The Devil And Miss Jones by Kate Walker
Harlequin
Contemporary
ISBN: 978-0373528622
Reviewed by Vanessa

Carlos Ortega, aka Diablo, has recently discovered that his life has been a lie. Disinherited from the only family he has ever truly known because they didn’t share blood, he is now wandering on his motorcycle seeking to find something. Out of the fog appears a ghostly apparition that resembles a bride that the locals had recently spoken of. Carlos believes that for an instant he is seeing things. He soon discovers that the vision is actually a runaway bride seeking to step away from her structured life, and just live for the moment. Carlos offers up the name of Diablo, along with any assistance he can give the distraught woman, and soon embarks on a new path.

Miss Martha Jones is at first reluctant to take assistance from the man called Diablo, as he is a stranger and this would be so out of character for her. However, she had promised that a new Martha would emerge after she had witnessed her fiancé and her chief bridesmaid going at it before she ran out of her wedding! While she hesitates with accepting Diablo’s assistance, she feels that current that runs through her when they touch. Soon she is gripping him on the back of that wild motorcycle and finding more than she bargained for when she and the hunky stranger share what should have been her wedding night. Feeling like she has taken one too many punches from the opposite sex to last a lifetime, Martha walks away from Diablo only to come back into his life four months later to reveal the outcome of their one night together.

Miss Jones reaches out to Carlos’ family and waits there for a way to contact him, but his grandfather had taken it upon himself to instigate a face-to-face that Martha was never counting on nor did she truly want. Will Carlos’ past come back to haunt him, or will Martha’s appearance in his life four months after their shared night of passion be the answer he had been looking for all along?

Both Carlos and Martha were two of a kind. They each turned their back and left everything behind to embark on a new life, a new future with nothing from the past. They brought different things to their new relationship, but ultimately they just wanted to feel as though they belonged to someone or something more. I liked that Carlos had an explanation for what he believed in The Devil and Miss Jones, but I wished that there was more of a timeframe for his long held stance. I also understood Martha’s stance and was glad that she still stood up for herself in the end. However, I still felt that some of the things that she partook of seemed very identical to the one that gave Carlos his beliefs from earlier on in The Devil and Miss Jones.

The Devil and Miss Jones never fully revealed the background of Martha’s fiancé and the identity of the chief bridesmaid. Did they ever miss the bride, and whose room did Martha ultimately go to? At one point, it stated that she went to “Cindy’s room” and then it stated she was outside the door of “Gavin’s room”, this left me guessing and made me question what I was reading.

The Devil and Miss Jones had so many plot holes left open for me that I tried to fill them in and this distracted me from my enjoyment of the story. Carlos claimed that he was disinherited and yet it also stated he was the heir to the fortune. His grandfather was never fully fleshed out and seemed rather cardboard for someone that seemed to play an important role in Carlos’ life. I couldn’t understand how Carlos could let something from his past affect so much of his life. Yet, the grandfather was willing to trust a strange woman who showed up at his door out of the blue, and his past didn’t affect his ability to trust at all. Where was the staff that should have been there taking care of the grandfather in The Devil and Miss Jones? Why would the grandfather be so caught up on blood lines and then change his mind because of the appearance of Martha and her circumstances? How could he have not previously known about his grandson’s abilities with the horses and the property when he chose to disinherit him before?

The Devil and Miss Jones is SO far removed from that one nefarious film that it shares it name with. However, it is a decent read that got a bit bogged down with so many details of mundane things in the first fifty pages that seemed to slow the pacing of the story down. Yet, I carried on, and found that I liked the idea of Carlos and Martha’s love story in the end. However, I did not like the feeling of still being disconnected from The Devil and Miss Jones because so many other things weren’t fleshed out for me.