Janet Gover, The Wild One (Choc Lit 2015)
Tyangi park ranger Dan is waiting by the billabong, kookaburra laughing, watching the brumbies (wild horses) drink at the waterhole. He is tasked with shooting them, a cull—they are non-native, damaging the parkland—but he’s not happy about it.
Quinn, photojournalist of some fame, is even less happy about it. She cooks up a plan to save the brumbies and shoot a photo-journalism story for Australian Geographic. Trish, manageress of the Coorah Creek Hotel, barman Jack and cook Ellen, Doctor Adam and his air-ambulance pilot wife Jess want to help.
When horse-breeder Justin and Carrie, a jockey retired from horse racing due to a serious accident, join the team, the project starts to look do-able. Carrie and Justin recognise the head stallion of the brumbies as being from a prized bloodline, offering Justin new breeding stock for his stud farm.
The free-spirited Quinn finds herself falling for hunky Dan, but they each have to bury some demons from their past before the camp side romance can become permanent. His from a war-time disaster in Falluja resulting from his failure to follow an order, hers from a failed marriage.
You will fall in love with the characters. They each offer their special talents to the brumby-corralling project, and they have to help each other work through their demons to get the job done. If falling in love should be the result, so much the better.
We enter a whole world, here, the Australian outback, a wild, beautiful world that humans are at pains to tame. We learn all about the business of corralling wild horses, too.
This is Book 2 in the Coorah Creek series. Quality chick-lit, beautifully written. Not really my genre, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Susie Helme 
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