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When Quin Levington shows up at her door, Josie Ryan is fuming. It’s the one-year anniversary of Liam’s death: her boyfriend and Quin’s best friend. And it’s been eight months since Quin fell off the face of the earth—when she needed him most.

Despite the anger simmering inside her, part of her is relieved to see his warm hazel eyes. But he comes bearing news. Quin believes Liam’s death wasn’t an accident, and when Josie is attacked, it becomes shockingly clear that a killer is among them.

Quin has always been in love with Josie, but he’d never cross the line with his best friend’s girl. He knows someone tampered with the harness that should have prevented his friend’s fall, and since Liam’s death someone has been trying to chase him away. After being framed for starting a bar fire, Quin was forced into hiding—and away from Josie.

He and Josie quickly realize that the killer won’t let up until Josie is dead. Quin will do everything in his power to protect her. He owes it to his friend . . . and himself. But the closer he gets to Josie, the harder it is to keep his hands off her. Her haunting eyes are full of anguish and grief, but when her lips touch his, he knows he can never let her go. Not again. Together, they must bring the killer to justice and avenge Liam’s death, once and for all.

Samantha Wilde is a new-to-me-author and ‘Dead of Spring’ is a short and sharp distraction of a novella that helps you wind your way off the beaten-track of life for a few hours before leading you back to it. I picked this up because the blurb was my kind of thing with that hint of the forbidden, with some suspense thrown into it.

And generally, it was an average read all around; Quin/Josie did seem a convincing pair though it felt like an instant-lust/love type given the length of the novella, though that didn’t come without the prerequisite troubles in their way. In the end, I’d could accept their HEA, but wondered at the strength of their connection past the dramatic climax.

There were some odd elements (certain pieces of dialogue, phrasing, contextual clues, even the characters’ way of thinking and expressions) which I couldn’t exactly reconcile with the entirety of the story as it did feel as though I was plopped straight in the centre of an ongoing drama and had only a small glimpse of a romance section within. That did contribute somewhat to the implausibility of the plot and some things didn’t add up exactly with the picture I’d built up by the time I’d finished the book, or maybe there were just some questions I had left that just weren’t adequately addressed at all.

Still, a fast read if you want a quickie of sorts, more so if you’re able to keep that suspension of disbelief throughout.