You live on a remote (and fictional) island off the coast of Washington state. For the past couple of days you've noticed a yacht, that looks disabled, from the shore. What do you do?
1) You live on an island! You call the Coast Guard and report what you've seen.
2) Hmmm, that boat looks in trouble. You call the local cop, he's the only law enforcement on the island.
3) You call the local handyman who is hot as hell, but has the personality of a bear you woke up from hibernation even though you've barely been civil to each other ever since you first met.
If you picked #1 or #2 please go to the back of the line. You have a problem with thinking logically ergo no way in heck you could possibly be a romance heroine. At least not the heroine in Her Other Secret by HelenKay Dimon. The improbable set-up of this romance only gets worse when a mystery man, dressed in a suit, walks out of the water without a backward glance at the hero and heroine standing on the shore.
Tessa Jenkins moved to remote Whitaker Island to outrun a scandal not of her making. Hansen Rye is the local handyman with a surly personality laying low after his life imploded back east. Then the man who walks out of the water turns up dead and Hansen starts looking guilty as heck given the man was tied to Hansen's mysterious past.
And there's the rub. Hansen looks VERY guilty. I mean, I know he's not guilty because he's the romance hero but...NOBODY ELSE IN THIS STORY KNOWS THAT! They all immediately jump to his defense even though Hansen has kept everyone at arm's length and has a barely housebroken personality. They just all immediately KNOW he's innocent. The word "trust" is thrown around a lot but I'm never convinced on WHY they trust him. He's tight-lipped and slow to share the truth - I mean, that warrants at least a tinch of suspicion in my opinion.
The further I got away from the improbable set-up, the better the story got. I got wrapped up in the mystery. Although with the small population on the island, this reads like a locked room mystery where it really can only be ONE person - you just have to wait to have the motive unraveled.
Dimon does a great job of creating a small town atmosphere with her island world-building, which is also a slight issue since I was often times way more interested in the secondary characters (OMG - Ben the cop!) than the main romantic couple. To say I'm a little disappointed that the next book in this series is about Hansen's brother (who never appears on the page in this book) is a disappointment. Jury still out if I'll make the pit stop with him, or just set this series aside until, hopefully, Ben's romance finally appears.
YMMV
Final Grade = C
