Review: No Cowboys No Angels – Petie McCarty

Reviewed by: Linda Tonis

Member of the Paranormal Romance Review Team

When Kellen Brand and her brother Joey lost their mother they were shocked when they were contacted by a lawyer who explained her will. They never knew their mother had a will made up and they never expected what came next. Their mother left them the homestead in Riverside, West Virginia which both Kellen and Joey believed was sold years ago. In addition she left a letter telling them that she left them a guardian angel. Their mother always believed in angels but over the years Kellen lost faith.

Riverside holds nothing but bad memories for Kellen and she decided to go there and prepare it for sale especially since there was a developer interested in the property. Her memories are of hunger of wearing rags to school and of being bullied because of her families poverty. Now she and Joey are both doing very well and she refuses to allow anyone to make her feel inferior.

When she meets Luke who owns the ranch next door to her she is taken back by her attraction to him and to his insistence that she cannot sell her property. Kellen was not one to back down from what she wanted and she especially was not going to back down from a man who thought he had the right to make demands on her. The developer plans a resort which half the town is against and the other half is for, Luke is one of the one’s against and he will do whatever he has to to persuade Kellen to keep her property.

Kellen reunites with two of her friends who like her were the object of bullying and she also meets some of the store owners from when she was a child who welcome her with open arms. Still determined to sell because she can’t get the bad memories out of her mind she begins to hate Riverside less and less each day while starting to like Luke more and more. David was one of her friends and managed to go to college and become a teacher and now he teaches in the same school they all went to. He is determined to make a change and when he invites Kellen to see some of the changes he made the first thing that jumps out at her is the look of the children, the same torn clothes and the same hungry faces that she lived with growing up. As much as things change they seem to stay the same.

Kellen is a very strong willed woman and stubborn and when she sees something going on in the cemetery she can’t help but investigate, an investigation that is dangerous both to her for spying and for the community as a whole. Someone is burying waste material that when it begins to leak would be deadly to everyone in Riverside. Kellen realizes that she has feelings for Luke and he has feelings for her but he also has a secret, a secret he is sure would make her run. He also has failed to tell her who he really is and when she finds out she feels betrayed because trust is very important to her.

This was a wonderful book and I read it in one sitting which is something I only do when a book holds my interest from start to finish. There is a lot of suspense, danger and two people who have a problem communicating. The author indicates that there is an angel in this book, one that we have to try to figure out and I thought I had it two different times and was proved wrong. The mystery angel was definitely a mystery. Surprises, secrets, romance and suspense what more can you want.