True Love

True Love by Jude Deveraux
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Alix Madsen spent only one summer on Nantucket when she was a small child, so when Adelaide Kingsley dies and leaves Alix her home on the island for one year, Alix is puzzled and reluctant to go...until her boyfriend dumps her. After that, a year away seems much more enticing. What she doesn't know is that the year has strings attached: she is supposed to uncover what happened when Valentina Montgomery vanished two hundred and two years ago.

For his part, Jared Montgomery Kingsley really does not want Alix living in his home for the next year. She's a newly graduated architecture student, and he is a famous architect who has no desire to put up with the fawning adoration of an acolyte. He owes her parents for essentially saving him and putting him on the path to where he is now, yet he hates that he has to keep their secrets and not tell Alix that each of her parents has spent a great deal of time on Nantucket these past twenty years or so. However, his grand plan to avoid her falls through when she and her best friend Izzy arrive three days early. That's when he begins to discover that Alix is everything he never knew he wanted.

As expected, book one in the trilogy helped explain some of the context for book two, For All Time which I accidentally read first. I highly recommend reading the series in order.

When I began reading True Love, I wasn't sure I was going to like it. Jared starts out arguing with his (several times great) grandfather, the ghost who's haunted Kingsley House for the past two centuries. Caleb has been visible to each of the heirs as well as the occasional female relative...and Alix when she was four years old. The argument read like a temper tantrum, making 36-year-old Jared seem petulant and immature, but thankfully I kept reading because it got better. While he will never be my favorite fictional hero, Jared did grow up and develop over the course of the book.

For readers' advisors: character doorway is primary, story and setting secondary. Some sex scenes and sexual references. I can't recall if there is any swearing.

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