Heart of Eden: Colorado Hearts, Book 1

Fyffe (the Prairie Hearts series) serves up a jumbled combination of calamities and half-baked clues in her first Colorado Hearts historical, set in Eden, Colo., in 1880. Widower Blake Harding is a surrogate son to John Brinkman and the foreman of his Five Sisters Ranch. After John dies, his five estranged daughters arrive from Philadelphia to claim their inheritance—the ranch. Sisters Mavis, Belle, Emma, Lavinia, and Katie were taken from the ranch by their mother as children and raised by guardians who, without their knowledge, siphoned away the money sent by their father for their upbringing. John’s will leaves half of the ranch to Blake and dictates that the sisters remain in Colorado for six months before they can inherit their shares. Fyffe’s characters face a grim litany of disasters—including a rattlesnake in a wardrobe, a kidnapping, and a dynamite blast—so there’s little time for the tentative romance between Blake and Belle. The author also introduces a few red-herring plot twists that tantalize but ultimately lead nowhere. Stilted dialogue and a plodding plot make this novel hard to plow through. (Jan.)