Rating: 4.25 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | All Romance | Amazon UK
Length: Novel
Grant Adams has the heart of a hopeless romantic, but the prickly temperament of a hedgehog. He’s blunt, obsessed with cleanliness, and a host of bad dates have made him understandably suspicious. So when a customer at the bank begins to flirt with him, Grant is caught off guard by the man’s attentions.
Tristan Carr is everything that Grant isn’t. As a car mechanic, Tristan is perpetually covered in grease, prone to messiness, and a parent to a teenage girl. But from the moment he spies the uptight Grant at the bank, Tristan is determined to woo the man. The road to love is rarely easy and this is especially true for Tristan and Grant. Misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and poor communication threaten to wreck them before they even begin. But when a sudden engagement forces them to start working through their issues, they realize they might just have something worth fighting for.
Bankers’ Hours was, at its core, a sweet romance between two men that desperately deserved a happy ever after. The plot is occasionally inane and there were times the characters and their actions were preposterous, but the affection between Grant and Tristan is generally strong enough to weather the rougher areas of the story. I see so much of myself in Grant it’s eerie. He’s obviously not low maintenance and at times he’s painfully oblivious to the rest of the world. But there is a desperate earnestness about him that I found endearing. You want to reach through the pages and wring his neck sometimes, but his faults are realistic and it’s easy to champion him as he screws up his courage to date Tristan. Tristan is more straight-forward and generally down to earth, though he’s pretty rusty at the whole dating game. They suffer from a serious communication issue that does feel pretty typical for a pair of relative strangers who are suddenly thrust into intimacy. In general they are a couple that are easy to connect with as readers and you definitely want to see them succeed. There are some aspects of their relationship that don’t quite ring true at times, but these are often small hiccups that don’t really detract from my enjoyment of their romance.
While enjoyable, Bankers’ Hours did suffer occasionally from a lack of believability. Grant and Tristan end up engaged through a very bizarre scenario that neither felt realistic nor particularly necessary to the story. Prior to this event, the slow progression of their relationship was charming and sweet and quite believable. The reasoning behind the engagement is a pretty thin plot concept that never quite stretches enough to cover the gaps. As a result, after the engagement the novel takes on a different tone from which it doesn’t fully recover. This isn’t to say the second half of the book is bad, just that it isn’t quite as strong as the first half.
Bankers’ Hours was a generally enjoyable romance between two characters that tug at the heartstrings and bring out the “awww” factor. There were some story points that never really worked and shifted the focus of the novel away from what had been the slow building relationship between Grant and Tristan. But overall the book was stronger than it was weak and I definitely enjoyed Grant and Tristan as a couple. Consider this one recommended and enjoy!
A review copy of this book was provided by Dreamspinner Press.
