Receive Your Copy Stranger In A Small Town (Shivers #1) Developed By Kerry Connor Distributed As Booklet

not you, its me,
I didnt hate this book, Structurally I think its pretty fantastic if youre a fan of romantic suspensespecifically Harlequin Intrigue where the focus is more on the suspense than the romance.
I think if thats youre jam, this is a Must for your tbr, Small town. Heroine wants to renovate a home shes in love with and doesnt understand why the townspeople are so cold and turned off by her while pretty understanding of the fact that it has to do with the house.
They make it very clear they dont want her renovating it and selling it, Hero comes to town, their meet cute is literally atin the morning and gets the job of helping her renovate it, As the reader you find out pretty quickly his relationship to the house though the heroine doesnt find out until later, There were terrible murders in the house years ago and everyone in town would rather the home just stay empty, The heroine amp hero begin working “together” to solve the murders and move on from it,
Again with the Tis not youin January I read quite a bit of light airy and fluffy and admittedly, thats my goto, Anytime I read a romantic suspense I enjoy it, I just think tone wisemy reader heart wasnt into this at the moment, Life is busy and crazy and hectic and while its great to catch the bad guysthis wasnt a fun read and it wasnt comforting.
Im happy I finished it, Im happy I read it, I do wish Id picked it up at another time, Id probably love it more! I loved loved loved this book, So entertaining yet simple as you would want in the Harlequin range, Terrific mystery with a touch of suspense and of course the lovely romance,
Kerry Connor's Stranger in a Small Town felt like the romance novel version of a Dateline episode, which I mean as a huge compliment Keith Morrisonever!.
It's my second foray into Harlequin Intrigue's "Shivers" series, after sitelinkThe Secret of Cypriere Bayou, but it was actually the very first installment published in May.


After an unexpected life change,something Maggie Harper decides to move to the small town where her grandparents lived in Pennsylvania and renovate the home she had inherited from them.
However, the other residents of the community resent her actions, as they see her efforts to makeover the house as socially disruptive, There was a gruesome, unsolved double murder in the building decades before and the town has been eager to ignore the property ever since.
When she tries to hire help and no one applies, she's forced to employ a mysterious, itinerantsomething man named John Samuels, Together, the pair begin to investigate the homicides and face increasing intimidation and danger,

As I wrote in the beginning, Stranger in a Small Town feels like an episode of Dateline: Maggie and John spend a lot of time driving around a picturesque rural community, desperately trying to untangle a complicated knot of longheld frustrations, disappointments, and suspicions.
They interview colorful local characters who are keeping secrets and obscuring their involvement in past misdeeds, There are no dramatic shootouts, climatic action sequences, or forensic breakthroughs, it's all about uncovering the emotional undercurrents in a small town, thirty years before.
Which is very, very much my type of mystery,

I'm also trash for hostile, gossipy small towns in romance! Like Talia Hibbert's spectacular sitelinkA Girl Like Her, Stranger in a Small Town depicts small town life as claustrophobic, performative, and myopic, which feels refreshingly subversive and original in a genre that's known for its rosecolored depictions of rural small towns.
Throughout the novel, Maggie and John are privately threatened and publicly confronted by a whole host of secondary characters, all of whom could be responsible for the violent deaths that haunt the community.
They're isolated, outnumbered, and the victims of escalating harassment, which created powerful tension and made me genuinely scared for them,

Like sitelinkThe Secret of Cypriere Bayou, Stranger in a Small Town has a hero who is hiding his identity from the heroine, in an effort to get closer to the scene of a crime.
However, this book handled this trope far better and more comfortably for my taste, Most importantly, Maggie and John only have sex after she has learned the truth about his identity and motives no dubious/nonconsent.
I would've preferred that John had come clean himself, instead of forcing Maggie into discovering the information on her own, but I appreciated that John feels consistently guilty and remorseful for his deception.
I also liked that Maggie confronted him in a straightforward manner and he apologized appropriately, His purpose in lying also felt a little more plausible or less morally reprehensible overall, than the hero's did in sitelinkThe Secret of Cypriere Bayou.


I loved Maggie and John's romance, Their investigative partnership struck me as more equitable, since neither one of them was a law enforcement professional in disguise, They were just two regular people, trying their best to deal with childhood trauma and the sudden loss of love, who also happened to be working really hard to solve a notorious cold case.
Their connection was full of rapidly building chemistry, but they were wonderfully mature about it and stayed aware of their circumstances i, e. , Maggie is John's employer John is lying to Maggie, Through their relationship, they both gradually let go of personal scripts that were no longer serving them too, John had to weaken his attachment to the narrative that he was responsible for his family's pain and Maggie had to rethink the idea that her stubborn and opinionated personality was unlovable or unfeminine.


I don't want to give too much away, but I also really enjoyed the identity of the villain, It was someone who I hadn't suspected and when everything is finally out in the open, I appreciated that Connor didn't write the antagonist as someone who was "crazy" or impossible to understand.
Stranger in a Small Town's murderer was a person whose story I could sympathize with and that twist was spectacularly thoughtful, surprising, and empathetic.
The entire third act was especially wellpaced and suspenseful and the epilogue was incredibly hopeful I loved it!

