I had not planned to read this book. I kind of recoil from the blend of paranormal mysticism and romantic suspense. For some reason these blends don’t appeal to me even though I have read and enjoyed them in the past (Dream Man and Now You See Her by Linda Howard, for example, are favorites of mine). However, Wicked Pixie alerted me to Mandi’s review on Goodreads and that she had DNF’ed the book because of the racial slurs that peppered the story. Mandi took some grief for this review and you came in to say that the voice behind the racial slurs died just a few chapters into the book, as if the dying of the character washed away the offensiveness of the book. I was curious enough to find out for myself what would justify the use of repeated racial slurs in a contemporary genre fiction book and thus bought this book at the indecently high price of $9.99.

I recognize that by writing this review, I will be propelling sales to those who are curious, just as I was curious but I want to talk about the book and the uses of the racial slurs and thus even though I find the book troublesome and offensive, I think the inadvertent promotional benefit is worthwhile.

Teague Creek was convicted of the brutal murder of his girlfriend, a DA who was investigating a series of arsons. (Pay no attention to all the legal errors such as the DA doing the investigating that a fire cop would do. I’m not sure that this book contains even one correct legal representation). It was posited that she figured out it was her paramedic/firefighter boyfriend and he killed her to silence her.  Teague breaks out of prison during a medical visit with the help of another prison, Taz, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood.  The two take a hostage, a woman named Alyssa Foster. Alyssa is a mix of heritages.  She identifies with no particular race and the only reason that the reader knows she might have some non Caucasian blood is that she becomes the target of a variety of racial slurs from Taz.  He calls her a dink immediately.  The first four chapters of this book are a barrage of racial terms and racial stereotypes.  Luckily for me, the book moves beyond that once Taz is dead, but for the first 80 pages or so you don’t go three pages without something offensive being slapped in front of your face.  The following are the excerpts with corresponding page numbers (according to my Kindle copy).  I am putting everything in a spoiler code (except for you RSS readers) because the racial slurs are so numerous and so offensive that I think that they could be considered triggers.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

The sadly ironic part is that the next two hundred pages are incredibly boring. The two talk, drive, talk, eat, talk, kiss, drive, and end up at a cabin.  Teague isn’t supposed to be much of a talker but the two seemed to have non stop repetitive conversations and internal monologues about how angsty their situation is.

Alyssa’s initial representation is contradictory and relies heavily on the romance reader’s assumption that all heroes are intrinsically good.  In other words, Teague who has the tattoos of a member of the Aryan Brotherhood such as a swastika and other symbols of hate on his body; who hangs around with a man who uses the worst racial slurs possible; who  has threatened Alyssa at every turn to do her harm; to kill a cop, a child and a woman if she doesn’t cooperate with him; who has placed in her harm’s way repeatedly; who has essentially ruined her career by helping to plant evidence that makes her look like an accomplice, is really a good guy.  When Alyssa voices her physical desire for this racist murderer as she defines him, we are supposed to nod our heads at her good taste.  When Alyssa doesn’t trust him and treats him with doubt, we are supposed to be chagrined at her inability to see through all the superficial bad things to the truly heroic guy underneath.

This book asks the reader to buy into the idea that Alyssa should instinctively know that all these bad things are merely acts and a true heroine would recognize the decency and humanity behind the swatiska emblazoned escaped felon/convicted murderer. About 40% in, Alyssa notes “There was a lot of good in this man, more good than she’d seen in most men.” and I couldn’t help but think that Alyssa must know really horrible men if Teague is the guy she think is better than most men.

Teague and Alyssa have a dilemma. In order for the happy ever after to occur, Teague must be exonerated from his crime; solve the mystery behind who framed him; and repair past sundered relationships.  Teague wants to do none of these things and although he has no money, he is intent on doing things his way which would essentially mean life on the run for him and his child.  Alyssa wants to do things a different way.

Here’s what struck me the most after thinking about this book for a while. The Aryan Brotherhood character’s dialogue is crafted with such attention to detail. Some of the slurs were so obscure to me I had to google them. Others were all to painfully familiar. This was a throwaway character who dies in Chapter 4 and then only two passing references are made to him throughout the rest of the book. Teague supposedly hooked up with Taz because Taz had outside contacts, ones that were willing to help him, but those contacts never come looking for Teague and Taz.  Never.  There is never any repercussions for Taz dying.  He was, literally, a throwaway character one whose deletion from the book would not have affected the plot arc in any fashion. You could have replaced him with anyone and the story would have remained much the same.  Additionally, it did appear that Teague had at least one friend on the outside who may have been willing to help him.

Contrast this to the legal aspect of the book. The hero is a convicted murderer. In order for a happy ever after to occur, the conviction has to go away. There are ways for this to happen but not in the way that is described in the book. I’m not sure how much legal research was done for the story, but I wondered if there was even one legal detail in the story that was correct. The ending was almost comical in its improbability.

There were other important inconsistencies. For instance, at one point Teague points out that he is totally broke and cannot afford any more appeals. Earlier in the story, however, Teague uses a credit card to do a cash balance transfer of $5,000 to Alyssa’s account to implicate her heavily in his escape.  Where did he get the credit card?  Was it just lying dormant for 3 years?  I thought he has spent all his money in pursuing custody while in prison!  (Yes, he pursues custody of his child while in prison and is devastated when he loses). And then he, a firefighter/paramedic, asks Alyssa what PTSD is:

What the hell is PTSD”

“Post-traumatic stress disorder.”

