I am thrilled that Drew and Charity are back together again. ~ Slick, Guilty Pleasures
Description:
Son
Brother
Lover
The love of Drew Walker’s life left to pursue her dreams. He told her to go, forced her to go, knowing that a stripper’s daughter would never be able to escape her mother’s past.
In the wake of the leaving, she left him with a broken heart. A heart that he’s held very close to himself for the last ten years.
Daughter
Friend
Attorney
Charity Thomas has worked hard to get out from under the stigma of being Jasmine from Wet Wanda’s, daughter. Ten years away gave her the distance to grow a backbone, it also gave her enough time to miss the hell out of Drew.
When Meredith Blackfoot gets her back to Bowling Green to deal with a situation at CRISIS, none of them realize the danger they are in.
Home invasions, a woman and daughter running from an evil man, and an attempt on Charity’s life puts Heaven Hill on alert like never before.
When the smoke clears, the bad guys are caught, and she is in the protection of Drew’s arms they can all breathe a sigh of relief.
In their hour of need, Charity is finally home.
Review copy provided for an honest review
This is such a hard review for me to write because I have loved this series so much and have watched this author’s career from the start and I wanted so very much to love Home Free by Laramie Briscoe, but unfortunately this book missed the mark for me. Ten years after Charity Thomas left Bowling Green, Kentucky and the love of her teenage life, Drew Walker, she has come back to repay a favor to a friend not knowing if she’ll stay or how she’ll react to being near Drew again or how he’ll react to her being back in his life.
In several previous books of this series we had glimpses of the teenage love between Drew and Charity and we saw a bit of the aftermath when she left town to pursue college and a career. The thing is, I wanted to see more of the time they were apart. We didn’t see Charity’s struggles and we only saw Drew’s struggle on the surface. I was disappointed that these characters weren’t developed more fully and we never really got to know the adult version of them. Their childhoods were no doubt messed up and several events in their lives shaped them into the people they are, but there was a huge chunk of time missing, important time in which they grew into the adults they are. This unfortunately made them feel somewhat one dimensional to me and I never really felt connected to either one of them during this book.
Charity comes back to town at the request of Meredith Blackfoot to help a mother and daughter with some legal issues involving a man that Charity has dealt with in the past. As an attorney and because she feels she owes Meredith a debt of gratitude she agrees to return. The ongoing case and the resulting investigation seemed to overshadow their relationship and to be honest I felt they slipped way to easily back into a relationship especially give how very little they talked about their lives. I get that they had an intense connection and they believe they never stopped loving one another, but on the other hand I question how well they really know one another given they’ve spent 10 years apart and never talked about that time. While I didn’t expect Drew to be a hearts and roses kind of guy there just seemed to be so much missing, very little romance and they both just turned a blind eye to the past.
I enjoyed seeing many of the characters from previous books and it was kind of wild seeing the young kids from previous book now pre-teens and teenagers giving us a good look at to what might be possibly coming in the future.
I am thrilled that Drew and Charity are back together again and while not my favorite book in this series; I still wouldn’t have missed Home Free by Laramie Briscoe for anything.
Thanks Slick for the review