Silent in the Sanctuary review

Another free Kindle book down.  This time it was Silent in the Sanctuary by Deanna Raybourn. Did I somehow miss the Romantic Mystery category of literature growing up?  I don’t think I ever really encountered the genre until Amazon started doling out free Kindle books.  But since then I’ve read Julia Spencer-Fleming’s In the Bleak Midwinter (which I have to confess was good enough that I paid for some of the sequels), Julie Garwood’s Murder List (which unfortunately had very two -characters), and now Raybourn’s book. I’d rank it between the two; the characters were very well drawn (Raybourn did an great job of making them compelling and believable), but the balance between mystery and romance tilted a bit too far to the romance side for my taste (it seemed like the mystery was there to drive the romance forward, versus the romance adding an extra element to the mystery). Others mileage will obviously vary, but I think for now I’ll pass on reading the sequels.  Still, it definitely qualifies as a fun summer ready.