There are almost no details given regarding the hero’s paranormal ability which consists of primarily being able to burn things with his hands and heal things (mostly cauterization but also reversing his burns). Throughout the story, this paranormal element is never explained and used in the most shallow of ways. He alternately burns and heals Alyssa and uses his high internal energy to hot wire about five cars. That’s it.

This is a Brava and I did think the story would be more spicy than it was. The story contained two full sex scenes and one was fairly tepid. It’s definitely not overly spicy. I wasn’t convinced of the chemistry between the two characters. Alyssa was constantly ruminating about Teague’s amazingly hot body but that seemed about it. Oh, and she noticed how, once he had showered all the blood off him, he looked “cleaner,more human.” Those powers of observation are keen.

These inconsistencies aren’t fatal to the book, but placed in juxtaposition with 10-12 hateful, racial slurs used to build the character of one throwaway person in the book, the inconsistencies place the use of racial slurs in sharp relief. Why?

These words are hateful and harmful. Why are they used? What do they add to the story? I wished some editor at Kensington had taken a step back and asked these questions.  This is no Huck Finn comparison. In the first place, the use of racial slurs in Huck Finn were period appropriate. Those terms, unfortunately, were used in regular commonplace vernacular. The use of these types of slurs today get people fired, even if they are used accidentally.

This language added nothing to the story other than to be shocking and offensive. Maybe people who have never been the subject of racial slurs don’t recognize how harmful these words could be but people whose business is made out of the use of words should recognize their power.

I’m not saying that racial slurs should never be used in literature or even genre fiction like romance, but I do believe that when you go down that route, there should be a good reason for their use.  There was no good reason for the barrage of hateful words used by a character that is non essential to the storyline.  I’m giving the book a D because I feel I may be overly biased due to the racial slurs.

Best regards,

Jane

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We enjoyed writing our joint review of K.A. Mitchell’s Life, Over Easy and, individually, both enjoyed your own Life After Joe so much that we thought we'd double the fun and repeat the experience. Driftwood shares some of the characteristics of your debut effort, Life After Joe. It features flawed, self-aware, and angst-ridden central and supporting characters; a rich, atmospheric context which engulfs the reader; beautiful writing which leavens the angst with a wry wit; and a plot centered on the sea and those who work and live in and around it. But Driftwood also diverges from your previous novel by focusing on characters who are either serving in or are veterans of the military, and by including a mystery subplot.

Thomas Penrose is a former army medic who served in Afghanistan and then returned to his native village in Cornwall to set up a practice as a GP. He lives in a derelict lighthouse/watch tower with his wolfhound, Belle, as his only companion. Thomas avoids everyone except his patients and tries to keep from drinking himself into oblivion on a regular basis. When he rescues a gorgeous young surfer, Flynn Summers, on the beach one day, he is drawn into contact with villagers and with servicemen at the nearby Royal Naval Air Service base, and he is enmeshed in a triangle with Flynn and Flynn's lover and former copilot, Rob Tremaine. Both Flynn and Thomas carry deep scars from their military experiences, and Flynn's bond with Rob is destructive and complex. The combination of the characters' military back stories, the abusive nature of Flynn and Rob's relationship, and the way the mystery unfolds ratchets up the angst level to such a high pitch that it is difficult for the reader to see how you will get them to an HFN, let alone an HEA. But the writing is so strong, and the evocation of the Cornish coast is so vivid, that it is difficult not to be swept along to the somewhat over the top resolution of the mystery and the absolutely over the top final pages.

Sunita: I loved Tom's voice and felt as if we really got inside his head. But the single POV, again, meant that Flynn was a lot harder for me to read. He's so beautiful and so screwed up, which the writing makes entirely believable and sucks me in, but in real life I think I would run far, far away. Nonetheless, I thought the way the relationship developed, and the way Tom tried to stay firm in his unwillingness to become part of a triangle, was effective.

I have no personal experience so I don't know how accurate this part was, but I thought the depictions of varied types of PTSD were excellent. I am so glad to see a sympathetic but unflinching description of what the lingering effects of war and conflict are. If anything, I thought some of the characters (like Victor) recovered a little too quickly.

Joan/Sarah F.: I don't have any experience with PTSD, either, thank heavens, but Thomas was brilliantly written, in all his fucked-up glory. I read this book because of the excerpt online. But especially this:

First, do no harm. Thomas, about to walk away, shivered to a halt. Eight bitter years since he had taken his Hippocratic oath, and he was certain he had violated it in a dozen ways. The war his nation was waging in the far-off desert he had left behind to come home and fit himself into the shape of the man he once had been-’that formless, limitless, probably endless fucking war-’it hadn't been conducive to good and dignified medical practice. Hippocrates probably had not foreseen the necessity of punching a wounded soldier unconscious to silence his raging objection to the failed Afghani suicide bomber being treated in the next bed. Of taking a rifle from a corpse and sniping off a bunch of gun-toting local kids across a wall of sandbags to defend the bleeding and helpless survivors at his feet. First, do no harm- It made Thomas want to laugh, or throw up, but he knew that to turn his back on the ocean now would be a harm his own fragmented soul might not survive.

I loved Flynn, too, because I could see him trying so hard to be normal, to make the expected gestures, and just repeatedly getting it wrong. I thought the slow reveal of his trauma and how it worked in with the mystery was very well done, no matter my issues with the mystery itself.

Sunita: I think the context is a character in and of itself. The depictions of Cornwall made me feel as if I were there, and the scenes on the ocean were really well done. To be able to move from the urban setting of the first novel to the rural village environment of the second without missing a beat is impressive. And the writing is once again top notch.

