I enjoyed the first Riggs Brothers book, Drive Me Wild. This one? Not so much. Jace—25, tall, muscled, and allegedly deep—just finished a 20-month sentence for grand theft auto. (The crime plot involving all the Riggs brothers threads through the series and doesn’t resolve here, in case you were hoping for closure.) Tara, his court-appointed…
Narrated by J.F. Harding Fly Away Home is an engaging, low-angst contemporary romance in which a mystery writer falls for the hot detective who – very briefly – suspects he may be up to no good. The reasons for that are a bit silly; author Colson Delacourt, in a café while talking on the phone…
In The City Without End, Kelly Jensen returns to the universe she created for 2018’s To See the Sun, although this story is set at the other end of it! The romance centres around the arranged marriage between two scions of the First Families of the glittering city of Zhemosen, and is set against a…
Melissa K. Roehrich’s Lady of Darkness is a new adult fantasy that combines familiar tropes into a character-driven narrative filled with assassins, romance, and secrets. Despite its intriguing premise, the book struggles to deliver an interesting story, often feeling like an attempt to mimic popular romantasy series such as Throne of Glass and A Court…
Westlake, Michigan is the kind of town where, in ways mostly bad, everyone knows your name and they never forget your sins. It’s a place young people leave as soon as they can—and come back to when elsewhere’s charms fail. In Drive Me Wild, both Luke Riggs and Emily Parker took off at eighteen, convinced…
I’m a fan of the TV show The Great British Bake Off so when I heard about this cozy mystery with a similar setup, along with a romance, I was all in. All of the food sounded delicious, the romance between the Viscount and baker was really sweet, and I couldn’t wait for them to…
I enjoyed the first book in this series, Never Blow a Kiss. It was wallpapery, sure, but very entertaining, with leads who sizzled and dialogue that made me laugh. This one? Still wallpapery, but missing the zing of book one. It’s not terrible, however, and, if you’re looking for fun and forgettable, this does the…
Deep End is Hazelwood’s swimmer/diver romance! The leads are elite college athletes and when they find out a secret about each other they decide to become teammates with benefits. While this isn’t my favorite trope, the story has tons of banter and humor that I love. Scarlett is a platform diver and a junior at…
An uneven tone makes The Duke’s Guide to Fake Courtship slow going. Heavy subject matter – including abuse between servants, social snobbery, racism, attempted sexual assault, child murder and mental illness – clashes with light scenes of family, banter and flirtation. It’s much darker than the premise on its back cover suggests, but lacks the…
This is–in some ways–an odd book. The mood is light and humorous and yet the hero struggles with alcoholism, the heroine is on the run from her father who has been molesting her, a woman in the book has been raped and viciously murdered, and the villain responsible for that crime tries several times to…
End of content
End of content