~ Review: Stolen Moments ~

Sionna Michaels is trying to get her life back together after the suicide of her husband.  True, she and Joe had been growing apart when he ended his life.  But he was still her husband and there is still, in her mind, a cloud of suspicion over his death.  She finally decides to confront the man she believes is responsible in some way for Joey’s death; his college friend David Young.

David Young doesn’t quite know what to make of Sionna.  After a disastrous first meeting, he finds himself drawn to the beautiful Sionna, and that is something he never planned on.  For he knows something about Joey that Sionna doesn’t, and he is afraid that the knowledge with destroy her.

Despite the odds, they take a chance on love, only to almost lose everything when David’s former fiancée decides that she wants David back.  And if the only way she can get him is to destroy Sionna’s happiness, so be it…

STOLEN MOMENTS is an apt name for this book, because David’s ex-fiancée, Jaunice, stole way too much of this book.  He lives in Virginia and she lives in New York.  Yet she found it necessary to make not one, not two, but three round trip flights between New York and Virginia to throw herself at him.  That’s a lot of flying for a romance novel, even when it is a main character.  When it is a really irritating secondary, it’s a whole lot of interference.  Jaunice would have been a lot more effective as a villainess had she actually resided in Virginia or at the very least stayed put for a week or two so that she could have done something other than make prank phone calls to Sionna.  Yeah, she went there…

I would have preferred to get to know the David and Sionna a lot better, and spend more time experiencing the two of them grow into the passionate love affair they are supposedly having.  They were strangely isolated people; aside from David’s ex-fiancée and Sionna’s teenaged twin sisters who popped in for a visit, neither one seemed to know anyone else.  Sionna called her mother in Georgia once and talked to her boss at the newspaper where she was supposedly employed, although she spent more time on leave than working.  I’m not even sure why the twin sisters showed up since they bickered briefly and left in a huff.  A lot more of the hero and heroine, a lot less of the old girlfriend, plus some interesting friends or even enemies, would have made this a more exciting read.

September 2000