Restore my Heart is what it sounds like: a romance novel. The cover isn't decorated with the standard heaving bosoms and shirtless man, but it's still a great, guilty summer pleasure to start those Florida hammock days.
But it's not all romance; it's more like a cross-pollination of mystery and romance. The author, Cheryl Norman, prologues the novel with the typical mystery opening, giving us a glimpse into the murder we'll spend most of the novel trying to solve. From page one, Norman's writing has an immediacy for even mundane details that will grip most readers ("Condensation slid down the can of his forgotten soda, forming a wet circle on his month-at-a glance calendar.")
At the heart of the story is the lovable-but-seemingly-unloved Sally Clay, owner of Mustang Sally's, a garage dedicated to restoring old cars in Louisville, Kentucky. When the hunky Joe Desalvo brings a mysterious Kaiser Darrin, owned by his father Leo Desalvo, who had died just one week before under mysterious circumstances, Sally gets quickly swept up into mystery and romance.
She and Joe investigate his father's death while Sally clandestinely spies for the FBI, which believes that the business practices at Bloom-Desalvo Motors may have been less than legit. The mystery portion of the story stays interesting, until a less than satisfying "reveal" scene, which hands us largely background characters as the killer(s). That's pretty much when I realized I shouldn't expect more from the novel than what it really is, a great romance with mystery flavoring, a fun read that I shouldn't have been taking too seriously in the first place. That's something I should have known when Norman creeps into the accepted prose of the romance novel industry, which is one of the reasons why the book is so much fun. Lines like "He'd definitely redlined her body's tachometer." are bound to make you grin a little, at the very least.
The author will be signing copies of her book on Kentucky Derby day at the Historic Inn on Charlotte in St. Augustine.
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