Review: The Gamble – Kristen Ashley

The Gamble Series: Colorado Mountain #1
on 18 April 2011
Pages: 629

Nina Sheridan desperately needs a timeout vacation. With a fiancé who can't even remember how she takes her coffee, Nina wants some distance to rethink her engagement. Flying halfway around the world from England to a mountain town in Colorado should do the trick. But when she finds a gorgeous man at her rental cabin, Nina's cold, lonely adventure suddenly heats up.
The owner of the house, Holden "Max" Maxwell is surprised by the beautiful woman who turns up at his door. But when Nina becomes ill, Max spends days nursing her back to health. A private man with a broken heart, Max finds himself drawn to the strong-willed woman. Soon it becomes impossible for Nina and Max to deny their growing attraction to one another. Yet even as these two wounded lovebirds think about taking a chance on a relationship, a dangerous secret from Max's past emerges-and threatens to end their love for good.

Sweet, hot, mysterious… The Gamble brought out all the feels! Great characters, a solid plot, and so much romance.

Not sure my The Gamble review will be all that coherent, because I’m still a bundle of feels over Nina and Max! I loved both of them from the very start. The little nicknames, how Max took care of Nina even if he wanted her out of his house at first, and the incredible chemistry between them. I have always enjoyed KA’s stories, but I have to say that this one really had everything going for it. There is a mystery, an annoying father, new friends to meet… Plus, there are some past issues in both Max and Nina’s lives that need to be dealt with.

I loved that in The Gamble, Nina came to Colorado to reflect on her life, and on her future with Niles. Even before I met him, I really didn’t like him. No matter what, when your fiancée needs a time-out to think things through, the guy should have asked himself some questions – and he really should have called her to see how she was doing. Max just got to me from the very start. Even when he treated Nina a bit like shit when she showed up at his door – she had rented an A-frame for two weeks, but there had been a mix-up and Max was home – there was just something about him that made my heart sing. And the way he called her Duchess because of her supposed English accent (and that made me laugh so hard!! my Norwegian friends tell me I have a foreign accent when I speak Norwegian now – after 26 years living abroad).

As I said, there was a lot more to The Gamble than the romance, though! There was a murder, there were some really nasty people who were kind of close to Max, and there were also some amazing people who were closer to him. The small-town feel to the story was great, too. Everybody knew each other in Gnaw Bone, and while in some ways that can be a bit difficult, it also brings a lot of hilarity to many situations. And it was so nice to see that the towns people were happy to see Nina with Max, and kept pushing her to be with him…

Of course, things weren’t exactly easy all the time in The Gamble, but the drama and the mystery worked so well for me, and even with over 600 pages to read, it was a fast read for me. I absolutely loved Max, and Nina was great, too. The side characters were so well fleshed out, and I really felt like I was inside of the story, in Gnaw Bone, and I could have stayed there even longer. Written in first person perspective from Nina’s point of view, and in past tense, I got to know her very well. Through the dialogues I also got to know the other characters, and I felt right at home.

Suddenly, he grinned and it irritated me to see he had perfect, white, even teeth. “Your sinuses hurt?” he asked. “Yes,” I snapped. “My sinuses hurt, a lot,” I told him.

You didn’t tease someone you didn’t like. At least that was what my mother told me years ago when I’d come home, complaining that all the boys teased me. She said boys teased the girls they liked, and one thing I learned in life, my mother was rarely, if ever wrong.

I needed to be the love of someone’s life, like Mom was for Steve.

Sweet, hot, mysterious... The Gamble brought out all the feels! Great characters, a solid plot, and so much romance. Share on X

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