Janet Dailey is almost a nostalgia read for me. I remember in my teen years my mom kept buying her Americana series—one book for every state. While her books are pretty simplistic in nature, I love them and it’s probably due to the fact that I read them during my formative teens. My mom also loved watching the PBR so this really was a double doozie for me. It brought back a lot of memories, especially while she was talking about Bodacious the bull. Even people who didn’t follow the PBR seem to know who Bodacious was! Obviously, these books are being released after Dailey’s death. I wonder if they were drafts somewhere that the estate is releasing or whether they are being ghostwritten. Either way, Whirlwind definitely still has the Dailey flare.

Whirlwind is a different kind of cowboy romance read. It’s not quite a ranch-style romance but somewhere between the two. Lexie and her sisters are running the ranch raising bulls after the death of their father. Their brother also died quite horribly after the bull he was riding trampled him. There’s a lot to unpack here though. Shane is not only a bull rider, he also works for the “enemy”, a big shot rancher who has a habit of buying what he wants in life and he has his eyes set on Whirlwind. Someone is also sabotaging the ranch. Is it the duplicitous ranch owner Brock or maybe someone closer to home?

Dailey has never shied away from the difficult and emotional topics and Whirlwind is no different. There’s some rough stuff here. Not only did her brother die from being trampled, but a friend’s bull riding husband also gets stepped on by a bull and ends up paralyzed from the waist down. The wife can’t handle it and she decamps and divorces him. The friend’s husband commits suicide. It’s tragic but it sets up for Lexie having to watch Shane go down in the ring.

I enjoyed the mystery of the sabotage. While it wasn’t super difficult to figure out who-dun-it, it still made for an interesting read. There’s a lot of action in and out of the bull riding ring. A downside to the book was that a lot of the info about bull riding was in complete info dumps. I don’t always mind that and in this case, if you don’t know much about PBR or bull riding, I think it would be necessary to get a feel for what is going on. Still, info dumps aren’t always the most fun to read through. The romance was pretty much instalove but eh, you can’t have it all. It’s not entirely believable either. Shane set Lexie up in the first few pages in a faux-dangerous situation at the instruction of do-anything-to-get-his-way Brock. I’m not sure that I could forgive someone who did that, much less as easily as Lexie seems to. Still, there is eventually a HEA for Shane and Lexie and I’m sure future Champions books will be touching on the sisters.

I give Whirlwind 3.5 out of 5 propellers

Review at Wicked Cool Flight