The Ruby Brooch - A Review

By

Katherine Logan

SYNOPSIS

As a child, I fell in love with history, then later as a young adult, I started reading historical fiction. A passion for history and a fascination with mysteries and time travel led to writing time travel romance.  

One of my favorite writing experiences happened a few years ago during the Christmas holidays. I was working on the stampede scene in THE RUBY BROOCH and I needed gun information. So I went to a local store. My first visit ever! The store was crowded with holiday shoppers. I stood at the door not knowing what to do. The cashier asked if he could help me. I said, "I need a gun that will kill as many cows as possible in the shortest amount of time." The store went completely silent. The men stared at me. I had a lot of explaining to do. After they discovered I was a writer, everyone wanted to give me gun advice. 

From the Inside Flap

From the white-plank fenced pastures of Lexington, Kentucky, to the Bay of San Francisco, The Ruby Brooch, a saga steeped in family tradition and mystery, follows a young woman's amazing journey as she tries to solve the murder of her birth parents 160 years in the past.

REVIEW

I love a good historical romance, but throw in Western Historical Romance, and I am a sucker.  I grew up teething on Louis L’Amour.  Despite the preconceived notions that he is a men’s cowboy author, his novels were full of rich western history and were filled with actual magical locations throughout the West.  He was also not afraid of a heavy dollop of romance and believed very much in “happily ever after”.

I feel that I have found another magical spinner of western romance in Katherine Logan, plus the added aura of just a touch of fantasy with the fun of time travel as her story whisks the reader back and forth between the mid-1800’s and the current day twenty-first century.  The characters that Ms. Logan introduced us to were bigger than life, as all western heroes should be, when the heroine found herself back in the 1800s.  What was fun was that those bigger than life heroes were quite ready for the strong headed, thoroughly modern heroine that was doing her best to fit into a more docile role of the 1800’s woman, and not quite making it. 

It was easy to fall into the story and fall in love with the hero as the storyline rocked along on the Oregon Trail on the un-cushioned seat of the heroine’s buckboard.  Being the brilliant woman that she was, she brought taboo items from the 21^st century back with her to make sure she could survive the wilds of the Wild West and in doing so saved lives of others around her.  Her training as a volunteer Paramedic definitely came to her rescue on more than one occasion, too.

As with any great western there were Villains, and the Villains in The Ruby Brooch were the ones responsible for killing the heroine’s parents…or were they?  The mystery of the letter left to the heroine, along with the Ruby Brooch that transported her between centuries left the heroine with few clues and an agonizing need to find the answer to who she was…

Like the giant of western writers, Ms. Logan painted fantastic scenery displays of the west that the wagon train traveled through, providing the reader with glimpses of the beauty of an untarnished land as she painted her landscapes in bright colored strokes across the pages.  Likewise, she spent equal time developing the personalities of the main characters giving us glimpses of the many layers of who they were and who they longed to be. 

The love story was not a disappointment.  Like a good loaf of homemade bread, Ms Logan introduced all the necessary ingredients and then added them to the mix as needed, adding the yeast of yearning for love to mix in and a large dollop of sugar to feed the love and help it to grow and infuse through the rest of the mixture.  As time and the story moved forward, she message and kneaded the growing attraction and love, then laid it aside to perk and rise.  Later she brought it out and pounded that love flat with a beating of stress and strife as the story went through stressful period… For as with any love, love grows and is beat down, but true love grows back, sweeter and better than before.  In the end, her final presentation was as deliciously sweet and comforting as a freshly baked loaf of bread, fresh from the oven. 

By the time I had finished consuming the novel, much like a freshly baked loaf of bread (smile), I was longing for another fresh loaf, hot out of the oven.  I hope we are not long in waiting. 

This novel was a wonderful FIVE STAR RATING. Katherine Logan will be an author I will be re-visiting and looking to read again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katherine grew up in Louisville, Kentucky and attended college in New Jersey, where she earned a BA in Psychology and a minor in Criminal Justice. After attending the Philadelphia Institute for Paralegal Training, she returned to Central Kentucky and worked as a real estate and tax paralegal. Katherine is an avid reader, a marathoner, and lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Website: www.KatherineLLogan 
Blog: www.KatherineLowryLogan 
Facebook: Katherine Lowry Logan, author
Twitter: @KathyLLogan