Review: A Coventry Wedding by Becky Cochrane

Just days before she is supposed to marry her famous soap star fiance, Jandy Taylor (aka Jane Halli aka January Day Halli) postpones their wedding and leaves town to collect her thoughts. Jandy borrows her grandfather's ancient truck and starts driving east. When the truck breaks down in a rest area somewhere outside of Phoenix, she spots a tow truck and sees a man dump a dog. When she goes to rescue the dog, she meets Sam, who turns out to be the driver of the tow truck and who, after scamming her out of the dog he names Sue, agrees to drive her to Dallas by way of small, quaint Coventry, Texas. Once in Coventry, Jandy doesn't want to leave, welcomed as she is by the friendly townspeople. It doesn't hurt that once she discovers that she has been dubbed a "runaway bride" by the press, despite her fiance and mother knowing differently (no such thing as bad publicity, right?), she confides in the local hairdresser who agrees to help her hide from the public eye.

As Jandy feels more and more at home in this small town, working in a gallery, and taking pictures that capture the feel of the place during its annual Godiva Festival (as in Lady Godiva, not the chocolates), she has to examine her feelings about the people in her life who are willing to sacrifice her happiness for their benefit. She must also face her burgeoning feelings for the sweetly protective Evan and his flock of sisters.

Cochrane has done a nice job drawing the charming town of Coventry and conveying its tight protectiveness towards its own. Jandy is very conflicted and there were times I wanted to smack her for being stupid and unwilling to believe what she knew was going on in the Hollywood publicity machine. But she wasn't always in denial, which made her much more sympathetic than she could have been. There were moments of gentle humor here, like when Sam tells her the rotary beater on her truck is broken or when Sam's sister creates a new baton twirling tramp persona for Jandy to throw the media off her scent. Mostly though, this wasn't a romantic comedy. It was just straight cute and sweet. The epilogue to the story was the biggest flaw here, being rushed and unearned, negating the need to finish off the less than pleasant bit of the plotline. It was a bit of a cop-out but luckily the appeal of the rest of this contemporary romance can withstand a let down of an ending. Cozies tend to refer to mysteries but if there was such a category for romances, this would be one of the designees.