AAR

  • Midnight Choices

    Midnight Choices is a surprisingly complex story for a series romance, so much that it has a bit of a single-title feel to it. In fact, the book I read directly after it, a single-title with a similar scenario and several of the same elements, was far more simplistic and less effective than this one….

  • Embrace the Twilight

    Embrace the Twilight gets off to such a fascinating, atmospheric and romantic start that it seemed destined for DIK status. Then the introduction of a deeply annoying secondary character sends the book in another direction, where the story begins to unravel. Colonel Willem Stone is a prisoner of war after being captured by the terrorist…

  • Quentins

    Quentins is the name of a Dublin restaurant that has a tremendous effect on the lives of its staff and patrons. It would make sense that that would be the focus of a book named after it. But while Quentins the eatery does play a large part of the story, and occasionally steps to the…

  • A Day Late and a Bride Short

    A Day Late and A Bride Short is from the Silhouette Romance line, a sweet line. I like sweet romances and I’ve read more than my share of sweet Regencies, inspirational romances, and straight romances that were sweet as can be. But the best of sweet romances are – well, they are romantic, something this…

  • The Last Bride in Ballymuir

    The Last Bride in Ballymuir is a fairly average contemporary read with characters who inspire no great dislike – but aren’t what you’d call compelling either. It has an nice Irish setting, and mercifully, the author doesn’t attempt to write the whole thing in dialect (I’ve read a few too many heavy-handed dialect jobs lately)….

  • The Longing by Wendy Lindstrom

    The Longing is an example of that increasingly rare creature, the non-Western Americana Romance. Good examples of that particular sub-genre are getting hard to find, and I am happy to say this one did not disappoint. The Longing began well, and moved along quite nicely, but it petered out a bit toward the end. However,…

  • Bed of Lies

    A moving read requires more than dumping page after page of misery on the characters. That’s a distinction Bed of Lies fails to make. This book is simply depressing. It’s more than 300 pages of misery topped off by a happy ending that’s about as believable as kissing a boo-boo and saying, “All better.” Zach…

  • The Ghost of Carnal Cove

    The Ghost of Carnal Cove is Gothic Light. Despite hitting all the familiar notes, it’s often the opposite of what it needs to be. Soft when it should be edgy, predictable when it should be suspenseful, this is a thoroughly average read. Makenna Lindsay comes to the Isle of Wight in the wake of a…

  • Riptide

    Though it doesn’t say so anywhere on its handsome cover, Riptide is an inspirational romantic suspense novel. The heroine is involved in a terrible crime and the loss of a loved one that leads her to a spiritual struggle. Though Sarah MacIntosh and Julie Armstrong are identical twins, they were adopted by different families and…

  • Kissed By Shadows

    Kissed By Shadows was a smoothly written book. There was no laugh inducing purple prose and no awkward sentences jerked me out of my reading. Technically, I have nothing to complain about. Gentle Reader: “So why isn’t the grade higher”? O.K., I’ll explain. Lady Phillipa Nielson is a member of the Mary Tudor’s court. As…

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