Raintree: Haunted by Linda Winstead JonesRain­tree: Haunted by Linda Win­stead Jones, Silou­ette Noc­turne, book #2 in Noc­turne series, pub­lished June 1, 2007 with 288 pages. Rain­tree: Haunted fea­tures Gideon Rain­tree, a mem­ber of the Royal Rain­tree fam­ily. The reader is told that each Rain­tree mem­ber has a spe­cific gift. When the story opens we learn that Gideon’s gifts include con­trol­ling elec­tri­cal energy and talk­ing with the dead.

The story is set in Wilm­ing­ton, North Car­olina and opens with a bru­tal mur­der of a young woman. Rain­tree is imme­di­ately assigned the case since he’s the only homi­cide detec­tive there. We learn that the vic­tim was a room­mate of Gideon’s cousin, Echo Rain­tree. She may have been the intended tar­get. So off she goes to spend qual­ity time with fam­ily or friends, with­out think­ing twice about it. Smart girl. Mean­while, Hope Mal­ory shows up at the crime scene for intro­duc­tions. She’s Gideon’s new part­ner. Gideon doesn’t take the news well since he’s been work­ing alone for the past 5 months. So there you have most of your conflict.

As read­ers, you want the cou­ple the author pairs up together to belong together. That wasn’t the case here. Their first meet­ing, there was noth­ing mem­o­rable about it. No chem­istry, no spark, no siz­zle. The two seem to only annoy each other. The author starts dol­ing out bits of infor­ma­tion on char­ac­ter that had me shak­ing my head. Start­ing with Hope, we learn that she’s moved to Wilm­ing­ton because her mom had a nasty fall. Being the good daugh­ter, she wanted to be nearby. I groaned inwardly at the rest: zero luck with men, mis­trust­ful of men, always picks a stinker and her past con­tains a painful rela­tion­ship. Sigh.

Then the author starts spin­ning some really weird logic straight out of the Twi­light Zone. Shortly after Hope first meets Gideon, she sus­pects he’s a dirty cop who prob­a­bly played some role in the crimes that he’s solved. WTF? Sim­ply because he lives in a nice house. The reader is sub­jected to the character’s con­tra­dic­tory musings:

“She [Hope] knew in her gut that Rain­tree was a liar. Of course he lied on a reg­u­lar basis:he had a penis. The ques­tion was, how deep did the lies go?”

That thought popped up after meet­ing Gideon for all of five min­utes. Yet, Hope is attracted to him despite his being a dirty cop:

“Did she want to believe he was a straight arrow because he was charm­ing and good-looking as well as infu­ri­at­ing? She didn’t want to be that shal­low; she didn’t want to be like those women who judged men by their looks and well-planned words, with­out ever look­ing inside to find what was real.”

Right. Let’s not for­get Gideon. Out­side of the nicely trimmed mus­tache and goa­tee, he wasn’t a win­ner either. The author loves to remind us that he’s a good cop. Well respected. Good look­ing. Not look­ing for love, mar­riage or kids. How­ever, he has “bad dreams” of a lit­tle girl named Emma who calls him Daddy. Poor Emma. Any­way, Gideon has no dis­cre­tion when he uses his “gift” of speak­ing to the dead at crime scenes. He’s always within earshot of other peo­ple who hear him whis­per or talk out loud to him­self. They must think he’s crazy but as long as he solves cases, who cares.

What made me close the book for good was when Gideon decides to get rid of his part­ner by sex­u­ally harass­ing her. He brings her to orgasm with his gift: his con­trol over elec­tri­cal energy. He pretty much tells her that no one will believe her if she cries sex­ual harass­ment. He thinks that her only option is to leave. Of course this doesn’t gen­er­ate the result that Gideon was going for because the whole expe­ri­ence has left Hope baf­fled and con­fused and curi­ous to know where this leads…[laugh]

Brief word about the bad guy: com­i­cal. Motive behind the killing: cliched and ridicu­lous. Romance: wasn’t much of one for me. The rest of the book: dis­jointed, poor plot­ting, bad dialogue—didn’t fin­ish. I think I was halfway fin­ished before that scene popped up to make me say: I’ve got other books to read. DNF. You may have bet­ter luck. Note: I find the five star rat­ing at Ama​zon​.com decep­tive as there is not one review of this book up—yet.

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