Captured By A Cowboy
Becky Barker

Note: this would be 4 stars if it were ever properly edited!

Contemporary western romance that has aged well since 1987 but needs an editor

Blurb:

Raquel was never sure why she surrendered to a total stranger. Naive impulse, primal instinct or feminine intuition? By morning she was no longer a truck stop waitress but a woman on the way to an isolated Wyoming ranch with Holt Tyler — and he wanted to know all the secrets she’d guarded so carefully these past months.

Was he kidnapping her for his own selfish reasons or trying to rescue her from a deplorable situation? Did he really want to protect her or just take advantage of her? Had she fled a wealthy, powerful father only to fall into the arms of a passionate, possessive stranger? Time would tell how much of her heart had been captured by a cowboy. This is a very sensual romance set on an isolated Wyoming ranch.

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Captured By A Cowboy was originally published in 1987. It has aged very well! The story is still relevant. It’s sweet, emotional, hot, and entertaining. It is fast paced and would be more so if it weren’t for all the errors. I loved the characters, Raquel’s growth, and Holt’s decision to let her go find her independence, trusting that she would return.

Unfortunately, this has clearly been digitized using text recognition, and it has not been proofread since. If you’ve been reading my reviews, you know that my brain edits what I read even when I’m only trying to read for pleasure. There was hardly a page that I did not make a correction on, and many needed several corrections. I love that we can get old books as ebooks now. But if you are going to charge for it, you must engage the services of a proofreader. And it clearly needed a better editor to begin with as all the errors cannot be blamed on a computer!

3rd person past tense. It has a head-hopping problem, jumping from Raquel to Holt and even to some secondary characters occasionally.

There were too many errors to count or even detail their types. It was hugely distracting from the story! It’s a testament to how good the story is that I made it to the end without giving up. I’d like to read more of Becky Barker’s novels, but I don’t think I can take it right away. She is still writing, so I hope her recent novels don’t have so many errors! – Update: The latest novel Barker has written does have loads of errors.

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