Tall, Dark, and Determined by Kelly Hake

From Amazon:

Welcome to Hope Falls where three enterprising young females are accepting applications for husbands-for-hire. With one woman already snagged, Lacey Lyman is one of only two remaining. No one really catches her eye until a handsome hunter arrives. Will Lacey find a way to bag her prey? Determined to investigate why Hope Falls’s mine collapsed, Chase Dunstan poses as a potential husband and a hunter, giving him the perfect excuse to poke around inside and outside of town. If only he could get the chatterbox Lacey Lyman off his trail. Can he keep his cover while solving the mystery of the mine?

From Misty:

Five chapters into this book, I finally broke down and looked up the reviews on Amazon so I could figure out what the story was actually about.  Not a good sign, people. 

This is the second in Hake's Husbands for Hire series, and I think it has trouble standing alone, at least to start out with.  I'm assuming the first book, Rugged and Relentless, which I have not read, gives a lot of background that is both lacking and needed in this one.  It is not that the information was not there, only that it was not clear.  Five chapters in and I still did not know who the main characters were supposed to be, and when I read on Amazon that Chase Dunstan was the hero of this book, I thought, "Who?"  I had by this time read the name, of course, but Chase had been going by an alias and between that and the SO many other names in those first chapters (names I would have recognized if I had read the first book), I just could not separate him out from the all the others, and after a chapter or two, I didn't want to anymore.  Call me impatient.

Hake's writing is at times clever, but her style can be confusing as it jumps from scene to scene with no background information on the scene until a few scenes later.  So you eventually get the information, but not when your mind wants it. 

I love the title, the cover, the cute premise, even the story and much of the writing and the banter between the characters.  I definitely recommend Tall, Dark, and Determined to other readers.  But I was confused for so long that it took a lot of the enjoyment out of it for me.