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This second book in Cole McCade’s series set at Albin Academy, a prestigious New England boarding school where wealthy parents send their (often) problematic sons in order to forget about them, is an antagonists-to-lovers story between the school’s football coach and its art teacher, a couple wh ...
Confessions in B-Flat is a resonant and romantic novel, filled with truth and history and finely-etched details. Featuring two young lovers who are passionate about changing the world but unsure of how to accomplish their goals, the reader will remember them and their story long after finishing th ...
a Retro Review
originally published on May 26, 2006
I'm a sucker for tortured heroes and heroines, as well as rich, even intense, historicals, so Mary Reed McCall's latest novel was a must-read for me. Her tale of love and healing set against the violent dissolution of the Templars is absolutely b ...
The Same Place is book two in Gregory Ashe’s The Lamb and the Lion series about a Utah-based wildlife vet and a con man – an odd couple if ever there was one – who, in The Same Breath, teamed up to solve a murder. Like its predecessor, this book is a perfectly balanced combination of myster ...
NOTE: This title was first published in the UK (March 2020) as Our Little Cruelties.
Liz Nugent’s Little Cruelties is a family psychodrama in which Oedipus meets sociopathy. Darkly funny, but not quite soapy enough to make the very long trip through the lives of these very unlikable people wh ...
C+
Pretending is a contemporary novel about a young woman sick of heartbreak and fear, who turns to another identity, a fake version of herself, to get by in the app-driven dating world. While it has a strong hook and a sympathetic main character, the story is so loosely held together that it was a dra ...
Suspension of disbelief can be a tricky thing. Most of the time when I find a book that has unbelievable factors, I don’t enjoy it. Every once in a while though, the outstanding pacing, riveting plot and intriguing characters capture my interest enough that I can ignore a few foibles. Such is the ...
I’ve read a number of discussions over the past few months about how to address COVID-19 in the romance genre. Do authors ignore it and write as if it hadn’t happened – effectively setting their books in a contemporary AU? Or do they incorporate it somehow? It’s a tricky question – for ...
To anyone who wants to read A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Mayhem after this review, I hereby issue a warning to ‘mind the gap’ as they say, the gap being the logic gap that pervades much of this disgruntled-acquaintances-to-lovers tale.
Lady Katherine – Kate - Bascomb is a blue-blooded w ...
You Had Me at Hola was released back in August, but I’ve been on hold for it at the library for a while. In the spirit that you may have been, too, or may have missed it in These Times, I’m here to follow up on the Pandora’s Box my colleagues Maggie and Caroline wrote when it was released. Ove ...