Bending The Rules by Tracey Alvarez Series: Due South #10
Published by Icon Publishing, Tracey Alvarez on 20th October 2018
Pages: 359
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Cop Noah Daniels doesn't believe in unicorns or true love, not since his life went to hell six years ago. Emotions are easier to handle when they're out of sight, out of mind. But when script writer Tilly Montgomery crash-lands into his world on Stewart Island for a month, she might just be the one to convince him that unicorns and true love do exist. If they're prepared to bend the rules a little…
Tracey Alvarez’s Due South series has always been a special one for me; that it’s set in beautiful NZ with its unique Maori culture—Alvarez’s clear love for her country bleeds through so enthusiastically that I can’t help feel it—is just a bonus.
Noah Daniels finally, finally gets his story, though it isn’t quite one that I’d expected, but then, I hadn’t expected my own reaction to be lukewarm at best.
I think few things really happened, even though I was partway though: there were a few to-and-fro moments that felt dragged out, the usual flitting in and out of the Due South characters who had had their HEAs already written and the slow unfolding of Tilly’s great-aunt’s grand affair with a man through her journal.
As a result, it took me days to finish this (never happened before with an Alvarez book!) and while I love the writing that’s a mixture of action, humour and quirk—sometimes all in a paragraph—it was a struggle to see Tilly/Noah together when I couldn’t really even buy into their attraction to begin with. Tilly was mildly annoying—the constant, mindless chatter, the cop-cling thing just got to me—and with Noah’s emotional disengagement, this was a pairing that made it surprisingly hard to see getting off the ground given how much they took turns to push each other away. Having these lines of conflict drawn quite early between them however, meant that there was a steady climb to a climax that I could see coming and it definitely got better towards the end.
‘Bending the Rules’ ended up a middling read for me, and it’s hard to say if I was really disappointed or not. I found myself firmly in neutral territory after turning the last page but then I thought immediately of the other characters who have yet to have their HEA and I was excited again knowing that this series would be continuing.
