Review - Sometimes a Lady

Title: Sometimes a Lady
Author: Linda Randall Wisdom
Publishing Date: 1992
Genre: Contemporary
Rating: B-
Sensuality: Warm

Elise Carpenter is a widow with three daughters. She and her husband were in their veterinary clinic late one evening when a group of men attacked them looking for drugs. Her husband died that night and Elise suffered a brutal beating. Now, several years later she finds herself in a bank at the same time the man who killed her husband is robbing it. He manages to evade the police and threatens Elise’s life. Detective Dean Cornell is assigned to protect Elise until they can catch the killer.

Elise’s character has a lot of baggage. She blames the cops for her husband’s killer being on the loose in the first place, and with good reason. They screwed up big time. But she allows her hate for cops in general to be unnecessarily rude and nasty to Detective Cornell most of the time. I thought her treatment of Dean was unjust and she was overall too prickly for me to really like her.

Dean, on the other hand, was quite the charmer. He let Elise’s insults roll over him like water off a duck's back. He never took her anger personally and that made this book much more tolerable. I loved how he interacted with Elise’s daughters. There is one part when he is dealing with the six year old that was just hysterical. I laughed out loud at that part and even days later would still chuckle over it.

It took a while for Dean and Elise to establish their relationship and I found that it progressed at a reasonable pace. So many books today have the hero and heroine jumping into bed right after they meet or having sex while a killer is lurking in the shadows. That wasn’t the case here. Aside from me having difficulty with Elise, Sometimes a Lady was an appealing story.