However, there were a couple of very, very small things that kept Stranger in a Small Town from a full five.
When Maggie is discussing her recent divorce with John, she tells him about her former husband's infidelity and expresses a lot of rage towards the woman he cheated on her with.
Maggie specifically insults the woman's body, Ugh, I get that's a standard, runofthemill type of emotional transference, but it's also a strain of internalized sexism that I'm very, very ready for us to retire.
Women aren't responsible for men's sexual or romantic decisions, Unfortunately, Stranger in a Small Town also leans into a cultural understanding of trauma as a psychological state that one can simply "let go of" and winks at the idea that trauma can be "cured" by romantic love.
Yeah, neither one of those things is real, But this novel was published a decade ago and hopefully our shared ideas about trauma have come a little further since then,.really

I actually finished this book a long time ago, quite possibly a year or two ago and realized it never made it to my goodreads account.
This was quite an enjoyable book, the lead characters were likable, the background was interesting, and I quite enjoyed myself, Mysterious Til The End

I really loved amp enjoyed reading this book by Kerry Connor, Stranger in a Small Town has you guessing for the answers to this extremely mysterious murderer, You would never guess who the murderer was, it was truly a shocking revelation through and through,

Genres: Action Packed, Mystery amp Suspense amp Thriller, and of course ROMANCE!!! So far it's freaking me out but it's just because of what happened in the past.
I'm liking it though and will continue to read it :
I will continue with this author's books, Quick easy reads. A double murder was committed thirty years ago, yet the memory is still rather fresh, And the woman restoring the Murder House, refusing to sell it and tear it down, is someone's thorn in the side, But not everybody sees it that way, since Maggie finally manages to find someone to help her with the house, But another stranger in town, asking all kinds of questions about the murder could only make things worse, . . Much worse, considering

the secrets John Samuels is keeping,

I read one of Ms, Connor's previous books and wasn't terribly impressed, but this story surprised me, In a very nice way, Nicely plotted and written, wellpaced, intriguing, tension filled, and suspenseful, with a chilling backdrop of a small town where everybody knows everything about everybody, yet no one knows what truly happened thirty years ago, and surprisingly no one wants to know what happened thirty years ago.


This closequarter atmosphere worked nicely for the story, heightening the suspense, keeping the mystery alive and kicking, keeping the reader at the edge of the seat, wondering who the villain was.
The truth packed quite a punch, since you truly won't see the truth coming,

The only problem though a minor one, was the heroine and her stranger and slightly overthetop reaction on what she deemed a betrayal on the hero's side.
They've known each other for a couple of days and she felt hurt that he didn't tell her his deepest, darkest secrets Overreacting much Maggie is trying to restore the old house her grandfather left her.
The problem is that a double murder occurred there thirty years ago and no one can forget it, The people of the town don't want it restored and they all let her know it, She can't even get anyone to help her with the work until a stranger shows up in town, She senses a deep sadness in him but she's happy to have the help, She's even happier to have him there when strange things started happening,

Maggie had come to renovate the house as a way to cope with the end of her marriage, Her husband had walked away with no explanation, She knew about the murders but thought after that long there should be no trouble, She is surprised by the level of anger that people have for her plans, She is desperate for help when Sam shows up, She is wary of him as she senses that there are things he isn't telling her but he can do the work, When he comes to her rescue after someone attacks her in the house, they decide that the only way to stop the attacks is to solve the murder.
Maggie is a very stubborn, determined woman, If she has to team up with the mysterious and sexy Sam to do it, that's what she'll do, She definitely feels an attraction to him but she's cautious because of the secrets she senses, When she discovers who he really is it's just one more betrayal that she feels, But the closer that they get to the killer the more her heart starts to overrule her head,

Sam has come back to face his demons, He blames himself for the deaths of his parents and the breakup of his family, He feels that only by solving the mystery can he begin to move on with his life, Discovering that Maggie needed help with the house was the perfect cover for his plans, He didn't expect to be attracted to Maggie and that just added to the guilt that he felt over his deception, That attraction also became part protectiveness as the attacks on them started to escalate, Sam has always felt that he didn't deserve any happiness in his life because of what happened, but being around Maggie makes him wish that things could be different.
I really liked the way that he told her everything once she figured out who he was, He'd never done that with anyone else and it relieved some of the stress he felt, I really enjoyed the intensity of the suspense as they got closer to identifying the killer, I have to say that I was kept guessing until the end, I really enjoyed this short novel, I wish there was a sequel or two, I want to know what happens with Sam amp Maggie !! The mysterious blueeyed stranger who showed up in the middle of the night wasn't just looking for work.
No, when "John Samuels" signed on with Maggie Harper to restore the decrepit old house, he was hoping for answers and a chance to face the demons of his past.
But then strange happenings started threatening his beautiful new bossand disrupting the passion that sparked between them, Someone didn't want them in that house, Someone who knew the truth about what had happened there thirty years before, about the brutal murder that destroyed John's family,

John never expected redemption, But danger waited in the old house, haunting them both,

.