Jean retreats to Attakapas Poste, a small settlement in the Louisiana bayou country where his friend Antoine lives. Before he leaves the territory, Jean asks Antoine to send money to Delphine and to make sure she is well cared for. Unbeknownst to Jean, Gabrielle is attending a party at Antoine’s home. Jean and Gabrielle met and fell in love in an earlier book, but have been separated by Jean’s smuggling activities. Now they meet again, only to be separated once more.

Gabrielle is tired of being a good girl. She feels tremendous responsibility toward her mother, who clings to the hope that her long-missing husband will find them in Louisiana and the family will be reunited. Gabrielle feels partially responsible for her father’s disappearance and would never hurt her mother. But she longs to be free, to sail the seas with Jean and feel the wind in her hair, and none of these things will come to pass if she stays in rural Louisiana. When the opportunity arises, she decides to follow Jean.

The atmosphere is well done, and Jean is certainly a vivid and easily likable character. Gabrielle is adequately spunky without crossing the line to stupid behavior. But the story changes locations with lightning speed and often with little explanation, with the result that it’s hard to follow. At one point I wasn’t sure if Jean’s ship was on a Caribbean island or in the Mississippi River.

But the biggest hurdle with this book is that it felt rushed and unpolished, with writing that was decidedly clunky in spots. Toward the end, I felt as though the author were merely stringing events together at a frantic pace in order to get the loose ends of the trilogy tied up, and several pretty unlikely coincidences were used to push things along. For example, Gabrielle meets a man on Jean’s ship. He’s her best friend’s long-lost father. Delphine meets a man in a convent. He’s lost his memory due to a bump on the head. He turns out to be Gabrielle’s long-lost father. People arrive in the nick of time, letters are saved from a sinking ship that just happen to turn the events of the whole story, and the overall effect is of a plot too weak to stand that must be propped up with contrivances.

The overall impression of Gabrielle is of two interesting characters and a decent romance, bogged down by a plot that can’t support them adequately. This trilogy simply fizzled out.

--Cathy Sova