Middle East

A
Girl, Serpent, Thorn

Nothing will make you relate to the heroine of Girl, Serpent, Thorn more than months of life lived during an unceasing quarantine.  Soraya, too, is forever stuck in her own palace on the pain of death – and the deaths of those around her. But the tale Bashardoust weaves for the reader is enchanti ...

B-
Hard Target

Hard Target is the first book in a new series of romantic suspense novels from popular author Pamela Clare featuring the men (and maybe women?) who work for Cobra International Security, the high-end security firm owned and run by Derek Tower, who was a recurring character in the author’s earlier ...

B
The City of Brass

The City of Brass, book one in S. A. Chakraborty's Daevabad Trilogy, has received quite a bit of buzz over the past few months. It's been compared to such books as The Golem and the Jinni and The Grace of Kings, and since I'm always on the lookout for new fantasy novels, I jumped at the chance to re ...

B-
Holiday Temptations

For me the words Holiday Temptations conjures up an image of gooey, warm treats and hot, sweet drinks. For the ladies in this anthology, however, the temptations are of a far different, more intimate variety. It made for some fun reading and the talk of sweets, twinkling lights and decorating trees ...

B+
Love Comes Later

Location, location, location. That’s a popular mantra which discusses what is believed to be the most important selling point of any piece of property. I can’t speak to the effectiveness of it in terms of real estate sales but it‘s certainly an important selling point to me vis-à-vis book buy ...

B
Between Ghosts

Between Ghosts is a standalone romantic thriller by Garrett Leigh set mainly in Iraq, during the horrors of conflict in Basra. The main characters are all English and except for Connor, members of an elite SAS squad. Connor Reagan is a journalist and in 2003, he marched with a million others thro ...

B-
Lady Emily's Exotic Journey

The thing that initially attracted me to this book was the fact that while it’s set in the Victorian Era, the action takes place well away from England. I have no objection to England as a setting, but it’s a refreshing change to find an historical romance set somewhere else; and the fact that I ...

A-
Night of a Thousand Stars

You know how sometimes you read the opening line or two of a book, and not only does it hook you immediately, but you can just tell it’s going to be a great read? Well, Night of a Thousand Stars is one of those books. It opens with Penelope Hammond, step-daughter of a rich American industrialis ...

B-
City of Jade

Have you ever read that book that was completely different from what you expected? This was that book for me. It stayed pretty true to the book description, but it was still not what I thought it would be. Gallienus, former soldier and current gate guard for the grand city of Constanti ...

A-
Her Desert Dream

Cliches and formulas are only boring if the author doesn't write beyond them. For example, many of Liz Fielding's books employ the following structure: A quick establishing of the characters and scenario, followed by… An intense, 48-hour period in which we get to know our two ch ...