Afterglow by Catherine Coulter

Matchmakers' victims...

What were their friends thinking of? Chelsea Lattimer and David Winter couldn't have been more different. Chelsea was a writer. She lost herself in the past to make up for the inadequacies of the present.

David was a doctor, a man of the here and now, with no time for the flights of fantasy he was sure writers indulged in.

But the passion they shared was no fantasy - it was so real, even Chelsea couldn't deny it. Could the matchmakers have been right after all?


I have to unearth some of my older books in my quest to read only contemps until Easter (you know the story to that). I was quite excited when I found this book 'cause I liked reading this CC novel the first time time I did.

But I was extremely disappointed after this reread. Meh was all the reaction I could come up with. I distinctly remember liking Aftershocks, the story of Dr Elliot and Georgina Mallory, the matchmakers referred to in the synopsis as well as the bestfriends of the hero and heroine respectively. I probably just let my curiosity get the better of me when I got this book because I so loved Aftershocks (which I don't have a copy of) and I was too prolly too carried away at the thought of a sequel.

I did like Chelsea being a writer of romantic fiction. She said that she wanted to write the kind of stuff that she wanted to read. She was proud of what she did and defended the whole process of escapist lit, both in the writing and the reading sense. It reinforced my belief that I shouldn't be embarrassed by what I like reading--romance, romance, romance 95% of the time. But I just detest it when people hide a smirk when they find out that I read those stuff. I'm sure I've learned more from reading these stuff than them trying to judge a person from what she's reading.

All in all, there just wasn't enough chemistry between Chelsea and David in the book. I'm into too much McDreamy and McSteamy that any fictional doctors will always surely come up short in comparison. Maybe it was just the appearance of Elliot and George every so often that made me enjoy the book the first time around. I just might give this to an office mate who has been wanting to borrow a book from me for sometime now...and then just conveniently forget about it.

Final verdict: 5/10. So-so.