Diamonds & Dirt
May. 12th, 2022 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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bookheaven
Diamonds & Dirt by Stephanie LaVigneMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This short novel was a freebie and for that it wasn't bad. The problem was it wasn't really mysterious enough to be a mystery nor romantic enough to be a romance. Caitlyn left small town Tennesse for Chicago and has been doing well in high end real estate though her last romance tanked. She gets a call from her Grandparents' lawyer to come home because her grandparents have retired and gone on a trip around the world and left her their music hall.
Right there I'm annoyed AF. What kind of grandparents don't talk to their grandchild about something like this and expect her to drop her career and move home? Yeah I know it's the plot of half the movies on the Hallmark channel. It's why I don't watch it. So she goes home to the dying town of Fox HIll where everyone is selling out to a mysterious farming company that is a) doing no farming and b) is buying in-town businesses where you couldn't possible grow a crop. Worse the music hall is in great disrepair (thanks Grandma).
Caitlyn almost immediately reconnects with her BFF from high school, Reba and Reba's brother, Kurt who run one of the few extant businesses, a diner. Caitlyn decides she needs to fix the music hall before selling it and you can guess the Hallmarky tropes that follow. Kurt, who was in love with her since h.s. reluctantly starts helping because he knows she'll go back to the big city and he doesn't want his heart broken. Caitlyn will be seduced by the folksy town she escaped and want to return. So yeah pretty paint by numbers that way.
The mystery is why is this big business buying up all the town and what can they do to stop it and how exactly is Grandma's lawyer involved. As mysteries go, it's not much of one and the end of it is ridiculous. MINOR SPOILER: Using your phone to track someone okay great but to do it over several hundred miles over days? Yeah not so much.
The characters were likable enough but I wasn't that taken in by the story or it's HFN ending.
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