Alexandra Ivy is a long-running favorite of mine, and I continue to enjoy her Pike, Wisconsin series. The fourth installment, Desperate Acts, heralds another successful romantic suspense for this genre fanatic. This is a whodunit that unravels over decades. It opens with teenage Lia Porter sneaking off to a party she shouldn’t have been at….
I love Alexandra Ivy’s Pike, Wisconsin series for its old-school suspense, and this standalone third installment is a nail-biter. Unstable is a second-chance romance at heart, and reunites Rachel Fisher and her ex-husband, Zac Evans, whose marriage imploded eight years earlier. But if there’s one thing history (and romantic suspense) teaches us, it’s that the…
Naomi Westfield is going to marry Nicholas Rose in three months even though their relationship is dead in the water. After a miserable game night with her friends, Naomi realizes Nicholas’s plan: he’ll force her to break up with him, thereby not only winning everyone’s sympathy but also giving him grounds to ask the broke,…
Ruthie Knox is my latest binge author, and her hot, honest contemporaries are consistent pleasers. After the world’s most disappointing marriage proposal, May Fredericks walks away from her NFL quarterback boyfriend (leaving her shrimp fork in the back of his non-passing hand). Unfortunately, a mugger snatches the purse she walks away with, and with just…
Dorothy Garlock’s Take Me Home caught my attention because of the hero described in the blurb – he’s a German PoW in 1945, escaped and hiding out in a small Wisconsin town. The premise reminded me a bit of a book which I read over twenty years ago but still remember, so I gave it…
Focus is so crucial in fiction that reading a book without it can be a disorienting experience. Often authors who write from the seat of their pants with no preplanning and don’t go back to fill in the gaps produce unfocused stories that seem to jump from one important point to another, never quite melding…
I’ve read a lot of Dorothy Garlock novels during my many years of being a romance reader and I’ve been a fan of most of them. Her gift is her ability to get into the hearts, minds, and times of her characters. Sometimes the reality she presents is harsh. I like, though, that she is…
This is the last in the author’s Mirabelle Island series. I enjoyed it overall, despite featuring one of my least favorite plot devices: A romance between a career woman who doesn’t want children and a single father. While not without flaws, this story of two troubled adults and two decidedly troubled children held my interest…
At its best, Anna Schmidt’s writing is truly lyrical. I’m primarily familiar with her through her Nantucket-set historicals, but with The Pastor Takes a Wife, I had a chance to experience her contemporary writing. This was a sensitive and very sweet story of love and redemption that really works well. Though the heroine frustrated me…
One of my goals this year is to read some of the Harlequin lines that I don’t read as often. Blaze is fairly new to me, but I’ve read several so far and enjoyed them all. The Charmer has a few plot points that irked me, but the book is well-written and enjoyable overall. The…
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