Son of the Morning

2.5 stars

I think I went into this with too high expectations. I was in the mood for a nice romance novel and add in the fact that I love time travel novels I was super interested. I’m also a huge fan of anything relating to the Templar’s; however, I was not expecting it to be the focal point of this novel. I wasn’t even going to try to compare it to Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander time travel novels, because that’s just setting any book up for failure as far as I’m concerned. But imagine my surprise when I realize it’s mostly this crime novel where the main character Grace basically spends over half the novel running away from bad guys – the time travel stuff doesn’t even happen till the last ¾ of the book!! But yes, before the author gets around to the meat of the novel (where the two main characters actually meet) we’ve got a bunch of running from the bad guys, a few half dozen pages spent with her shopping in Kmart, some wig shopping, working minimum wage jobs…essentially a bunch of filler as far as I could tell.

As for the romance aspect of this book, I found it severely lacking, especially considering that the two main characters did not meet until practically the very end. I like my romances where the two characters meet and build up a believable romance/relationship, rather than this novel where the two characters continue to have… we’ll call it ‘dream sex’, and when they finally do meet it’s a ‘we were destined to be together’ type of thing. The ending, okay, I’ll admit… by the end it got me and I really liked those two. Even had a few ‘aww’ moments… but overall I wasn’t satisfied with this story.

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My copy of Son of the Morning continues to roam around my workplace. My employees do not even bother asking me whether they can borrow it, it just goes right to the next person who wants it. I loved this book (and so do half the people I work with). I thought it was the best Linda Howard book by far. ( )

Grace St. John watches her boss, Parrish Sawyer killer her beloved husband Ford and brother Bryant. Parrish is determined to have a set of papers recovered from an archeological dig which Grace is translating. Further, Parrish intents to leave no one alive who knows of the paper's existence.

Explicit sexual scenes.

Time travel -- 1996 to 1322 ( )

re-read in 2004 by accident

Take one shot of Templar secrets, a half shot of romance, one shot secret society, one shot time travel and one shot ruthless megalomaniac; shake well and you get this novel.
Grace St. John is a scholar specialising in ancient manuscripts who is deciphering a set of recently discovered papers that appear to be a key to a lost treasure. When she finds herself on the run after her ruthless boss kills her husband and brother she decides that the papers must be very important and she works on translating them, with a little help from an interesting variety of characters.

What she eventually discovers changes her world.

Now it's not a bad read, Graces' growth is quite interesting and dragged me in but the resolution left me a little unsatisfied and I'm finding it difficult to work out why. It falls somewhere between a romance novel and the Da Vinci code and I found it quite readable. ( )