Joan/Sarah F.: I especially loved the watch tower that Tom lived in. I could feel Tom's relief when he was able to step over the threshold, but could also feel its desolation and emptiness that matched Tom's internal landscape so perfectly. I think the ending — after the mystery was wrapped up, the very last chapter — was perfectly done (and no spoilers here), precisely because of how it demonstrated the changed internal landscapes of both Tom and Flynn.

Sunita: I was less taken with the mystery subplot, and with Rob as a character, especially in the later parts of the book. He came across as too villainous. The prior connection between him and Tom which was eventually revealed was clever, but instead of providing a way to make Rob more complex, it didn't really go anywhere, and Rob wound up becoming more and more evil. And with the intensity of the mystery storyline, it was hard to come back to the HEA/HFN of the final pages. Given what has gone before, can we really believe that Tom and Flynn can settle into a relatively peaceful, angst-free life?

Joan/Sarah F.: It wasn't only Rob's character, but the over-the-topness of the mystery itself. Rob's crime was particularly heinous and his attempted cover-up with the hit-and-run on Tom was a little unbelievable, as was Tom's physical ability to do all that he did during the climax of the plot after being in a coma. I just kept thinking, “Okay, he needs to collapse now,” rather than focusing on the resolution of the mystery.

Sunita: Overall, the mystery and the angst were a bit too much for me. But I was so taken by the writing and the Cornish setting that I can see myself rereading this. And the sex scenes were really good; they were integrated into the story and they helped us understand the characters and their relationships. I will definitely read your next book.

Joan/Sarah F.: While the mystery and final suspense was a bit silly, to my mind, I adored the attendant angst, of course, as is my wont. I think the characters of both Tom and Flynn were wonderfully done and I loved seeing them both coming to life a little bit at a time through each other. Stay away from the grand gesture at the end and stick with the emotional introspection and your books would be perfect. For me. :P But I'm also very much looking forward to your next book (from Loose Id in November, apparently).

Grade: B

Best regards,
-Sunita and Joan/Sarah F.

Book Link | Kindle | nook | Sony| Samhain

Related posts:

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2. JOINT REVIEW: Life, Over Easy by K.A. Mitchell
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Neurosurgeon – and Mum!, by Kate Hardy. Amy Rivers is a successful neurosurgeon, but a difficult operation has caused her to doubt her skill and suitability for the profession for which she has sacrificed a great deal. She takes a leave from her London practice and goes to her aunt and uncle’s home in a coastal Norfolk village in order to recover and regroup. She has to share the large house with a newly arrived GP, Tom Ashby, a widower and single parent who is staying there while he fills in for Amy's uncle as a locum during their trip abroad. Amy is standoffish and self-protective at first, but she and Tom are soon attracted to each other, and Amy reluctantly feels a strong kinship with Tom’s 8-year-old daughter, Perdy. Tom and Perdy have their own issues to deal with, and they has moved to the village to try and begin a new life.

This is a sweet and gentle story which seemed slow in the beginning but really captivated me as I kept reading. It’s nice to see a heroine who has a higher-status job than the hero in the same profession, and it’s even more unusual to encounter a hero who seems utterly comfortable with it. Tom is a great beta hero. He worries about his daughter, he listens to his patients and he tries to be considerate of Amy’s wish for privacy and emotional distance even as he’s growing increasingly attracted to her. At first, the prospect of Amy and Tom getting together under the same roof as Perdy squicked me out, but Ms. Hardy is a very good writer, and she pulls it off. Amy and Tom are careful to behave only as friends in front of Perdy, and they constantly think of her feelings as their relationship deepens. There are a couple of very good sex scenes, and the relationship progresses over the course of a couple of months.

This is a pretty realistic, down to earth story with characters who could live next door to you, and with whom I would happily have dinner. The hurdles Amy and Tom face in terms of Amy's decisions about her professional life, deciding whether they are committed enough to move forward as a family, and the lingering effects of their past relationships are dealt with very well. As usual, Ms. Hardy puts a lot of medical information and terminology into the novel. At times these scenes feel way too long and didactic (such as when Tom is meeting with a patient who may have diabetes), but at others the discussions are the way Tom and Amy connect and clearly propel the story along.

The book flagged a bit for me in the final chapters, when the focus turned to the various problems being solved. This may in part be because Amy and Tom clearly loved each other by then, so it was just a question of how they would get together. Nevertheless, the lovely characterizations of the main characters, the realistic feel of the setting and the storyline, and Ms. Hardy's usual excellent writing made this a very enjoyable read. Grade: B+.

This book can be purchased digitally or in paper via Book Depository.

Prince Charming of Harley Street, by Anne Fraser. Rose Taylor has taken leave from her position as a practice nurse in Edinburgh to take care of her parents during her father’s convalescence. She finds a temporary receptionist position in Harley Street, where the GP turns out to be an aristocratic playboy with a long list of rich and famous patients. Rose can’t imagine she has anything in common with Dr. Jonathan Cavendish, but as she works with him she finds that there is substance beneath the party façade. Nevertheless, she is afraid to allow the relationship to develop, both because their lives are so different, and because of the secret she is keeping, a secret which will determine the course of her future.

