Our third visit to the fictional Oregon town of Mount Hope and its close-knit family of first responders delivers an HEA for nurse practitioner Jonas Jensen with a character we’ve met briefly but who appeared the least likely to fall for another man. The author once again delivers a well-written and engaging small-town romance full…
New-to-me author Amy Rae Durreson’s A Frost of Cares is a superbly-crafted little gem of a book that combines a genuinely creepy ghost story with a lovely, gentle romance, and addresses some serious themes in a sensitive manner – all in just over one hundred and fifty pages. It turned out to be the perfect…
Fearne Hill’s Island Love series wraps up with Vine, a heartrending and heartwarming story about a young man struggling with serious mental health issues and the neuro-divergent (or “differently normal”, as he puts it) gentle giant who helps him find his way towards a brighter future. The author’s presentation of mental illness is honest –…
It’s not often that every book in a series is good enough to deserve a DIK rating, but Jenn Burke and Kelly Jensen are four for four with Inversion Point, the fourth novel in their consistently creative and compelling Chaos Station sci-fi romance series. Note: This is a same-couple series with overarching plot elements so…
Timothy Janovsky’s The Merriest Misters is a mash up of a marriage-in-trouble story and The Santa Clause – yes, really! – that I mostly enjoyed but which, unfortunately, fails to stick the landing. It’s well-written and the issues the couple are dealing (or not dealing) with are recognisable and realistic, but the ending is dissatisfying…
Narrated by Gary Furlong Secondhand Skin is the second spin-off of Hailey Turner’s fabulous Soulbound series of inventive, action-packed urban fantasy novels set mostly in an AU New York City. Probably the most beloved secondary character of the series is Wade Espinoza, whom we first met as a traumatised teen who had been enslaved by…
Something we reviewers often say is that the hardest books to review are the middling ones; the ones that aren’t terrible but aren’t great and are just kind of okay. Unfortunately, Jack Strange’s début, Look Up, Handsome, doesn’t quite get to ‘okay’ levels; it’s billed as a rom-com but is neither romantic nor funny, the…
Narrated by Pete Cross Every so often, you come across a story that feels as though it shouldn’t really work – and yet it somehow just does. Maybe the premise requires too great a stretch or simply doesn’t make sense, or maybe there’s something that gets a big side-eye – but the overall story is…
Eden Winters’ entry in the Carnival of Mysteries series, Lighting the Darkness, is a sequel, of sorts, to the urban fantasy/sci-fi/procedural Darkness that came out earlier this year. Darkness wasn’t a perfect book, but I had to applaud the author for the solid worldbuilding and intruguing storyline, for taking risks and coming up with a…
Having really enjoyed AJ Rose’s The Family Man (book one in The Mind Hacker series) I’ve been looking forward to reading The Phantom, which promised to be another compelling read. The suspense plot is interesting and well-constructed – I like the way the author balances the moments of action with the painstaking research and the…
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