Hope Ignites: a Hope NovelBy Jaci BurtonJove Contemporary, 2014 One of the drawbacks of novels-in-series is that they can become savagely habit-forming, both for their authors and for their readers, and any habit can be taken to morbid extremes. And when it comes to series-novels, “morbid” is just about the only word to describe romance author Jaci Burton (casual bookstore shelf-browsers who don’t know her name will certainly know her covers, in which the ridiculous historical fiction trend of headless woman is well-revenged in a seemingly endless parade of headless men) when it comes to this particular habit. One of her latest books, Hope Ignites, is the second in her new “Hope” series, and she’s also written four books in her “Wild Rider” series and a whopping seven books in her trade-sized “Play-by-Play” series. She’s so fond of follow-ups it probably takes her an hour to sneeze.She has the proverbial legions of devoted fans (it would be ungallant to ask how many of those fans might desert her if she got a different book-cover designer), and in fairness it must be said she works hard to please them. The plots of her books (most especially, most groaningly, all those “Play-by-Play” novels) are as elementary as a child’s building blocks, but they’re also assembled with a child’s earnestness.Hope Ignites turns on such a plot: cattle rancher Logan McCormack has agreed (at the star-struck insistence of his housekeeper Martha) to rent out part of his forty-five thousand acre ranch to a Hollywood production crew shooting a big-budget movie. Since he’s a self-contained block of fenced-off emotion, he doesn’t intend to do anything more than cash the studio’s check and keep his distance, but as chance would have it (…) he meets the show’s lead starlet, a pampered Army brat named Desiree Jenkins – and of course our monosyllabic rancher is struck by her:

Logan didn’t know what to make of Desiree Jenkins. She couldn’t be more than in her mid-twenties at best, which put her firmly in the close-to-ten-years-younger-than-him category. Scrubbed of makeup, she looked like a teenager, but there was a worldliness in her eyes that made her seem a lot older.She sure was pretty with her long dark hair and wide eyes that he couldn’t quite get a handle on, color-wise. Every time she shifted position, so did the color. At first they seemed blue, but now they were more like a brownish green, with little flecks of gold in them.

She’s struck by him too, although as in all Burton’s many, many series novels, exactly what attracts all her well-drawn, spirited, intelligent young women to the morose dipsticks she sets up for her heroes is never even remotely clarified. In Hope Ignites, for instance, although the union-required words are said in passing about Logan’s he-manly good looks, it seems pretty clear Desiree is moved much more by his acres than his abs:

She rented a condo and she could hear her neighbors argue. She made good money, but she invested it. One of these days she’d like to have property somewhere remote, where she could be alone … like this. Someplace to call her own, where she could establish roots and never have to pick up and move again.

Burton moves the whole thing through a handful of cardboard quasi-obstacles (the movie’s male star being both the most predictable and most enjoyable), but her long-time readers will be expecting her signature blissful multiple-endings, and they won’t be disappointed. They also won’t be given much of a breather until they’re on to the next installment in the next series.