The Iron Man was a good news/bad news sort of book. On the good side we have Kay Thorpe’s writing, meaning the book flows well, the dialogue and interactions move the story, she includes setting and she does not rely on inner musings to tell us what is happening to Kim and Dave. The characters are well done, although I couldn’t identify with either, and there are several conflicts that must be solved and sticky situations to wade through to achieve the trademark happy ending.

On the bad side Dave is a hard guy to appreciate and Kim is a bit of a goof. Dave is iron on the outside with a spine of steel and is opportunistic, decisive, dominant but not nasty. Kim is silly enough to come to Sierra Leone in the early 1970s without a return ticket on the off chance that her fiancé had an accident/amnesia/complete loss of contact. She is convinced fiancé Chris would never ever in a zillion years simply drop her without writing to tell her the romance was off.

Kim has all of 20 pounds (somewhere under $1000 in today’s money) to her name, not enough to get back home and not enough to keep her while she looks for Chris. She gets up to the mine in the mountainside to find him, expecting a joyous reunion. (Yes, she’s that naïve!)

Dave fired Chris some time before when Chris got into a fight over a married lady and took off with said lady. Kim can’t believe that Chris would do this and goes willingly with Dave back to the capital, Freetown, to find Chris. Chris tells Kim it’s over and he won’t come home or drop Mai. Now she’s stuck with no way to get home.

Dave says he’s returning to England in 5 weeks and suggests they marry until then so she can travel with him at company expense, then they will separate and he will help her get on her feet. Kim infers he means a platonic marriage and accepts. Dave of course means nothing of the sort, thus the first conflict.

Dave is hard and unemotional – of course he has emotions but he doesn’t yield to them – and Kim is impetuous and often lets her feelings drive her, thus a second conflict and one that will endure.

Kim and Dave forge a tenuous relationship as she makes a home for him, insists the servant man clean the cupboards and improves the cuisine and he manages to relax with her. They are beginning to get along almost as friends when they go to Freetown for a weekend and meet Dave’s friends on the beach. Friends include Karen, an obvious former girlfriend, who makes it clear she’s interested in Dave and intends to get him. (It isn’t clear why she wants him, she doesn’t love him and she doesn’t need his money and she’s not interested in following him around the world to mining camps. But this is a Harlequin Presents so take it as given that all the girls want Dave.)

Old fiancé Chris shows up wanting money. Kim and Dave make a sordid bargain where Kim will stop pretending she doesn’t want him in exchange for Dave helping Chris escape the country and Mai’s relatives. This isn’t exactly a conflict but sand in the wheels of their friendship.

Dave runs the mining camp and is hands on. When a landslide blocks the road, incidentally blocking Karen in at the camp, Dave gets in the bulldozer to clear it out and the dozer turns over and crushes his arm. He lies to Kim that his arm is merely broken, tells her to go home, that he wants Karen, not her.

This third conflict means that Kim must confront Dave and tell him she loves him and she is convinced he loves her too. She’s on some shaky ground here! Dave rejects love to stay strong and invulnerable and now, with his arm in bad shape, he’s even less willing to admit emotion or accept Kim.

Kim pushes him, finally loses her temper and calls him a coward and not worth her bother and he finally admits he wants to believe she loves him. The story ends here but it’s obvious Kim and Dave have a long, hard road, albeit a happy one, because Dave now has a bad arm and a wife to consider when the next job looms. He’s a skilled engineer and leader but staying in a softly civilized country is a big change after traipsing around the world. Plus he’s not used to having another person love him or to admit to any emotional weakness. Kim’s a strong person despite being emotional and impetuous – witness how she took the rough camp and terrible weather and scorpions and lousy food in her stride – and she’s determined to drag Dave out of his heart’s hidey hole and I think she will succeed.

Please note the story is set in Africa in the early 1970s. Dave and Kim respect the natives and treat them as people but the book refers to Africans as “boys”, part of the baggage in any novel set in this time frame.

Kim Thorpe writes detailed and believable settings. Here we are in the hot mountains in a tropical climate, just before the rainy season lets loose. There are bugs, spartan living conditions, a gravity-fed shower and it’s hot. The rain makes mud everywhere and landslides and potholes and the road is full of deep ravines filled with gooey mud. The author doesn’t belabor these things but we can see them and think that we’d not be nearly as cheerful as Kim.

My favorite romances make me feel like I’m right there, they have a sense of immediacy and movement. The Iron Man doesn’t quite manage that. I felt more like I was watching the story than living it.

I got my paperback copy on eBay in a Kay Thorpe lot (so far my only eBay book purchase that had damaged books) and you can probably find this on Thriftbooks. Archive.org has a pdf copy you can borrow but there is no version for an E reader.

Rating this is a bit of a six of one, half a dozen of another. The plot was nothing outstanding, the setting was excellent. Characters were a mix with the minor characters being 2-dimensional and the main characters reasonably well developed although not terribly sympathetic.

At first I thought Kim was a dope but her better qualities grew on me in retrospect; I realized that it takes a fine character to cheerfully accept mud, heat, bad food and primitive living conditions! Dave has many great qualities but he hides his compassion and I wonder about fidelity.

Because I couldn’t identify with any of the characters or feel like I knew them, or that they are real people, I’m rating this

3 Stars