Montana Royalty by B.J. Daniels

And I apologize again for the stock picture. Sometimes I think I should just break into the school library on weekends. They really should be open more hours.

Montana Royalty by B.J. Daniels is being offered for free, at least at my local Borders. There's a big ol' FREE GIFT emblem on the front cover. I guess it's meant to get people into reading Harlequin Intrigue books, though I'd have thought they would want to pick a more typical example than this one.

Originally published in 2008, Montana Royalty is a sort of twisted Cinderella story crossed with the best kind of soap-opera shenanigans--think Dynasty times Dallas divided by One Life to Live. I'd first read B.J. Daniels with this month's Boots and Bullets, so I sort of knew what I was getting into:  both are an insane combination of mistaken identity, baby-switching, and murder that stands out from the typical Intrigue book.




The build-up in this one was slow and a bit tedious at first, as a seemingly endless parade of royals from an unnamed country are introduced and given motivations. A princess has been buying up all the land in one part of Montana, and Rory Buchanan (a relative of Asa's?) is the sole holdout buyer. Then a palace gets built. Then the whole damn royal court moves in. While the first half of the book suffered under the weight of so many characters and names to remember, it gives the masquerade ball at the center of the book a good amount of room to play in, and makes guessing what exactly is going on a lot more interesting than you usually get from an Intrigue book.


There's a few mysteries going on. Rory slept with one of the royal grooms, Devlin Barrow, in a line shack during a storm. There's someone stalking her and vandalizing her property. Devlin is in Montana because he wants the truth about his mother's murder, and the only woman who knows that truth left his country for America. Princess Evangeline is planning to do something desperate to stay relevant after her father, the king, dies and is stuck in a dreary marriage. Like Boots and Bullets, the romance aspect is mostly secondary to the intrigue, and it's a welcome change from other titles in the series.

The main characters are fairly flat, as is sadly the case in many category romances, but the supporting cast has enough color to keep things interesting. It's also fairly slow-moving for a novel that, at 212 pages, comes in just shy of my other Intrigue books in length (the two at hand are, oddly, both 217 pages long. This may warrant further investigation.) I really do enjoy the shift in focus from the romance to the surrounding plot, but when the page count is this tight there's a certain amount of sacrifice in the level of emotional involvement. I had the same problem with Boots and Bullets; it kept my interest as a mystery reader, but not as a reader of romance novels. I found myself skimming the scenes between our plucky protags to get to more interesting action and scheming and such.

Montana Royalty gets a PG-13 for some fade-to-black action and one scene of a creepy creeper creeping creepily, and a C+ for being a fighter, but not a lover.