Linda Howard’s After Night – A Review
Since she was a child, Faith Devlin has adored the superbly sophisticated Gray Rouillard. They are at opposite ends of the social scale. Gray’s father practically owns the small town of Prescott, and Faith looks up to Gray as the ideal teen hero. That image is shattered in one devastating night that forever changes the lives of Gray and Faith.
Gray’s father, a notorious womanizer, eventually crossed the line and left his family, disappearing into the night with his lover, Faith’s mother. Upon discovering these disappearances, Gray unleashes his overwhelming anger on Faith and the rest of her family by evicting them in the middle of the night from the Rouillard-owned shack they had been living in for free.
The memory of that night shapes the rest of Faith’s life. Her goal is to get back to Prescott and find out what really happened to Gray’s father (Guy) and her mother (Renee). Faith has worked extremely hard to improve her lot in life and make something of herself. She is no longer the redneck from a white trash family.
Faith anticipates that she will not be very well received upon her return to Prescott: her family’s reputation for petty theft remains stagnant, even twelve years later. It doesn’t help her case that she is the spitting image of her mother.
In an effort to protect his still fragile family members, Gray again tries to get Faith out of town, this time making it difficult for her to live there easily. His plans are rejected in various ways. Faith is determined to stay in Prescott until she has solved the mystery. Someone else in town is not impressed with Faith’s investigations and begins to threaten her. Gray discovers that he is attracted to Faith and is proud to protect her from her. As he spends more time with her and she shares some discoveries that raise more questions, he wonders what really preceded that night 12 years ago.
While the general plot of the story is fine, my main comment on this story is my difficulty liking the hero as a person.
While the reader can appreciate Gray’s physical attractions and Faith’s lingering attraction to her from her teenage years, he wasn’t and isn’t the best person at all. For a boy who had a soft spot for Faith as a fourteen-year-old girl, he showed absolutely no interest or concern for her well-being when he watched her gather up her family’s meager possessions, which had been dumped outside the house and into the yard. yard by his police friends. During the desperate gathering of her belongings, her six-year-old retarded brother hindered her all the time by clinging to her legs. She had been the victim of the actions of her father and her mother, both her and 22-year-old Gray, but he put her through this additional trauma. On top of this, he tells her that she is “nothing but trash”.
He repeats that phraseology 12 years later when he kicks her out of his motel room. (He owns the only motel in town.) He also has no qualifications for shaking her or grabbing her wrists until they leave a bruise. This makes him almost abusive, making it hard to relate to him as the romantic hero. It makes the reader wonder what Faith sees in him, particularly when she doesn’t do or say anything to redeem herself in regards to her words and actions from 12 years ago.
So the almost instant attraction between them twelve years later, without any sort of clarification or apology regarding that night, didn’t sit well with me. Too many issues that should have been addressed, were not. Plus, Gray jumped from being a total playboy, to suddenly just wanting to be with Faith, without much character development or relationship in between. It seemed like instant lust, solving the mystery and then getting married. There was very little exploration of why they should be together.
