1The mechanic has barely gone into his back office before Sterling Hayes is under the steering column of a stranger’s wrecked Prius. He takes the fuel pump relay first, because a car without one will start and then quietly die. Then, because he never does anything by halves, he pulls the main engine fuse as well, slips both into his back pocket and closes the panel so nothing looks touched. Ten minutes later he will tell the car’s owner, with a sympathetic shrug, that parts are slow out here and she is stuck in Blackwood, Montana for a month. Dark Horse by C R Jane puts that scene in its fifth chapter, and everything the novel wants from its readers is already in it: the thrill of being wanted that badly, and the decision to look away from what it costs.
The woman is Sienna Blake, a former Boston lawyer who left an abusive marriage with two suitcases and a plan to start again in California. A mountain storm puts her into the town mascot instead. The man is a thirty-year-old rancher who came home from a Manhattan hedge fund to run one of the biggest outfits in the state, and who spends his evenings, with the sheriff and a bounty hunter for company, making sure men who hurt women stop breathing.
A Courtship Built on Theft
This is a single-hero romance, and the author’s note says plainly that there is no sharing. Everything rests on Sterling, and Jane writes him as a charming menace from the first page. The dramatic irony is the engine. Sienna’s chapters read him as a cocky, oddly attentive cowboy; his chapters show the reader exactly how attentive. He has heard her through the wall of her room at the inn. He knows her coffee order before she has placed one. And he stocks a closet with clothes she only browsed in a shop.
For dark romance readers, that is the point, and Jane commits to it with real verve. The best set piece in Dark Horse by C R Jane is pure screwball: Sienna, trialling as a waitress at the diner Sterling has invested in, trips on a rug and launches an entire cherry pie into his chest. He peels off his shirt in front of the whole breakfast crowd and the scene plays out exactly as shamelessly as you would hope. A Ferris wheel conversation at the rodeo carnival is the emotional high point of the first half. Sienna tells him the shape of her marriage, and of the friends and family who took her husband’s side, and he simply believes her. It is a small, kind beat, and it does more for him than all the smoldering.
Here, though, the book’s central contradiction sits. Sienna fled a man who tracked her searches and promised to bring her back if she ran, and the hero she falls for bugs her room and keeps her from leaving town. The text lets her name the stalking out loud, then waves it through, and a household interrogation by Marvis, Sterling’s formidable cook, is played for laughs. Readers who come to the genre for exactly this fantasy will not mind. Readers hoping Dark Horse by C R Jane will reckon with the echo should know that it never does.
C R Jane Makes the Comedy Do Two Jobs
The second thread is Sienna herself, and she is the better reason to read. Her narration is a sitcom monologue, a joke in almost every paragraph, and some of them are very good. Her doomed first job interview, at a florist that doubles as a funeral parlor, ends with her slipping on a wet floor and baptizing the shop in embalming fluid, then being sent home with a single daisy and a voucher for grief counselling. Every small-town eccentric in Dark Horse by C R Jane gets a pass through her deadpan.
What Jane does well is let the jokes work as armour. Sienna changes her number, flinches at a pet name, calculates how many concussions count as too many. She hints at a secret from Boston that she will not tell, and when it surfaces late in the book it reframes everything before it in a way genre readers will relish. It is the boldest choice in the novel, and the reason the pairing works as two equals rather than a predator and his prize.
The trouble is that the armour never comes off for long. Even her nightmares arrive with a punchline attached, and by the halfway point the reflex has become a tic.
Where C R Jane Gives Ground
- The narration over-jokes. The same physical tells recur constantly: forgetting how to breathe, one pet name repeated until it stops meaning anything, a chapter closing on a one-word paragraph. Scenes keep going for one more quip after the real beat has landed.
- The middle is padded. A long stretch of the book is given almost entirely to explicit scenes and afterglow, with the thriller plot moving a step at a time. The romance would have lost nothing with a tighter edit.
- The mythology is a fog. Sterling keeps an old seismic monitor whose twitching needle warns him that something under the mountains is stirring the town’s violence. Drifters, stone spirals and a chanting cult follow, and almost all of it is parked for the sequel rather than paid off here.
- The hero is never examined. His surveillance, the stolen car parts and a copied key are all framed as devotion. That is a genre choice, but Dark Horse by C R Jane raises the parallel with Sienna’s ex itself, then refuses to follow it.
Heat level: very high and fully open door. The scenes are frequent and long, between one hero and one heroine.
Read These Next
C R Jane is best known for her hockey and football romances, the Pucking Wrong and Wrong Player books, and her mafia series begins with Don’t Say Mafia. Dark Horse by C R Jane is the first of the Blackwood Cowboys novels; the second, Devil’s Knot, belongs to the sheriff.
- Harvest Season by Brynne Weaver for killers in love, played for laughs as much as for chills.
- Game On by Navessa Allen if the watching-from-the-shadows hero is the part that hooked you.
- Colt by Jessica Peterson for a Western ranch romance with the darkness dialed right down.
- Serial Killer Games by Kate Posey for another heroine who turns out to have more teeth than anyone expected.
What Stays With You
Strip away the gore and the heat and Dark Horse by C R Jane is a story about a woman who was told for years that she was the problem, finding a place where her worst self is not a dealbreaker. That is a potent fantasy, and Jane sells it with jokes, nerve and a supporting cast you will want to revisit. It would be a stronger book if it trusted its heroine to stop joking now and then, and if it noticed the man in the back of the garage.
Keep your car keys close. In Blackwood, the parts go missing first.
