A western romantic suspense story always sounds like fun. In this case, a widow with a little boy, Joanna Watson, is involved. She and five-year-old Samuel live quietly in the mountain town of Settler's Fort, Montana. Due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Samuel is abducted, and this starts LOVE’S MOUNTAIN QUEST.
Veteran mountain man Isaac Bowen is the first one to find Joanna as she searches for her son and Laura, the lady who was keeping an eye on him at the stream. Joanna has to work as a washerwoman. Isaac discovers that the sheriff is lying dead nearby, and some horse tracks lead away from town. He suspects a local gang of predators, of the human variety. Raising the alarm, Isaac and Joanna get underway while a posse follows them.
This second book of the Hearts of Montana series shows a lot of the tough conditions and hardscrabble living of the day, as the pair doggedly pursue the kidnappers on horseback. Nights pass and days follow. The weather changes and the rocky trail lames mounts. Can they ever come up with the gang, and if so, what will happen?
There is a time and a place for romance. While cosying up to someone for warmth is understandable, it’s definitely odd that an attack by wolves should cause a few minutes of kissing while a horse needs its wounds treated and the wolves might return. We’re told that someone has shot a deer, as is evidenced by scraps of fur on the trail. I think the guts of the animal are more likely to be lying there, as the hunters generally paunched an animal to make it easier to carry, and get rid of what they would not eat. The wilderness road comes across as unforgiving and the criminals are, typically, not good horsemen. But they would be unable to travel far without a horse, so I did think they would take better care of the animals.
Misty M. Beller makes us respect her unlikely pair of rescuers, showing the determination they feel to save two young people who saw a crime and were taken to silence the witnesses. Joanna wants her son back, and Isaac, well, he has something on his conscience. LOVE’S MOUNTAIN QUEST is a novella-length adventure with many hair-raising situations and some strong fellowship.
After her son goes missing, Joanna Watson enlists Isaac Bowen--a man she prays has enough experience in the rugged country--to help. As they press on against the elements, they find encouragement in the tentative trust that grows between them, but whether it can withstand the danger and coming confrontation is far from certain in this wild, unpredictable land.
Young widow Joanna Watson is struggling to make a new home for her five-year-old son, Samuel, in the little mountain town of Settler's Fort. When she returns home from work to find Samuel and the woman watching him missing, with no lawman in town, she enlists a man she prays has enough experience in this rugged country to help.
Isaac Bowen wants nothing more than a quiet, invisible life in these mountains, far away from the bad decisions of his past. But he has a strong suspicion of who's behind the kidnapping, and if he's right, he knows all too well the evil they're chasing.
As they press on against the elements, Joanna fights to hold on to hope, while Isaac knows a reckoning is coming. They find encouragement in the tentative trust that grows between them, but whether it can withstand the danger and coming confrontation is far from certain in this wild, unpredictable land.