Eris Adderly’s Bass-Ackwards is the sweetest book you’ll ever read that starts with the hero committing egregious workplace sexual harassment. A standout working-class erotic romance that starts out pushing consent boundaries and gradually works its way backwards to heartwarming, Bass-Ackwards is a kinky, cuddly contradiction that I enjoyed from start to finish – or maybe,…
J.L. Merrow’s Plumber’s Mate Mysteries series consists of six books written between 2012 and 2021 (and I don’t know if book six was the final one) and the PoV character is indeed a plumber, Tom Paretsky, who lives and works in a village near St. Albans in Hertfordshire. But he’s a plumber with a difference;…
Earlier this year, while poking around in my TBR pile (it’s quite massive), I came across Mia Hopkins’ Thirsty, the first book in her Eastside Brewery series. I started reading it and was totally absorbed, cursing myself for not having read it sooner. In short order, I read book two, Trashed, and then to my…
Warning: this book is filled with serious discussions about, and memories of, various characters’ domestic abuse. There are no active descriptions of abuse on page (everything is related via memories or off-page), but one of the minor characters does die at the hands of her abuser. This is one of those books that really should…
Two households, both alike in owning Vietnamese restaurants, in SoCal, where we lay our scene. Fortunately, Bảo Nguyễn and Linh Mai are brighter than their Veronan counterparts, although their situation is no less complex: their parents have bad blood that goes far deeper than a culinary rivalry. This is an enjoyable #OwnVoices YA contemporary which…
It takes extraordinary authors to make extraordinary books out of ordinary people. Fortunately, Cara McKenna has what it takes. Erin Coffey earned her LPN while nursing her dying grandmother, so Larkhaven Psychiatric Hospital is her first professional position – one she only took to be close to her disastrous sister and beloved nephew. Kelly Robak…
I haven’t read too many début stories this year, but I heard good chatter on social media about Cara Bastone’s Just a Heartbeat Away, the first full length novel in her Forever Yours series. (Technically her first book is a prequel novella to the series, When We First Met, but this is her first full…
I love realistic looks at low-income characters, heroes who win you over by who they are and not what they have. So how have I never read Mia Hopkins before? Eddie “Trouble” Rosas has just completed a five year prison term when he encounters a stunning but sobbing woman in the east LA community herb…
Inked with a Kiss is a wonderful, sweet and chemistry-laden tale about two ordinary women falling in love under the ordinary pressures of real life. Thirty-seven-year-old Jamie Winston is a tattoo artist and shop manager with a dysfunctional family – a twelve-year-old-daughter, Riley, whom she adores but clashes with occasionally, her ex-wife, and two helpless,…
I loved Fix Her Up, book one in the Hot and Hammered series. That was a pleasant surprise since my relationship with Tessa Bailey is hit or (mostly) miss. I never know how I’m going to feel at the end of one of her novels. But Fix Her Up was great. Reader, it featured a…
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