This fourth book in Ari Baran’s Penalty Box series is a second-chance romance featuring two top-flight hockey players who are at or near the end of their playing careers and are not handling the prospect of change at all well. It’s an emotional and very messy story, somewhat darker and more sombre in tone than…
Dash and the Last Picks are back in Again With Feeling, book six in Gregory Ashe’s cosy mystery series set in and around the fictional Portland town of Hastings Rock. I don’t mind admitting that I came away from the previous book (Between You and Me) feeling frustrated by the amount of emotional constipation on…
The Rules of Royalty takes one drop of Red, White and Royal Blue, one drop of The Princess Diaries, and then it swishes it about in a beaker. The end result isn’t bad, but not original enough to warrant anything above a B grade. But it’s a pleasant, enjoyable story. Jamie Johnson is just as…
As with many Christmas romances, a bit of suspension of disbelief is required to accept the premise of Avery Cockburn’s The Christmas Curse – namely that a grown man could continue to believe he’d been cursed by a cranky elf at a shopping centre when he was a kid – but it’s worth getting past…
On Circus Lane is the prequel to 2020’s Merry Measure, in which the central romance unfolded against the backdrop of a trip to Amsterdam in order to celebrate the engagement of Tom Wright (older brother of primary school teacher Arlo) and his boyfriend, Bee Bannister. Readers were captivated by the pair – so obviously happy…
Saving Mr. Bell is a fluffy, snowed-in, only-one-bed seasonal romance featuring a burned-out concert pianist and a film-maker who decides it’s time someone stepped in to stop him going completely off the rails. It’s a quick and entertaining read with lots of snarky humour and two likeable protagonists; the inciting incident is a bit silly,…
I admit I’ve veered somewhat off course for this year’s December theme of “It’s a Party!” with this one; I usually read something festive/Christmassy for the final TBR Challenge of the year, and that’s what I had in my mind when I chose to read Avery Cockburn’s A Christmas Harbor. I suppose I could make…
Narrated by Simon Goldhill Unnatural is a childhood-friends-to-lovers story featuring Iain Sinclair and James Hart, whose years-long friendship goes disastrously wrong and causes them to spend several years deliberately avoiding each other. It’s 1824, and Iain has just resigned his army commission and accepted a post as a government agent in India. He will be…
Narrated by Joel Leslie Tobias Lykke is big, awkward, and accustomed to spending his holidays alone. This year, however, his godmother—who may or may not be an Italian countess—gives him an elf doll originally entrusted to her by her second husband, who might or might not have been a wizard. An evening of THC snickerdoodles…
Earlier this year in Promises of Forever, Nicky James introduced readers to Niles Edwidge the best friend/former lover of Koa Bugard, one of the protagonists in that story. Niles teaches music at Timber Creek Academy, the prestigious private school where Koa teaches English, and although they were no longer romantically involved it was clear they…
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