I have enjoyed a couple of Fraser’s previous books (including one Jayne reviewed favorably here
), but this one fell flat for me. I never really connected with either of the characters, and I couldn’t figure out what made Rose fall in love with Jonathan. Yes, he was rich, titled, and handsome, but that’s not supposed to be enough in a category romance. He never really did anything that convinced me he had transcended her initial antagonism toward his lifestyle and his apparently cavalier attitude toward his profession (at one point Rose thinks of him as Little Lord Fauntleroy, which was hilarious and apt). We discover over the course of the book that he does like and respect his rich, sometimes spoiled patients, and he treats them with care and consideration, but that strikes me as a relatively low threshold for heroism. Jonathan tells Rose that meeting her has made him want to give up his partying ways, but I didn’t really feel the change in him. He struck me as a superficial but decent guy, relatively unformed at this point, but who had a chance to grow up to be a somewhat dull but worthy person. I found Rose to be a slightly more interesting character than Jonathan, especially in her relationship with her parents, but she was also kind of blah (despite her singer-songwriter talents) I did enjoy the scenes with Rose, her parents, and Jonathan, especially Jonathan’s efforts for Rose’s father. They seemed both genuine and in character.

Part of my problem with the book is the writing style, which employs somewhat melodramatic language when Rose is thinking about her difficulties, but which can be almost flat and unemotional when Rose and Jonathan are talking to each other. And when Jonathan’s father is talking to Rose near the end of the book and telling her how she resembles Jonathan’s mother, I read it but I couldn’t feel it. But I think that the main flaw is that I never felt that there was something essential between Rose and Jonathan which made them look at each other and think, “This is it.” Oh well. Grade: C.

Book Link | Kindle | Amazon (This actually is a 2 -1) | nook | BN | Borders
| Sony | eHarlequin

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I have loved doctor-nurse romances ever since I found Cherry Ames, Student Nurse in my junior high school library. I don’t know why, because I’ve never wanted to be either a doctor or a nurse. My doctor relatives and friends are good at their jobs but we rarely talk about them, and until I was middle-aged I spent almost no time in hospitals. It must be because I like worldbuilding, and hospitals really are their own unique, almost self-contained worlds. In the olden days, medical romances featured handsome, brilliant, and usually rich doctors who fell in love with either beautiful, feisty, yet competent nurses or jolie-laide, shy, yet competent nurses over the course of 192 pages. But while that still happens, we now have the greater likelihood in real life of male nurses and female doctors. Have Medicals changed along with real life? What kind of lives and romances do these books portray now?

Like every other Harlequin line, Medicals have a set of distinguishing characteristics. First, the hero and heroine have to be medics. Women can be doctors, although men are not yet allowed to be nurses (if someone has a contradictory example, please comment!). They can have related medical occupations, like EMT, and they can work in hospitals or in private practice. The majority of Medicals are set in either Australia or the UK, probably because that is where their authors live, but there are a handful of writers who set their stories in the US, such as Dianne Drake, Janice Lynn, and Laura Iding.

There are Billionaire Docs, Posh Docs, Royal Docs, and even Sheikh Docs. But there are also Ordinary Docs. A current release by Alison Roberts, Wishing for a Miracle, features a decidedly middle-class EMT hero. An appealing feature of heroes and heroines in Medicals is that even when they have HP-like attributes, there is a maturity and sense of purpose to them that makes them grounded (Lynn Spencer pointed this out in a comment to Jessica’s post). Being a Billionaire, Royal, or Sheikh (or for that matter Spanish or Italian) isn’t going to matter when you’re in an operating room engaged in a high-risk operation, or sitting in an office telling a patient he or she has a brain tumor. The hero has to be convincing as a professional, and since many readers have much more experience with illness and disease than they do with high finance or running multinational companies, the authors have relatively demanding standards of authenticity to live up to. Similarly, while there are still a few young, ingenuous heroines (Carol Marinelli has a recent release, A Knight on the Children’s Ward, with a student nurse heroine), most heroines are at the very least highly competent and often quite experienced. The hero is usually the more powerful of the couple, which can be especially acute in a medical setting, but many authors are careful to stress the importance of the subordinate occupation. An excellent book by Amy Andrews, Top-Notch Surgeon, Pregnant Nurse, has a brilliant surgeon hero, but the heroine is the head of the Surgical nursing unit, and her staff is integral to the success of a high-risk operation on conjoined twins.

Ah, those conjoined twins. There aren’t very many of those, but there are plenty of standard-issue twins in Medicals, and even more singletons. There are just babies all over the place. Either the babies are patients in the children’s ward and the heroes and heroines are OB/Gyns, Pediatricians, Childrens’ Surgeons, or Children’s nurses, or the hero or heroine has a child when the story begins. Or, of course, the heroine becomes pregnant during the course of the story, usually accidentally or because of the hero’s Miracle Penis (Caroline Anderson has a recent release,The Surgeon’s Miracle, which features a Miracle Vagina for a change). If condoms actually failed at the rate they do in Medicals, the companies that make them would have been sued out of business by now. The authors do their best to make these accidental and miraculous pregnancies believable, and the best books are pretty successful, but it is definitely a trope. I don’t mind babies in my category romances, but even I get burned out after a while.

The prevalence of miscarriage plots exemplifies the greater level of angst found in Medicals. Perhaps it’s because so much of the drama comes from serious illness/disease or unexpected pregnancy, or perhaps the seriousness of the setting and the occupations feeds it. But while the stories can have plenty of lighthearted elements, several authors write intense books (Marion Lennox is a master at these). It’s difficult to pack complicated backgrounds and foregrounds into the category format, and sometimes the complications go over the top, but when the authors pull it off, the books can be really memorable.

Despite the abundance of babies, Medicals are well worth reading for the relationships and the contexts, especially if you like UK and Oz/NZ settings. For those who like US settings, the ones I’ve read have ranged from the Deep South to rural Utah, and I hope the variety will be maintained as the US list expands. The sex is less explicit and frequent than in the HP or Blaze lines, but usually more steamy than the Harlequin Romance line. All those babies have to start somewhere! And there are some absolutely terrific authors. Among my favorites are Sarah Morgan, Kate Hardy,Marion Lennox, Amy Andrews, and Fiona Lowe, and I’m always looking for new authors.

