For those of you who, like me, were disappointed in Remember When, Judith McNaught’s last book, you’ll be glad to know she is back in form again with Night Whispers.

Sloan Reynolds is a detective on the Bell Harbor Police Force. Suddenly, she gets a call from the father she hasn’t seen in 30 years inviting her to come visit him and her sister Paris in Palm Beach. She tells him to go to hell, but FBI agent Paul Richardson convinces her to go so he can gather information on her father. Richardson tells Sloan only enough to get her to go and visit, but keeps several things from her.

At first Sloan has a hard time warming up to her dad, Paris and her 95-year-old great-grandmother Edith, and she constantly feels out of her league. She even has trouble knowing how to flirt with Noah Maitland, a rich and handsome family friend. As time passes, she begins to like Paris, Edith and Noah, but still has trouble with her father. The family relationships add a lot to this book, but I wish Sloan’s father, Carter, would have been developed a little better. Noah’s family were delightful, as were Sloan’s mother and her best friend Sara.

McNaught gets back to some of her standard plot devices: the wonderful, spunky, beautiful heroine; the rich, handsome, arrogant man; the rich family, and even her Together, Big Misunderstanding, Together Again plot for the couple. There really are no surprises except that this plotline still works for McNaught. There was some deviation from the standard in her last book, Remember When, and most people didn’t like it. McNaught includes in this book, the love scene that was missing from Remember When.

The packaging of Night Whispers makes it look like it is going to be suspense, and part of the plot is suspenseful, but in no way does it overshadow the romance. In fact, the suspense doesn’t really kick in until about the last quarter of the book. If you’re worried that McNaught is going more mainstream, let me allay those fears right now: she’s not with this book. Very good news to me and to other readers who miss the romance when an author moves to hardcover.

Fans may recognize a secondary character, Paul Richardson from Perfect. He plays much the same role here, right down to interceding with Noah on Sloan’s behalf. Only this time, he gets a romance himself and we get to know him a little better. Something else that I like in Night Whispers is the way that McNaught works in names of families from the historical novels she has written.

Night Whispers didn’t have quite the emotional impact for me that Perfect or Whitney, My Love did, but it was still up there as one of her better books. I’ve decided that I, too, like McNaught’s historicals better than her contemporaries, but that will in no way stop me from buying and reading any of her books whether they be historical or contemporary. McNaught is a comfort read for me – I know exactly what I’ll get from her, and when she’s on her game, I am never disappointed and sometimes my expectations are surpassed.