****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Catherine Anderson has done it again~~stolen my nights, my sleep, my thoughts~~and left me wishing the next book in this series was already ensconced on my Kindle. This is an expertly drawn historical romance with strong elements about faith, hope, and the endurance of love.This story opens with murder, the murder of the Gabriel Valance, a gunslinger, having killed many during the course of his short life. Prone on a snowy boardwalk in Random, Colorado, his last cogent memory is seeing a beautiful 'Christmas Angel' standing in the candlelit window of her millinery shop across the street.That's when fate intervenes. Now standing before the pearly gates (in this instance, a table in a crumbling shack), Gabriel is given an opportunity to live life over. He has a month to save a lost soul in Random, and is provided the names of three individuals who fit that bill. One of them is the milliner he glimpsed as he died: Nan Sullivan. Gabe chooses her, and so begins the spiritual journey of a very bad man named Gabriel Valance.Armed with information provided by the angels at the gates of heaven, Gabe is redeposited in Random, not only burdened with his responsibility toward Nan, but also with a host of rules by which he must abide. He knows, too, that at the end of his do-over-month, he will again die at the hands of his killer, his only hope for heaven being his successful redemption of Nan.Nan Sullivan has secrets of her own. Believing she has murdered a despicable suitor, Nan is on the run. With her is her much younger sister, Laney, whom she passes off as her daughter. The two have been living successfully, however fearfully, in Random. But terror comes knocking when Gabriel Valance shows up on their doorstep, and he wants only one thing~~marriage with Nan.During his month, Gabe finds it increasingly more difficult to abide by the rules the angels at the gates have mandated. Complicating the situation is the fact that he's fallen in love with Nan and her 'daughter', Laney. The idea that he's preordained to die again on Christmas Eve is almost more than he can bear.This is a magnificent, heartwarming, heartbreaking story that had me laughing and crying, sometimes simultaneously. The characters are so well-drawn I keep hoping any or all of them will show up on my doorstep. The plot elements have kept me thinking about my own life, my own comfort zone, and how often I cast a blind eye on the circumstances of others.Ms. Anderson has written a love story featuring the personal redemption of a very bad man.We should all be so lucky.