I’ll be doing monthly mini-review roundups of a number of the Harlequin and Mills & Boon releases. The timing of releases is a bit complicated, because Harlequin doesn’t release Medicals a month early the way it does the other lines, and there is a lag between US and UK releases. Moreover, not all the M&B are released as US Harlequins, so the books may not always be reviewed in the month they’re available in the US. But I’ll try mostly to review those that I know will be released in the US, and if there is reader interest, I’d be happy to do reviews of backlist books that are still available in e-form.

If you’ve read this far and want to try out a Medical, There are several available as free online reads at the Harlequin and Mills & Boon website. Harlequin has a new one by Fiona Lowe, Return to Love, and and Mills & Boon’s online read library has stories by Melanie Milburne, Laura Iding, Dianne Drake, and Alison Roberts.

If you have authors and books to recommend, either in the Medical line or elsewhere, I’d love to hear about them.

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2. Mills & Boon to Test Paranormal Market
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Kym Hinton recommended this book to me. Now, she edited it (and I assume accepted it for publication at Carina), so she was slightly biased, but, despite my trepidation with the first person, I’m so glad I read it. This is a debut, so you don’t have a backlist I can glom, but you’re going on my “Authors to Watch Out For” list. And I recommended it for our July Recommends, so here’s a slightly belated review.

A friend of mine read this book and gave it a much lower grade than I’m going to because it was way too angsty for her. I, however, *like* angst. A lot. And this book certainly has a LOT of it. So I was a very happy camper.

Matthew is six months past a break-up with the eponymous Joe of the title. Joe left Matthew for a woman (after conducting an affair with her for two years, unbeknownst to Matthew). Joe was determined to make his parents happy by having the stereotypical heterosexual lifestyle, despite the deep love between him and Matthew–they were, in fact, childhood sweethearts who grew up together. Matthew had never been with anyone else besides Joe, until he started fucking around after Joe left.

This book is about stereotypes–it plays with them and builds on them and breaks them and I love it for that: the stereotype of the childhood sweethearts with the bit on the side, of the bar scene, of men going “on the down-low” for what they “really” want; the stereotype of the tall, dark, and handsome stranger that Matthew finds at the bar one evening before Christmas. This stranger is Aaron, an oil rigger, who is himself looking to drown his own sorrows at the bar but can’t bring himself to actually hook up with anyone. Aaron and Matt build a relationship much more quickly than either of them expects, until, of course, Joe shows back up.

The angst is…heavy. You do a marvelous job of dealing with all the emotional hangovers of a devastating break-up. Matt is blindly trying to find ways to deal with Joe’s betrayal and at one point he’s suicidal. You do a brilliant job of leading us into that darkness but at times I thought he pulled out of it a little too quickly for accuracy. Aaron’s own issues are also huge and while I love how he breaks down at the end and remakes himself, the lack of access to his thoughts (it’s first person narrative from Matt’s perspective) makes his tumble into love with Matt a little quick for me as well, considering his previous relationship. (And Matt’s storming of the oil rig was…a little forced for my taste, although I love what happened once he was there.)

All in all, this is a tidy little romance (100 pages) that plays with romance stereotypes AND with gay stereotypes in ways that I adore. It’s why I liked Jez Morrow’s tidy little Force of Law and Anah Crow’s dark, violent Uneven. The angst and heartbreak and pain is also a big plus in my book and you do it so so well. As I said, I’m looking forward to your future books (although you really need a website!).

Grade: B+

Best regards,
-Joan/Sarah F.

Book Link | Kindle | Carina Press | nook | Books on Board

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Dear Ms. Ryan,

I had greatly enjoyed your medieval romances, and hold fond memories of Heaven's Fire and Silken Threads especially, so when Still Life with Murder came out back in 2003 I snapped it up. I was glad to discover that your first foray into the mystery genre was a compelling page turner.

Recently, I heard from Keishon and Jane that you are selling both your Patricia Ryan medieval romances and your P.B. Ryan mysteries on Smashwords for a bargain price. At Jane’s request I dug up a post I wrote for a Yahoo group I belong to at the time I first read the book, and reconstituted that post into this review.

Still Life with Murder takes place in Massachusetts in the 1860s. The book opens in 1864 when its heroine, Nell Sweeney, is assisting Dr. Cyrus Greaves who has been called to deliver a housemaid’s child at a Cape Cod mansion that belongs to the wealthy Hewitt family. But there is trouble; the baby is lying transverse, and the doctor needs to perform a caesarian.

Soon after the operation is complete, it becomes apparent that Annie, the housemaid, doesn’t want the child. Her husband is away at war, and not the child’s father. Meanwhile, Viola Hewitt, the matriarch of the WASPy, Brahmin Hewitt family, has recently learned that the eldest two of her four sons, both Union soldiers, died in Andersonville of dysentery.

The grieving, wheelchair-bound Viola now wants to adopt the little baby girl Annie is determined to abandon, and after seeing Nell hold the baby lovingly in her arms, she offers Nell the position of little baby Grace’s governess. Nell, who is Irish, has just enough education to be a nursery governess. She’ll have eight years to learn what she needs to know to become a preparatory governess, Viola insists. Nell tries to tell Viola that she may be harboring illusions about Nell, but Viola replies that “Gentlewomen have no monopoly on virtue.”

