Review #44: No Tan Lines, by Kate Angell

Shaye Cates is from the wrong side of the beach, at least in Trace Saunders' eye. Shaye and her family own and run Barefoot William Beach, and Trace and his family own the fancy-pants hotel on the other side of the sand. When Shaye's famous volleyball-player brother offers to headline a pro-am tournament, Shaye sees the economic boost the event could give her struggling little village. The only problem is she has to ask Trace to borrow a few hundred feet of his beach. And Trace isn't exactly willing to share.

Shaye talks him in to it, but Trace has his own caveats and sticks his nose in, convinced that Shaye's not going to be able to pull this off on her own. In a B story, Trace's former lover starts her own jewelry shop and falls in love with Shaye's brother. And in a C story, a random beach resident sort of falls in love with a volleyball player, but it's a story that just sort of gets forgotten. Honestly, I think I was more interested in the volleyball player than the other two stories.

Trace is kind of a jerk, and Shaye, for all her supposed toughness, lets him walk all over her. I never felt that their relationship was equal, and I never really cared whether it worked out for them. Angell would have been better off leaving the sub-plots out and concentrating more on developing Shaye and Trace in to more likeable characters.