The Expectant Executive is the next to last story in the year-long Elliotts saga. The heroine, Finola Elliott, who has figured in many of the past books, is a high-powered career woman. She runs Charisma, one of the top fashion magazines in the country, and is on track to win her father’s contest and become…
Writing a series of books can be a challenge for an author. Balancing the exposition in each succeeding book – too much will bore readers of the previous books, and too little leaves new readers bewildered – takes a lot of skill. In Foot Loose Leanne Banks expects the reader to jump right in, and…
Kids by Christmas is the last in Janice Kay Johnson’s trilogy about siblings who were separated when their parents were killed and who have now found each other. The first two books in the series – Open Secret and Lost Cause – told how Suzanne Chauvin, the oldest of the family, discovered her sister and…
His Dark Kiss is a gothic tale that gets the atmosphere right. But with easily recognizable scenes reminiscent of Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, it’s hard not to. However, there is more to a good book than atmosphere. Emma Parish is an illegitimate poor relation living with her…
How much plot and description can be crammed into 299 pages? Well, the answer here is clearly “a lot”, but the big problem is that all that plot and all that description, along with the added irritation of Central Casting Irish dialect on every page, resulted in a book that, for me at least, wasn’t…
A Lady’s Pleasure is a mix of Ye Olde Victorian Melodrama and Ye Olde Victorian Erotica. It’s kind of silly in spots, but darned if I didn’t find myself guiltily enjoying it. Merriam Everett’s father called her “Merriam the Mouse”. Her late husband mostly ignored her, and concentrated on seducing the maids. Merriam is now…
It’s a pretty common, even trite, observation that people often mistake lust for love. The characters in this book seem to have the same problem at times. While the “erotic” in this erotic medieval romance comes through very clearly, the “romance” is a little less obvious. The characterizations in the book simply are not complex…
I am pleasantly surprised with my first volume of Secrets. You never know what you’re going to get when you delve into the world of erotic writing. Especially when you’ve never heard of any of the authors. Two of the short stories are good to excellent, another is somewhat above average, and one falls short.
In The Earl of Her Dreams, Anne Mallory doesn’t deliver a well-rounded historical romance. While the lead characters were likable, their characterization lacked dimension. And the mystery sub-plot is not interesting enough to make up for the tepid romance they share. Christian Black, also known as the Earl of Canley, disguises himself as a commoner…
I usually have no problem leaving Bad Boys anthologies on the shelf. The titles generally sound salacious and a little embarrassing, and I figure the bad boys are usually policemen or cowboys. But British Bad Boys? That’s another story. I grabbed this one and dove right in. While I wasn’t quite what I expected, in…
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