Nell is thrilled not just at the opportunity to better her circumstances, but even more at the chance to have a baby to hold and love and raise almost as her own. It is something she thought could never happen, so she eagerly accepts the position with the Hewitts.

Four years pass, and in 1868 the Civil War is over and the Gilded Age is in full swing in Boston. Grace is now three and a half and known as Gracie, and Nell loves her dearly. She would do nothing to jeopardize her position as the Hewitts’ governess; nothing that is, until Viola Hewitt’s oldest son, one of the two Viola believed had died in Andersonville, turns out to be alive and in prison for a murder Viola is convinced he could not have committed.

August Hewitt, the patriarch of the family, is furious at William Hewitt for not telling his family he was alive for four whole years. He refuses to aid his son and is willing for him to hang. Therefore Viola has to go behind her husband’s back, and the only one she can turn to is Nell. And Nell suddenly finds herself thrust back into the world of thieves, prostitutes and cardsharps, a world with which she was once all-too-familiar. Now she must hide that familiarity so as not to lose her position with the Hewitts and along with it, Gracie.

This recap covers only the beginning of this rich, well-crafted mystery. I sometimes find mysteries too cerebral and not as emotionally involving as I would like them to be, but reading this book I wasn’t bored for a minute, because at the same time Nell is investigating clues, she is also learning more about what kind of men William Hewitt and Detective Colin Cook of the police department are, while they (and the reader along with them) are learning more about Nell and her past. Since this is the first in a six book series, not everything about Nell’s past is revealed, but the reader's appetite for more is whetted.

The attraction between Nell and Will, a doctor who became addicted to opium after it was medically administered to him in Andersonville, is palpable. But there are many barriers in the way of their association, not least of which are that to remain Gracie’s governess, Nell has to keep her reputation spotless, and that her employers prefer that she not marry.

While there is a lot of character and relationship development in this novel, I would have liked a bit more, because I enjoyed what I learned about Nell and Will very much. Nell is a true survivor, someone with a lot of strength and determination. These qualities allow her to get to the bottom of the truth as well as to surmount numerous obstacles. Will is perhaps more vulnerable, but like Nell, he has endured a lot in his life. If the two of them are scarred by their pasts, neither one wears it on his or her sleeve nor complains about it.

I liked the wealth of details about Boston in the 1860s, and found the description of the opium dens particularly fascinating. Although I don't know much about the setting, the book felt authentic to me.

Some of my friends refrain from reading mysteries for fear of violence and gore, so I want to assure readers that in this book, only a few details are given about the corpse, and these are not gratituous — that is, they are strictly there to identify clues like whether there was a struggle, whether the dead man was still alive when so-and-so saw something, etc.

Still Life with Murder was thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing. Many of the historical romances published when I read this book, back in 2003, were lighter in tone and set in England, so although this was a mystery rather than a romance, the difference from my usual reading was welcome. I suspect the book would hold up well and be just as entertaining today. A- for Still Life with Murder.

Sincerely,

Janine Ballard

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I’ve never been a huge fan of the Intrigue line because I felt that even full length romantic suspense books struggled to fit both romance and suspense in one story, how could a compressed format do both topics justice? Under the Gun had a good balance of both the suspense (which was more of a whodunit) and the romance, in part because both were in full swing at the start of the book.

Luke Hathaway was jilted by Claire Samson, his one love, who then proceeded to marry another man a month later. Claire loved Luke, but he was always keeping something from her. At the last minute, she caved to her fears and gave Luke his ring back and decided to marry stable, wealthy Phil Samson. Only Phil decides to fake his death and pin it on Claire and now she looks for Luke to help her.

It wasn’t explained why Claire was so good at evading the law or why she thought Luke could help her other than he has a savior’s complex. I wasn’t super convinced at Luke’s easy forgiveness of Claire’s overthrowing him but it was a quick read with a decent suspense thread. B-

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Marchese’s Forgotten Bride by Michelle Reid

This is an amnesia story but this time it’s the hero who has amnesia. Allessandro Marchese is on hand to oversee the smooth assumption of his latest takeover. Cassie Janus is the single mother of five year old twins who nearly faints upon seeing Sandro again. She had had a romance with him and after she got pregnant, Sandro disappeared leaving Cassie alone and penniless. With her MBA, she’s managed to provide a good life for her children and she’s furious to see Sandro again. Further, she’s not sure if she really believes his crazy claims of amnesia. Sandro is manipulative and Cassie is helplessly attracted to him. For fans of the amnesia trope, this is fun to read about the hero with amnesia. All the good of an HP line is here without too much of the bad. It’s full of agnst and passion but not too much of the asshole hero and no doormat heroine (despite Cassie’s attempts to resist her own desire). B-

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The Doctor’s Pregnant Bride by Susan Crosby.

Ordinarily I stay out of this line. The doctor/nurse dynamic has never been one that interested me. Probably too many years of hospital related television dramas. Doctors never seem to have fidelity as part of their makeup.

Sara Beth O’Connell works in a fertility clinic whose research and results are under suspicion. She is asked by her best friend and boss to keep an eye on the clinic’s two main research doctors, one of whom is Ted Bonner. Ted plays the part of the absent minded professor, someone who is so focused on his job that he can barely remember to eat, let alone date. Most of the story involves Sara Beth becoming the focus of Ted’s attention, particularly while she decorates his bachelor bad at his invitation. There’s some clinic work, but the medicine is really a sideshow. I swear I read more about the two of them debating furniture pieces than about fertility science. It was rather a dull story and it didn’t inspire me to pick up others in this line. C

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Dear Ms. Seville.

