In The Midnight Rain - Ruth Wind

Ellie Connor is a biographer with a special talent for piecing together fragments of the past. Her latest project, though, promises to be her most challenging-and personal. Not only is she researching the life of a blues singer who disappeared mysteriously forty years ago, but Ellie is also trying to find the truth about the parents she never knew. The love child of a restless woman who died young and an anonymous father, Ellie has little to go on but a faded postcard her mother sent from a small East Texas town-the hometown of her latest subject.Could Mean Finding Her Future

It is there that Ellie meets Blue Reynard, a man with deep roots and wide connections who may help her find answers. With a piercing gaze and cool grin, Blue is as sultry and seductive as the Southern night air. Beneath his charming surface, however, lies a soul damaged by loss. Despite her better judgment, Ellie finds herself irresistibly drawn to Blue's passion-and his pain. But Ellie's been lured by sweet talk and hot kisses before. How can she possibly stay with blue when every instinct tells her to run?

I have to start this review by saying that for a long time I heard the best things about this story. I had it on my TBR pile and each time I would look at it and think: hmm is it really that good? But I never felt compelled to pick it up till a few weeks ago. Well, I was completely blown away by it, I loved it and I am now wondering why I lost all that time without reading it...

I loved Ellie and what she did. Someone that loves music so much but that being unable to play has decided to write musician's biographies to spread that love sounds both interesting and romantic. When the object of her latest biography - a blues singer who vanished from the face of the earth - tales her to the small town where she believes she was conceived thirty something years ago Ellie can't resist trying to investigate the disappearance and at the same time discover the father she never knew.

Through the internet she meets Blue Reynard, another blues lover who ends up inviting her to spend that time in a spare cabin he has on his property. Ellie hesitates but since she is taking her dog along eventually agrees and relies on Blue's help to be introduced to the people who might help in both projects although she never reveals to anyone that her father may be a local and that she is looking for him.

The small town in Louisiana where the story is set is almost a character itself. A place where black and white people live side by side nowadays but that had a story of segregation in the past and that Wind describes with great detail from the hot, sultry nights to the forests and the orchids, the rain and bad weather and the blues music that seems to be everywhere. As Ellie and Blue spend more and more time together the sexual tension between them becomes more difficult to fight, and the atmosphere surrounding them just seems to heighten that. However Blue's troubled past doesn't make him a prime candidate for a HEA and Ellie hesitates in becoming involved with him.

Her main goal is still finding out what happened to Mabel and to discover who was her father and she is in for more than one surprise when she finally discovers what happened. There are many emotions in this wonderful story and it doesn't always makes it an easy and light read. However it is certainly a very engaging read and I was glued to the book till the last page. I loved it! I can't wait to find out if Ruth Wind has more books like this one published.

Grade: 5/5