A Private Affair by Rebecca York is a 2015 Sourcebooks Casablanca Publication. I was provided a copy of this book by the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I've read Rebecca York's work for many years and she is usually very consistent, especially in her romantic suspense series. However, this one missed the mark.

Successful and driven fashion model, Olivia, returns to her hometown after the death of her best friend from high school. Olivia believes her friend's murder and the recent deaths of a couple of other people in her graduating class, is linked. Since the police are not going to buy into the conspiracy theory, Olivia puts her career on hold and hires a private detective, named Max to help her figure out what is going on.

Romantic suspense is actually a favorite of mine because it combines mystery and suspense with romance- my two favorite genres in one book. Win- Win. But, in this case, I was stunned by an incident toward the end of the book where Olivia is in a situation that should have taken her a very long time to recover from emotionally and is very controversial, at least I thought it was.

However, she shrugged it off really quickly and had no problems picking up her sexual relationship with Max almost immediately after this very difficult to read passage that I found disturbing on many, many levels.

But, even without that controversial scene and Olivia's very understated reaction to it, the plot was full of holes and paper thin.

I had the feeling I was reading a manuscript for the 1980's that had been touched up just enough to release as novel, because the story had a really dated feel to it.

I'm usually pretty easy to please and don't usually go in for harsh critiques in my reviews, but I can't recommend this one at all. 1.5 stars rounded to 2.