Denise Rossetti recommended this book to me late last year, but it took Maili ALSO recommending it to me recently to finally make me read it. I think I had about 7 hours of sleep in the three days since I started it. It’s just…brilliant. As I write this review a few days after finishing it, I’m still lost in your world, thinking about the characters, wishing them well.

Dr. Jack Francisco is a maxillofacial surgeon who witnesses a mob murder and is taken into protective custody. He gives up his life and his job (OMG, all that training!) in order to do the right thing and testify about what he saw. But he’s quickly found by a hitman, known only as D, who refuses to kill Jack because he’s been mysteriously blackmailed into taking the hit and can’t bring himself to do it. He’s one of those mythically moral hitman who will only take the hit if the mark “deserves” to die. One might roll one’s eyes at the cliche and might even, in a dorky moment, quote Gandalf (“Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends”), but by this point, your writing and characterization had pulled me in so perfectly, I really didn’t care about quite how much disbelief I was suspending.

D takes charge of Jack (if HE found Jack in protective custody, someone else would too, and in sparing Jack’s life, he felt he’d taken responsibility for it), and they wander around the country, avoiding death from the many people on their tail (mob hitmen, mysterious people after D, Federal Marshals who want Jack back), and falling in love. One thing I ADORED about this book was that they only started noticing each other physically and being attracted to each other and falling in love AFTER the danger was (mostly) over. When they were running for their lives, they were running for their lives and not stopping to fuck like bunnies, or even stopping to make eyes at each other. And yet the sexual tension, the unacknowledged attraction was still there and I’m not sure how you did it. Brilliantly done.

That’s pretty much the plot for half the book. The second half is taken up with trying to keep both Jack and D alive through the trial and then trying to clean things up enough that they could get their HEA. But this bare bones summary does the story such an injustice. You don’t shy away from the moral issues these two men have to face, you don’t shy away from showing their struggles with themselves and with each other. And OMG, you don’t shy away from their emotions. You show Jack struggle with his feelings for a hired killer. You show D’s slow return to emotional life so carefully, so perfectly, I literally couldn’t put the book down:

D shut his eyes, every cell in his body pushing and pulling at him…pulling him toward Jack, pushing him away, a tug-of-war where nobody won. He shuffled forward, slow and hesitant steps that drew him up behind Jack. He didn't turn from the window although he surely knew D was there. D's hand rose from
his side, a marionette arm on strings, his breath going shaky and panicked like a spooked horse. Jack didn't move.

Fuck it. D let his hand fall to Jack's shoulder. He felt him flinch a little at the contact, but he didn't turn. The feeling of Jack beneath his hand, warm through his shirt and solid and strong and alive, sent another blast against that vault door, shuddering it on its hinges. He put his free hand on Jack's other shoulder, his head sagging down. He could feel Jack thrumming, like putting his hand on the hood of a car with the engine
running.

D gave up. He couldn't fight this, at least not now. [ . . . ]-’it was all too much, even for him. He tilted forward until his forehead was resting against the back of Jack's neck. A great exhale rushed from him and
he found himself hanging on to Jack's shoulders for dear life.

I’m still drowning in these characters a full day after finishing this book.

Also, the suspense was unbelievably good. I am not a mystery reader and I rarely read suspense, so the fact that I had no idea about the course of the plot might not say much, but I think it was wonderfully done. My heart was in my throat for HOURS on end and I could NOT put this book down. (It might have helped that I was reading on my iPhone — it’s so difficult to read ahead.)

Niggles: Jack had a doctor’s bag and it had stuff in it. Do doctors REALLY have doctor’s bags nowadays? Especially specialists like Jack? If they do have doctor’s bags, would he really still have it all through the many transfers of protective custody? And if he DID keep it with him, would it really have medicine in it? And syringes? Really?

Also, Jack’s profession is not fully integrated into his character. He chafes a little at losing it in the protective custody, but considering how what D does is SO much a part of who he is, in comparison there’s no discussion of WHY Jack chose to do what he trained for. It’s part of his Type A personality and it’s used to discuss moral issues:

"How about deciding whether you're going to treat the woman with the head trauma or the drunk driver who mowed her down? Or whether to let a man die of gunshot wounds because you know he shot a cop on his way down? How about treating a woman who's been beaten nearly to death and having to watch her walk out the door back to the husband who nearly killed her while she tells you that he didn't mean it, not really! Don't you fucking talk to me about hard choices, and harsh reality. Just because I didn't tote a rifle around Kuwait and never put a bullet between someone's eyes doesn't mean I live in some world of sunshine and rainbows, D. I live in a world where I spend months putting a four-year-old's face back together after her own father smashed it in with a bowling ball. You think you've got it so hard, and maybe you do, but the shit is tough all over. Fucking suck it up, man."

But his career is not as brilliantly a part of him as being a hit man is part of D. But that’s really an “in comparison” niggle rather than anything else. If D hadn’t been so brilliantly done, I don’t think I would have noticed this about Jack.

D’s “dialect” is…slightly annoying. When he’s thinking to himself about whether or not to kill Jack:

Just do it. Fuckin' do it. You can live with it. You cain't live with what'll happen if you don't, and that ain't no figure a speech. Only takes a second. Two shots. Shut them eyes a his lookin' at you like they see through ta yer bones. Fucker; why does he keep lookin' at me like that? Most folks look away. Look at the floor, at the ceiling, at their own hands, anywhere but at me. Biggest damned eyes I ever saw on any man, and bluer'n the sky down in Bryce Canyon. Big enough ta hold all the life in him so's I can see it, the life they want me ta take, the life I'll hafta stand here and watch leave him. Stupid motherfuckers killin' their own and makin' me clean up for 'em like they fuckin' branded me.

