all book related reviews
I’ve devised a method of rating characters in the books I read. It’s something I call Armstrong’s Patented Dinner Test, and here’s how it works. Ask yourself, “Would I enjoy sitting down to dinner with these people? Would I find the experience fascinating…maybe a little thrilling…perhaps even a touch dangerous?” Positive answers indicate the presence…
Barbara Wood’s latest novel Sacred Ground is a complex tale of mystery, insight, and history, with strong characters both in the present and in the past. All aspects of the plot are involving, and if the suspense is lacking in some subplots, it’s more than adequate in others. Dr. Erica Tyler is an archaeologist for…
Desert Rain is an “Indian Romance,” but it’s quite different from a run of the mill Indian Romance. For one thing, the author is Native American, for another, he is male. The hero and heroine of the book are both Indians and the romance takes a backseat to an exploration of the lives of the…
The spine of Since You’ve Been Gone reads “fiction” and it is clearly billed as a work of suspense, rather than the hybrid called “romantic suspense.” While it does contain a romance, the story’s focus is not on the love story but on the main character’s efforts to save a kidnapped child. Rebecca Ryan has…
Harry Turtledove is known for his alternate history science fiction epics like Guns of the South, in which South African radicals provide the Confederate army with automatic weapons, changing the outcome of the Civil War. Judith Tarr mixes fantasy with history in her epics about ancient Egypt, medieval England, and other locales. Together these two…
The authors of this book called their hero Dusty Conrad. I called him something else, and it wasn’t anything nice. At the beginning of the book, I wondered how the authors could make me like a man who had deserted his wife because things got a little rough. At the end of the book, I…
It’s got a charming hero and one unexpectedly humorous interlude. But between the nebulous back story and the two main characters’ stubborn mistrust of each other, The MacGowan Betrothal couldn’t hold my attention for more than thirty pages at a time. The year is 1535, and lovely Isobel Fraser is the cook at a castle…
You Never Can Tell is a thoroughly researched and well-written story, as you would expect from Kathleen Eagle. Unfortunately, I felt shortchanged by the human aspects of the story and let down by a lack of romance conveyed. Eagle has been moving away from genre romance for some time now and this book continues that…
A Love For All Time is arguably one of the last good Bertrice Small books out there. A re-release of one of the early novels in the famous Skye O’Malley series (falling chronologically between All The Sweet Tomorrows and This Heart Of Mine), it falls into the “golden era” for Small fans, just before she…
Could you use a laugh? I know I could. Let me suggest a book called Sex Tips For Girls, humorist Cynthia Heimel’s take on the state of the female/male union in the post-feminist era. Blunt and funny, it addresses such issues as “Who are we?”, a look into the psyche of a gender who no…
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