Prior to this book, my only exposure to Amish romantic fiction has been the works of Beverly Lewis. Therefore I was immediately surprised by the non-Amish (to me) sounding names. I was also surprised by how quickly the plot moved along although at the end it all made sense.
Spoilers!
The real hero does not make an appearance in the blurb, and did not appear in the flesh until after the death of the red herring hero. In this respect the blurb did a good job of leading me down a merry path. I was expecting a story about love growing in a marriage of convenience - that seems to be quite a common romance novel theme - but this book upended my expectations by chapter 6.
The heroine is not obviously a role model or obviously NOT a role model. In this respect Fisher has given us a more real to life heroine than most romance novels - Amish or otherwise I would think. Other than being extraordinarily pretty, there was no one trait about her that particularly stood out, making her both more ordinary and more unusual among her usually one dimensional contemporaries.
For a romance novel with slow moving Amish protagonists, this was a page turner. The underlying mystery in the book was kept at a low simmer consistently throughout and the final unraveling was both believable (if foreseeable) and gently satisfying.
Somehow although this book did not come across as gentle as Beverly Lewis', and I would say is drawn with bolder colors, the final impression is that of a gentle story about gentle people handled gently by a gentle author. Nothing really stood out - and yet it wasn't a waste of time. It's just a gently satisfying read.
(gosh could I use the word gentle any more often in one paragraph?)
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