel to Horseman, which I read first followed by A Difficult Woman, her first published novel. Confusing, eh? Sorry. That's just the way my mind works.

How come I didn't read the two intertwined stories in sequence? I couldn't locate The Horseman's Secret. My daughter was kind enough to scout around for me until she found one at a Barnes and Noble. She mailed it and I received it yesterday, opened the box and began reading.

I wasn't at all disappointed that I read it out of sequence. Both The Brother Returns and The Horseman's Secret are stand-alone novels. No prior knowledge of the story lines is needed for the full enjoyment of either.

However, since I already knew the horseman's secret, I took a different tack when I read the book. At first, I scanned through it, and then I decided to read it more thoroughly not for the romance between the two main characters, Regan Flynn and Will Bishop, but for the atmosphere that Jeannie Watt so eloquently and familiarly weaves into her stories.

As luck would have it, I fell in love with one of the characters despite my initial resolution. A special horse captured my attention as soon as it came into the story, a horse named Skitters, so called for its tendency to jump and buck unexpectedly. Will Bishop bought Skitters for his daughter Kylie, but soon realized that the horse wasn't suitable for her. He resolved to get rid of Skitters, but Kylie had already fallen in love with it. So here we have Will conflicted between Kylie's happiness and her safety. The ending to Skitter's story is just absolutely pluperfect. If you want to know what it is, you'll have to beg, borrow, or buy the book.

While reading for cowboy atmosphere, a couple of terms popped up in the novel that brought back some old memories. One was Bluetick, as in a hound dog used in the South largely for hunting 'coons, raccoons. I wondered what the heck Nevadans used Blueticks for. Still do. Gotta do some research on it.

The other term Jeannie used was hay flake. At first that one puzzled me. Then I shifted into image mode and tried to visualize a hay flake. Was it loose hay stirred up in the wind and drifting to Earth like snoflakes? Obviously that wasn't it because Jeannie mentioned feeding a small horse one hay flake and a larger horse two snow flakes.

Then it came to me. A hay flake is a section of a bale of hay. When the wire holding a bale together is cut, the bale spreads apart much like an accordian. Those spread-out segments are hay flakes. I'd seen them as a kid.

None of this has much if anything to do with romance to most folks, but I'm reminded that the West and cowboys occupay a special place in the mythology of America. The American West is a romanticized vision of the founding myth of America, a solid, determined, indepentent individual braving the odds to make a new life in the West.

This vision is embodied in novels and stories and movies galore. My first exposure to the romantic West was the old Saturday afternoon Western. That was followed by the novels of Zane Grey.

Now, we have authors like Jeannie Watt presenting great romances set in the modern West. I'm eagerly awaiting her Cop on Loan scheduled for release in October 2008. I don't know anything at all about the book's plot or setting, but I've spent some time speculating. We'll see how close my thoughts are to the actual story. One thing I am almost certain about. It will be set in Nevada, a very special spot with cowboys and beautiful maidens galore. If she shifts the location elsewhere, I would be greatly surprised.

Okey, dokey, good reading.

My Favorite Romance Author

...happens to be Jeannie Watt.

I have an unfortunate habit of raving about the things I like. And this novelist is a newly-discovered delight.

I stumbled across her purely by accident one day while passing a bookrack in a supermarket. I'd been looking for a Western novel and my eye happened to fall on the nicely illustrated front cover of a book sitting askew in the bottom shelf, partially obscured by another book. All I could see was a cowboy and some ranch buildings, so I grabbed the book and ran.

At home, I noticed that it was a Harlequin romance novel and I put it aside, thinking perhaps I'd send it to my daughter since I never read romance novels. It just isn't manly. Or so I thought.

Later that day in a moment of inactivity, I leafed through the book and couldn't put it down. The title of the novel was The Brother Returns and the author was Jeannie Watt.

Later, I did a little research for other novels she'd written and found A Difficult Woman, which I promptly ordered from Amazon.com. This one was better yet, so good that I wrote a review on Amazon, followed recently with an as yet unpublished review for Barnes and Nobel. Writing reviews is something else I never do.

Now, I'm scouting around for The Horseman's Secret, a book that gave birth to a sequel about a brother who returns. Fortunately, my daughter has ordered one for me, which if all goes well, should arrive in a week or so.

In the meantime, I eagerly await Jeannie's newest novel, Cop on Loan, scheduled for release in October 2008. I have no idea of the plot of this story, but the title intrigues me.

Later this month, you might catch Jeannie at the Romance Writers of America annual national conference, to be held in San Francisco at the Marriott, July 30-August 2, 2008.

So, what is it about her writing that I particularly like? For one thing, she writes about ordinary people. They live ordinary lives much like the lives of the rest of us. Until love strikes. But even then we can relate to their angst.

And her characters are superbly drawn. She rounds out not only the protagonists but the supporting cast as well. In A Difficult Woman, she drew my personal attention by skillfully weaving an older man, Luke, into the story so completely that I immediately recognized him as someone out of my own youth.

My Mom and Dad had an older friend much like Luke. This friend was a bartender at, surprise, surprise, a place in California called the Owl Club. Coincidentally, the Owl Club is the name of a casino in Jeannie's story and the central location for much of the action in A Difficult Woman. Not the same Owl Club of my youth, of course, but close enough to fire my dormant imagination.

Jeannie's dialogue, especially the male dialogue, also drew my attention. If you didn't know better, you'd think that Jeannie Watt is a male author using a female pen name. But no, Jeannie is a woman, a school teacher, married, with two grown children.

Above and behind her startling technique and writing skills, however, I respect her hard word and tenacity. Here is a person who has persevered. Among other things, she's taught school, raised children, worked a ranch, and goodness knows what else, all the while following her dream of becoming a writer. Her life story reads like a novel in and of itself.

Okay, I've raved long enough. I've been criticized in the past for pouring it on too thickly, but as I mentioned earlier, it's one of my many character defects. The possibility that I might change is rather remote.

We like what we like. What else can I say?

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Romance Novels

I don't ordinarily read romance novels, preferring instead a good Western. However, put together a modern Western with romance in it, and I might be able to get into it.

That's what happened with a couple of novels by Jeannie Watt. I read her "The Brother Returns" followed by "A Difficult Woman." I stumbled across them by accident at a super market book rack. I was enthralled by her writing, character development, and dialogue. I'll just sum it all by by saying, "Man, she's a gooood novelist.

Another favorite author is Nicholas Sparks. His novels aren't strictly romance. Some are romances wrapped in a mystery, and those are the one I like. I've just finished "A Bend in the Road." Before that, I had read "True Believer" followed by its sequel "Love at First Sight," two top-notch novels.

These two fiction authors are the first I have read in more years than I can recall without giving away my real age, which isn't as high on the scale as most think but certainly high enough to provide me with the wisdom to avoid adolescent impulses.

If you haven't already read these authors, try them. You may like them.