Twin of Fire by Jude Deveraux **

Ok, now that I've read the companion book to Twin of Ice, I can definitely say it was a 2 star read.

I was so confuzzled by Twin of Ice that, to be fair, I gave it 3 stars, hoping that maybe reading Twin of Fire would clear it up and I'd at least find it average or mediocre.

Nope. I struggled and slogged and... ok, I finally ended up skimming just to get it over with, because I couldn't bring myself to DNF it. ("did not finish")

This is Blair's side of the story - how she managed to boink her twin sister's fiancé and marry him, then rewrite her personal history to be that she was always in love with him.

There were so many odd things in this story. For one thing, everyone in town always called both girls Blair Houston, since they were identical twins, one named Blair, one named Houston. However, the girls are now 21 and Blair has been living with relatives in Pennsylvania since she was 12. Uh, no one realized that it was only Houston living there all this time? Go figure. Mind you, this is even when they call her house where she is living with her husband - uh, they still can't tell which twin would be answering? What is it, a town of dolts?

Once again, there was weird dialogue where the response had nothing to do with the statement it was in reply to, over and over. As an example, Blair asks Lee, How often do you come here (to a cabin)? and Lee replies, Since I was a child. Hmmm. I'm thinking, and how does that quantify how often you come here, Lee?

Plus we had oodles of that obnoxious plot conceit where the heroine is determined to, no matter what, follow - or lead - the hero into every dangerous situation there is, because... well, because she said so. And the flip side of that is the hero insisting he'll tie her to the bed to keep her safe while putting himself in numerous dangerous situations, even though he's not an ex-Navy SEAL or undercover operative. Arg. Hate that.

Well, all in all, the story was bizarre, the characters odd, the writing so weird I found myself staring at the page wondering if it was a translation from a foreign language. A Bad Translation.

I'm not even going to elaborate any more on the plot - something about mines, lady doctors, twins (did I mention Blair already had a fiancé when she had sex with her sister's fiancé?), well too many different things were going on and...

2 stars. I've wasted enough time on this series.