This book is sweet and heart-warming. Cat is a woman who grew up in foster care. Her childhood was anything but typical. Ethan is a child who currently stuck "in the system." His father is a complete moron who likes nothing better than to beat him up and make him feel worthless. Mitch is a man who believes in justice and pursues it as far as he's allowed to go. Solving cases and bringing people to justice means a great deal to him in terms of his career, but Cat means more to him.

This book covers abuse, foster care, adoption, the struggles to "connect" with others due to trust issues, and the emotional roller coaster that we call love. The feelings/emotions shown in this book are very realistic and the characters are well-portrayed. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Warning: About 90% in (toward the end of Chapter 22, I think!), you will run into sex. Personally, I didn't think it was necessary. The feelings between Cat and Mitch were fairly obvious. ( )

My second book by this author and 12th Chick Lit book.

I knew the first book in this series, Dogs Aren't Men, was a part of a series, but I had the odd impression that the books were less connected than they actually turned out to be. I mean, the main characters from the first book, Rebecca and Derek, turn up in this one - slightly larger role than cameos. Derek is much more of a slightly larger role than a cameo, while Rebecca is just shy of a side character. Mitch, a side character in the first book, takes over lead in this one. Along with Cat, who wasn't involved at all in the previous book.

The book is mostly about how Cat, who was physically abused while growing up, and eventually kicked out at 15, has made a life for herself since then and feels the need to act as a support for someone in a similar situation to the one she was in when she was a kid. So she goes through the process of becoming a foster mom, and gets a foster kid. Named Ethan. Who is 13. The mother left shortly after Ethan was born, and the father was very abusive.

Mitch, being the other co-lead, is a committed bachelor and ladies man. He's also a police detective and so a good part of his story involves mysteries and crimes.

There's something of a cliché that popped up in this book that came close to just barely causing me to give this a lower rating. A damsel in distress type of situation where the weak weak woman had to be saved by a strong man. This seems to go down three tracks - if the woman is presented as strong and able to take care of herself, which one would lead to believe given Cat's back-story, then a) she gets knocked out and that's the explanation for why she needed to be saved; b) she gets injured in the process and is in the process of mostly saving herself when the big man turns up, or c) she saves herself and the big manly man turns up to save the day to find that he was needed more as transportation away from the crime scene. That's, of course, in the rare situations when the woman is presented as strong. Most of the time the woman is just represented as this fragile injured bruised flower whimpering in a ball of fear. I'm not going to say what happened, just that events unfolded in a way that both annoyed me and kept me from lowering the rating.

I've only read two books by Tiner, but I already see a pattern. Everyone who turns up in the book has to have some romantic connection presented for them to deal with. As in, in the prior book the main characters were Derek and Rebecca, but various other people were set up with 'people to play with'. The receptionist, the lab tech, etc. In this book, a second pattern point that I hadn't thought of until this moment popped up. In addition to everyone, including the 13 year old boy, finding some opposite sex person to drool over (and yes, it always has to be an opposite sex person), there's something of a jumble of people to wade through to see who might end up matched up - in terms of the main woman in the story.

For example, in the first book, Rebecca's mom gave Rebecca's phone number to Derek's mom. But it was Mitch who called and got entangled with Rebecca. While Derek hovered angry-like. In this book, Cat just kind of had two men somewhat aggressively pursue her (Mitch and a guy named Paul), while in the background a third man moaned in pleasure at every glimpse of Cat (this being Ethan's principal).

In the end, despite displaying several cliché’s and issues I normally dislike, I enjoyed the book well enough to be entertained. If you liked the first one, you'll probably like this one. If you didn't read the first one . . um . . *rereads what I wrote to see if I gave spoilers*, technically you don't need to read the first book first since there are different main characters in the two books, but you'll 'know' what happened in the first book, for the most part, by reading the second.

(And for the love of all that is rational, don't read the third book before the first or second. Probably shouldn't start it before writing whatever you wanted to write in a review. I admit that starting the third book before writing anything in this box kind of impacted what I wrote here). ( )

I haven't read "Dogs Aren't Men" and I'm not sure if this one is intended as a sequel but the book was so satisfying I didn't feel like I was missing anything. This was my first introduction to Mitch, Derrick and Rebecca (who featured prominently in the previous book) but this story belongs to Catherine or "Cat" as she likes to be known (there is also a subplot storyline involving an actual cat, which is very cute). I loved this woman and her big heart and how she wants to make a difference by taking in a young troubled teenager, Ethan. Although the young boy brings along a lot of "baggage" with him (which creates lots of twists and turns in the story), he also brings with him some truly heart-warming moments that are shared between him and his new "mom," Catherine. Allied to this emotional relationship, Cat has also caught the attentions of Mitch, a really fine detective. The subsequent courtship and romance is sure to melt a hardened heart. ( )