From Amazon:
Copper Ridge, Oregon's favorite bachelor is about to meet his match
If the devil wore flannel, he'd look like Ace Thompson. He's gruff. Opinionated. Infernally hot. The last person that Sierra West wants to ask for a bartending job—not that she has a choice. Ever since discovering that her "perfect" family is built on a lie, Sierra has been determined to make it on her own. Resisting her new boss should be easy when they're always bickering. Until one night, the squabbling stops…and something far more dangerous takes over.
Ace has a personal policy against messing around with staff—or with spoiled rich girls. But there's a steel backbone beneath Sierra's silver-spoon upbringing. She's tougher than he thought, and so much more tempting. Enough to make him want to break all his rules, even if it means risking his heart…
So it looks like Maisey Yates is going to follow the plan laid out by Shalvis' Lucky Harbor and Mallery's Fool's Gold and run an extended small town series focus around small groups of three, a series within a series. This is a setup I enjoy, and of course now I'll be keeping my eye out looking for potential matchups.
As it turns out, this one is a bit hard to talk about without spoilers, as a major event happens early on in the book. This was shocking to me, something you rarely see in novels published this decade, and I immediately worried that it would fall flat. The unfolding is well done tho, with the reader clearly in the loop from the first moment and instead of playing off as completely corny, the expectation from the reader is built up nicely. I thought it was handled really well. However, I suspect some readers will hate it. (Sorry to be vague, but spoilers!)
Ace is charming and hot and from his appearance in the first three Copper Ridge books I thought I knew who he was. As it turns out, Ave hides a lot behind his role as the helpful bartender, and his life is empty and lonely. Ace knows everyone and likes everyone but feels like he's messed up so much of his life outside of Copper Ridge and can't really ever recover. Fortunately for him, Sierra comes along and demands that he face his past (it's really not optional, at all) and while he struggles a bit with it he ultimately pulls it together.
Sierra is a bit of a contradiction. She is a spoiled rich kid, absolutely, but she's also smart and capable. She might have worked at daddy's ranch, but she was good at it. She struggles to find her place when she leaves the ranch, because of course everyone thinks she only got the job because she's family, when really she's a hard worker and completely able to handle what's thrown her way. I did have a hard time with her stubbornness, and was grateful when she acknowledged that even she wasn't consistent (for example, she keeps driving the truck her dad paid for, after cutting ties.)
In the end, I did enjoy this a good bit. I wasn't expecting to, after the big secret is revealed, but it ended on a good note and I would not hesitate to request another.
One Night Charmer is released on April 19th.
It's funny I had way more problems with Ace than I did Sierra. I liked Sierra from the beginning though I was glad she acknowledged the whole issue with the truck but I spent most of the book wanting to slap Ace.
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