Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Jennie Jones, Mira, $29.99.
“Rural romance meets Blue Heelers.” Jennie Jones admits that she loves this tagline just as much as the television series.
The characters were important while she worked on the storyline, but she also had some ‘assistance with the policing side of things, and some excellent insight into small-town outback life, including romances leading to happy ever afters for members of the police force’.
Touching on life, mystery, love and laughter, Jennie’s story has fervour. Set in the Western Australian outback town of Mt Maria, 400 kilometres from the nearest city, there’s also focus on a possible crime.
Isabelle Jaxine Brown has made a good life for herself with her café and her animal rescue shelter, but the homecoming of her secret teenage daughter, Frances, changes everything.
Jax was only 17 when she was coerced into giving up the baby to Frances’s father and his wife. She will now get a chance to make it right. So it’s a good thing she hasn’t got time to think about recently returned Detective Senior Sergeant Jack Maxwell, who inexplicably disappeared in the middle of their only date last year.
However, Jack’s back in town to investigate suspicion of drug trafficking. She’d come to Mt Maria eight years ago—to at last get away from the years of guilt and remorse. To find somewhere far from what had been, and what she’d done.
Jax (as she’d been known for the last few years) is no longer the shy, frightened, good-girl 17-year-old who’d been coerced into doing things she ought not to have done. As a 30-year-old, she could handle anything. At least, that’s what she keeps telling herself.
Through no fault of their own making, Jaxine, Jack and Frances are misfits, and each of them has heart.
