With Every Breath by Lynn Kurland

With Every Breath is the latest in Kurland's series about the MacLeod and de Piaget families in Scotland. Many of them involve time travel and/or ghosts. My favorite in the series is Stardust of Yesterday, one of my favorite romance books. They can be read out of order, but if you read them in order you get to revisit old characters which adds to the fun.

Although I really love Kurland's writing, I have to reluctantly say With Every Breath is not her best. I still enjoyed it, but it has some fairly major flaws. The first is that it is too long and could have benefited from some editing to condense the narrative. There are too many pages in which not very much happens. Another problem is that the heroine is always crying. I mean, ALWAYS. It got very irritating. I understand she was upset, but to spend three-quarters of the book weeping is too much. I also found it totally unbelieveable that she was still a virgin at 33 and that they didn't do anything more than kissing in the book.

There was a secondary plot line that wasn't well developed until the very end, when it came together and made sense. I also would have liked to have had more time travel. The heroine, Sunshine, goes back in time to 1375, but she's only there for about 84 pages of a 386 page book.

Every author can have an "off" book and I will certainly buy her next book. If you haven't read anything by Lynn Kurland, I'd recommend starting with one of her earlier books, like Stardust of Yesterday, If I Had You or Another Chance to Dream.

I'd rate this book 6 out of 10.