A Cowboy's Recipe for Romance by Amy Proebstel

From Goodreads:

He’s ready to settle down. Her first love is music. When he brings home a gold digger to meet the folks, will the hired help put a song in his soul?

Randy Easton is a rancher at heart. So when the wealthy Texan decides to propose to his high-maintenance girlfriend, he takes her to the family homestead hoping she’ll embrace the quiet wide-open spaces. But after her loathing for horses shatters his dreams, he finds himself drawn to a melodious singing voice coming from the kitchen.

Becky Monroe has found her groove as personal chef to rich cattlemen. But the aspiring songwriter’s perfect pitch screeches out of tune when the ruggedly handsome heir rides in, accompanied by a backstabbing spitfire. And when her employers leave on an extended vacation, she’s trapped serving the hunky cowboy and the vegan vixen with a predator’s thirst for the kill.

Though Randy strikes a fast friendship with the country-gal cook, he struggles to search for his suddenly missing parents while keeping his would-be bridezilla happy. And as Becky does her best to maintain a professional distance, she can’t help but feel that falling for the boss’s gorgeous son has all the ingredients for happily ever after.

Will this star-crossed couple discover that together they hit all the right notes?

My Take: 

Hm, where to start? There may be some mild spoilers in this review, but I will try to keep it vague, so read at your own discretion.

This story had a lot of potential. There are several mysteries that never quite get off the ground. We have the disappearance of Randy’s parents, we have the identity of Becky’s father, we have Kate’s shenanigans while she’s away from the ranch, and then we have the parent’s return with no explanation of the slightly paranormal mystery of some “time warping” element in play. None of which are ever explained.

Randy and Becky are both likable characters, but they come across flat at times. Perhaps because so much of the story is told to us, not shown. Time often passes by in chunks, and we simply must accept that during that passage of time our two characters spent enough time together to fall in love. But we don’t get to experience it with them. Kate is an over-the-top villain with no redeeming qualities. Completely one-sided with no explanation of why or how she became that way. She made me roll my eyes more than once with her two-year-old temper tantrums.

So, while this book is well-written technically, there were things that made me want to put it down and walk away. The only reason I didn’t was because I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

I think the story could have been really good with a little more show and less tell, and if the conflict was more about the missing parents and less about a one-sided witchy woman.

I give The Cowboy’s Recipe for Romance a 3 and a Clean rating.

1-5 scale and what it means:

1: I couldn’t even finish it / just plain bad 

2: I hope I didn’t pay for this / disappointing 

3: I didn’t hate it, but it was still missing something / forgettable but inoffensive 

3.5: On the line between good and ok / like, not love 

4: Solid mind candy / worth reading 

4.5: So very close to perfection! / must read 

5: I could not put it down and I’m still thinking about it! / a true treasure,p>

Movie Ratings in relation to my review:

Clean--Hallmark movies, some kissing, no nudity, no intimacy on or off "screen" 

PG--Some innuendo but nothing kids don't hear every day, intimacy is all closed door 

PG-13--some language (swear words not related to intimacy), more talk about intimacy, heavy petting, removal of clothing on screen, but intimacy is closed door. 

PG-14—somewhere between PG-13 and R. Not erotica, but at least a paragraph of on-screen intimacy 

R--swearing (F-bomb, on “screen” intimacy, sometimes feels like the whole story is about the intimacy and not the relationship or some other plot, but not always