GRR Reviews Prairie Heat: Cowboys of the Flint Hills by Tessa Layne

Prairie Heat is a contemporary western (cowboy) romance with a good amount of ancient intrigue and secrets (the embarrassing, but not deadly kind) and that is seriously cramping the style of the modern generation. The author managed to pivot from second chance love into a fake engagement which is rare to see it done right.

Blake Sinclaire loved the girl next door, Maddie Hansen, in Prairie but he had no time for romance, needing to manage his family ranch. The Sinclairs and the Hansens were in a feud over some land that Blake's father lost in a poker game. Blake went to negotiate with Hansen patriarch again to offer to buy back to land, only save the senior Hansen from an almost fatal heart attack, which brought Maddie Hansen home from her job at Fermi Labs. Blake had a plan to regain the land, and it involves being engaged to Maddie, even though Maddie had no plans to be a rancher's wife. Even Blake execute his plan, he found that what he thought was the truth behind the loss of the land was merely a cover story, and the truth is much more devastating, even as he realized the fake engagement he had with Maddie... may be turning quite real. But will their relationship withstand the truth?

A lot of these "let's get married in order to _____" plots don't make that much sense, and this one... was a bit iffy. I like the twist about the poker game wasn't what it appeared to be, but I still have a bit of trouble wrapping my head about "how does being engaged to Maddie" would allow Blake to regain the land other than the Hansen patriarch asked him to...

Category: Western

Primary Plot: Cowboy desperate to regain his family holding from rival neighbor found himself engaged to the girl who left town for her career

Tropes: return, ranch, fmaily secrets, fake engagement, reunion, unrequited love, weird will

Overall Rating:  4/5