Solace Island

by Sara Flynn

November 6, 2018 · Berkley

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Solace Island is a book that isn’t entirely sure what it wants to be. It starts off reading very much like a romantic comedy and finishes up as romantic suspense. This didn’t greatly bother me since those are both things I enjoy, but I could see how another reader could feel like they started one novel only to finish an entirely different one.

Maggie Harris is trying to figure out her future after her fiancé (and the co-owner of the business they share) breaks up with her right before their wedding. Maggie’s sister Eve suggests they rent a cottage on quaint Solace Island in the Pacific Northwest to relax and regroup.

It’s on Solace Island that Maggie meets Luke Benson, a former high-profile security expert turned baker. Their meet-cute is genuinely funny, and sets the tone for something more rom-com than rom-sus. Maggie is driving to the cottage at night, but gets lost in the dark and the fog. She pulls over and decides the safest course is to wait out the night and find help in the morning (she doesn’t have cell reception, of course). She remembers reading some survival training that says to bundle up to stay warm overnight–so she layers herself in clothes, including a bathrobe, and wraps her sock monkey PJs around her head to keep heat from escaping that way.

Luke comes across the car and figures someone left it abandoned. He goes to check it out, a woman in the back sits up wearing a sock-monkey-PJ headdress and a pink bathrobe and they both scream.

Most of the book reads like this. Maggie and Luke are thrown together and something mildly embarrassing and funny happens. Tilly has excellent comedic timing and she manages physical humor in a book in a way that I’ve rarely seen be successful.

As they spend more time on the island, and with Luke, Eve and Maggie consider the possibility of moving there and opening their own café. Maggie is an excellent baker of pastries and pies and cakes (Luke specializes in bread, so there’s no cross-over) and they join Luke in the annual Saturday market to see if their goodies take off.

Luke is immediately attracted to Maggie (well not immediately, immediately because sock-monkey-PJ headdress), but he’s quiet and reserved. He was engaged once too, but his fiancée was conning him and he was shot when he found her in flagrante delicto with her real boyfriend and co-conspirator. Luke quit the security business, no longer trusting his instincts, and moved to Solace Island to regroup.

Between Luke’s uncertainly and Maggie’s very recent betrayal, we have plenty of fodder here for some excellent internal conflict. Neither of these people would be prone to trust anyone after what happened to them, but they’re so drawn to each other it makes the possibility of trying for love one more time too tantalizing to resist.

We have also have a great, supportive relationship between Eve and Maggie. I really love reading about women who boost each other up, are honest with each, and all around provide each other with protection and unconditional love. Maggie and Eve are as much friends as sisters, and while they occasionally irritate each other, they always take care of each other. They push each other to be better and to take risks–like going on a date even when you’re hurting, or moving away from the job you hate to the one you’ve dreamed of.

All of this is more than enough to make for a great book. Then about two-thirds of the way through, a black SUV tries to run Maggie off the road, and Luke’s spidey sense starts tingling. Maggie’s ex turns up dead and things start to go very wrong.

At this point the tone of the novel changed considerably. The bubbly humor was gone, and suddenly Luke’s Romantic Suspense Buddies (aka sequel bait) show up and everything gets very Alpha-heroey. Eve and Maggie stay with Luke and the RSBs (their sophomore album Danger Boner is soon to be released) while they try to figure out what’s going on.

Forced proximity romantic suspense? So my thing. But that’s not at all where this book started. The shift in tone was so jarring it felt like I was reading a different novel entirely. And because so much of the suspense is pushed into the tail-end of the book, I felt like the clues as to what was going on weren’t really woven throughout the text.

Despite all that, I still enjoyed Solace Island. I just felt like I enjoyed almost two separate stories or one story written by two different kinds of authors. It was an odd reading experience, and one I can see bugging a lot of readers. The thing is, the author writes both romantic comedy and romantic suspense well, so I think that if the book had stuck with one theme throughout, it would have been excellent. The comedic tension and suspenseful tension were spot on—they just felt incongruous together.

If you’re a fan of both genres like I am, then I think Solace Island might work for you as a reader. If you read strictly romantic suspense or humorous contemporaries, then expect some frustration.