...Bookfanatic

It was bad editing.

Karma is book #33 in Carol Lynne's series Cattle Valley and sadly it's not going down as one of the better books in this series for me. Admittedly it had a strike against it before I even started reading it, but putting that aside I was determined to give it a fair chance.

There are no spoilers here this is all part of the book description or info from previous books...

Going into this book my only issue was that it was about Guy 'freakin' Hoisington. He's shown up here and there in previous books. Exuding a sense of self importance that only added to his obnoxious nature and more often than not drunk as the proverbial skunk. So was I going to like Guy...probably not or at least I wasn't seeing it happen and predictably it did not.

Our other MC is Shane Rendell and we've seen him around a time or two. Shane, I at least liked. He's definitely one of the good guys. He's had a tough life and he's worked hard to make a better one for himself. Sadly he also seems to be hopelessly in love with Guy. Well they do say 'love is blind' and in Shane's case love is also lacking in self preservation.

Shane and Guy have a history. Apparently they dated for a short period of time during which Guy was relatively sober and Shane fell in love with him. Unfortunately Guy 'hastily cast him aside' in plain speak 'Guy kicked his ass to the curb' and from the sounds of it he was none to nice about it.

Ironically towards the end of a previous book in this series a very drunken Guy Hoisington caused an accident that put both him and an innocent victim in the hospital and leaving Guy in a coma, when he comes out of his coma he's left sober and having to face the consequences of his actions and the truth of who and what he's become. The only person at Guy's bedside during his hospital ordeal is none other than Shane. Shane unlike everyone else remembers the brief glimpse that he got of a different man one that no one else in Cattle Valley has had the privilege of seeing and he's determined to help guy find that man again.

I actually liked the first part of this book more than I had anticipated being possible. Did I like Guy no, did I come to like Guy not really. But I did like the Shane and I have to admit I pretty much agreed with everyone else in the story that he deserved better than Guy, however, I admired his loyalty and his perseverance. There were things in Guys past that explained why he'd become the person he had. I'm not saying it made anything ok just that I at least understood what put him on the path he was on before the accident.

If the last part of the book had flowed better with the beginning and spent a bit more time making the relationship between Shane and Guy believable (there were things in Shane's past that made it hard for me to believe he would so willingly fall into a relationship with an alcoholic) I probably would have come out of it wanting to give this book at least 3 stars and I may have even liked Guy a bit more. Unfortunately for me the last part seemed to get rushed. I'm not really sure why at 88 pages I'm pretty sure that it could have been afforded a little more attention to detail to maintain the quality of the story, but maybe that's just me. This was the main reason that the story went from being at least a 3 star read to 2.5 stars. It just didn't stay solid enough and I started to not enjoy or find the relationship between the MCs as believable as I had towards the beginning  and now for the moment that Karma killed...

This goes to editing and maybe I'm being a bit picky here but for me authors are wordsmiths, if you will. Just as a blacksmith specializes in forging metals, an author specializes in taking words and crafting them into a story. So with that goes the ideal that one of the very most basic skills an author should have is an understanding of the language that they are working with, what a word means and how to use it to create images, express thoughts, move a story's plot along and the importance of ensuring that their story is presented in it's best possible form. Ok, so that's the basis of why this one little thing stuck in my brain and while it honestly had no impact on my rating of the book it did annoy the hell out of me.

At the end of this story Shane is having a moment where he's realizing that it's not Karma that guides a man through life, so here's where I'm going to use the exact quote because there is no better way to explain this and it really gives nothing away in regards to the story. So let's play a game, when I was in elementary school this was a thing that one of my English teachers would frequently do on test where they would give us the same sentence with only a word or sometimes two different and we had to select the one that was correct...

1. "Shane had given a lot of thought to karma, and he'd decided it wasn't fate that guided a man through life, it was strength, integrity and a willingness to become a better person in the face of adversary..."

2. "Shane had given a lot of thought to karma, and he'd decided it wasn't fate that guided a man through life, it was strength, integrity and a willingness to become a better person in the face of adversity..."

3. "Shane had given a lot of thought to karma, and he'd decided it wasn't fate that guided a man through life, it was strength, integrity and a willingness to become a better person in the face of adversarial..."

So if you want to know which one is correct and which one the author used just check the spoiler...

I have to admit sometimes I'm not sure why I keep reading this series and as near as I can surmise it's because at the heart of it I like the premise that the author has for the series and the optimist in me wants to keep believing that she can do it justice. Overall I think there's such potential for both the storyline and the collection of characters it contains. So yeah, I'll probably keep reading it and it'll remain one of my conflicting but guilty pleasures until it ends or something goes so horribly wrong that I just can't do it anymore. It's just one of those things that I hate to love but for some reason I love it anyways ;-)