Author: Helena Hunting
Kindle Unlimited and Audible
Narrators: Andi Arnt and Teddy Hamilton
When I saw that Helena Hunting had a new series, I was happy. I really love her style of writing and I had high expectations for this one. Plus, it was a small town romance and I love the dynamics of small towns! In small town romance series, the town is almost a character. I always thought it would be fun to spend some time in Stars Hollow withe Gilmores, or visit Jack’s bar in Virgin River, or buy something in Catherine’s shop in The Good Witch… I was really hoping I was going going to fall in love with Pearl Lake. Well, I didn’t.
Let me explain: Dillion is the small town girl who managed to get away. She left for bigger things, for life in Chicago, where she had a job and boyfriend. Things go sour for her: she gets laid off, her relationship ends and her brother gets involved in DIU back home and she has go to back to help her family. Van (Donovan Firestone – this is such a daytime soap name for a character, but I digress) is also having a really hard time. His grandmother, who lived right next to Dillion’s family, has passed away, he just found that someone has been syphoning funds from the foundation in honor of his late mother where he is a board member and everything points to him as culprit, and, to top it all off, he loses his job in the architectural firm where he works because no one wants to work with someone suspected of embezzlement.
With a title like Love Next Door, I don’t even need to say what happens next. There is the meet-cute de rigueur: Dillion has the keys for the house next door, because she was very close to Bee, Van’s grandmother, and she is the executor of her will. She sees movement in the house from her place and she decides to check. She lets herself in and she finds a very naked Van coming out of the shower. Also, in classic hate to lovers trope, things don’t go well from there.
We meet an assortment of characters: Dillion’s old girlfriends, who she sort of ghosted when she moved to “the city”; Tucker The Fucker, Dillion’s smarmy old boyfriend; Billy, Dillion’s brother; Aaron, Billy’s friend who now works at Dillion’s family’s construction business; Teagan and Bradley, Van’s siblings, and his dad. However, there isn’t much development there. Also, there are basically two important story lines that I was expecting were going to be more detailed. There is something really wrong going on with Billy and I was really hoping there was going to be more attention put on that storyline. The situation regarding the embezzlement in the foundation is also resolved so quickly that it left me with a “WTF just happened?” feeling. It’s like we got to the third act and we definitely had to get stuff resolved so let’s get to it. It was all too quick.
It’s a Helena Hunt book, so it’s obviously not bad, but it definitely doesn’t have her signature style. It’s a first book in a series, and usually, when you get a series, you kinda know whose story we are getting in the next book. In this one, I have no idea! I didn’t get invest in any other character. I kind of suspect that it might be a story with Teagan and Aaron, but I may be completely wrong. I will probably read the next book just to see where this is going.
I read and listened to this book. The narration is by Andi Arnt and Teddy Hamilton and they are one of the reasons why I managed to enjoy this.
Possible triggers: death of a parent (complications from surgery), DUI, cheating (not the main characters), mental illness – bipolar disorder and paranoia, embezzlement/blackmail/fraud