It’s part of him. It’s perfectly sustained throughout the book. But it’s never explained by where he came from (either geography or class). And it slowed down my reading sometimes enough to be mildly irritating. But not enough to stop. Never enough to stop. Did I mention I couldn’t put this book down?

And finally, there’s a 15 page Epilogue that should have been cut completely. Even before the Epilogue, you’ve got two endings. I’m glad you went beyond the first ending to the second ending, but then adding the Epilogue as well was just too much. And the short stories on your webpage are just…sad? I understand another sequel’s coming, but don’t give Jack and D problems before they’ve even settled into their happy ending.

That aside, your writing is amazing. The individual words you choose surprised me in a good way. The sentences you string together flow beautifully. The paragraphs you make are perfect:

With his shorn hair and stubble, D's head looked like it had been sandblasted and weather-stripped. Jack had spent most of his professional life cutting people's faces open, and his surgeon's eye showed him the bones beneath D's skin, although his seemed much closer to the surface than most people's. His jawline was like a flying buttress, his brow like one of the table mesas that lurked on the horizon. His skull was geologic in its architecture. One could only imagine the seismic events and plate tectonics that had gone
on in his life to shape him into this…whatever he was.

The story as a whole is still glowing bright in my mind. I would pretty much read anything else you wrote, no matter what. I’m torn how to grade this book. Logically, looking at all the niggles I had, it should get a B+ or even a B but the book FELT like an A- book, so I’m going to go with my gut.

Grade: A-

Best regards,
-Joan/Sarah F.

| Book link (no excerpt) | DreamSpinner Press | Kindle | Amazon

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Ever since you revealed that your next book would be about Jae Sun Kim, the hot, sarcastic, misanthropic doctor from Collision Course, I have been yearning for this book. Yearning, I tell you. The problem, of course, with wanting a book so hard is that when it comes, it might suck and all that yearning is transformed into disappointment more crushing because of the depth of the yearning.

This book doesn’t do that. This book is worth every ounce, every drop, every last millimeter of yearning. In fact, this book is about one of the most perfect romances I’ve ever read.

Jae Sun Kim is a trauma surgeon who finds himself on a live-on dive cruise vacation for a week because he’s running away from the fact that his careful plans to move from his residency in Jacksonville to a fellowship in Seattle have collapsed through no fault of his own. He desperately wants to put the continent between himself and his homophobic parents in Orlando but has no idea what to do now. Shane is the dive master on the cruise, very much a rolling stone determined never to grow any moss. Much to Kim’s disgust, he and Shane end up rooming together in a tiny cabin even though he booked a single cabin. And the cherry on top of his loss of control is an unexpected sea-sickness that Shane helps him through.

I love the first description of these two men:

The guy might have been giving a lesson on a dude ranch. The lilt in his voice made cactuses and Stetson hats tumble out along with his words. Which in a less stressful situation might have been nice, because a tall guy in boots, a hat and dusty jeans, drawl pouring sweetly from a wide mouth, was the kind of thing Kim had been known to bookmark on his laptop. Especially when that cowboy parted with the dusty jeans and boots in the first thirty seconds. He could leave the hat on for the ride.

It tells us so much about Kim — workaholic extraordinaire — and about his perception of Shane, one that Shane does nothing to dispel.

While Kim and Shane enjoy some really great sex in their time together on the boat, sea-sickness aside, they are really drawn together when the boat abandons them during a dive. This extended scene of survival reads like an adventure story, but tells us a lot about the characters. In fact, everything tells us about the characters. You are, to my mind, the undisputed queen of Show, Don’t Tell, and these two characters are so brilliantly constructed, they felt like they should have walked off the page into my living room (I wish). I was grinning like a fool as I watched Shane stumble toward the realization that Kim is a top and only a top and that pocket-sized Kim expected tall, muscle-bound Shane to bottom. And I had an even bigger smile on my face when he did and loved it:

Kim wrapped a hand around Shane's neck and pulled him down. Fuck if the bastard hadn't been right about Shane's wiring, because the weight of Kim's hand on that spot had Shane's knees starting to bend. He took a deep breath when he realized all Kim was pushing for was a kiss. Shane spread his legs until they were a little closer in height and met him halfway.

After the life-and-death situation, Shane follows Kim to Jacksonville, and it’s in the relative peace and quiet of everyday living that their flaws come out and threaten the relationship. But I love how unabashed both Kim and Shane are about their character flaws. Shane is perfectly happy being a fuck-up, following his traveling itch, moving to make sure he doesn’t get bored. He thinks to himself once:

His conscience always took a back seat to the fact that he was a slut for pleasure and that wasn’t going to change any more than the fact that everything he got involved in turned to shit.

He tells Kim during their final fight:

“I’m not a fighter, Jay. I don’t have the patience for it.”

But he’s not an asshole because of it. He’s just…Shane. Just as Kim is just…Kim, completely unable to understand emotional entanglements, completely uninterested in having relationship conversations, frustrated and embarrassed by them:

Kim couldn't begin to understand what he wasn't understanding and he hated it. Confusion was as unfamiliar as it was loathsome, and he remembered why, despite the human propensity for pairing off, he had successfully avoided being befriended. For the most part. Unwilling to expose more of his efforts at communication to ridicule, he folded his arms and leaned back against the couch.

The ending is…just sublimely perfect. I always squint my way through my first reading of the ending of a highly anticipated book (yes, I read the end first) because it just might not live up to expectations. And if it’s good, I then kind of wince my way through reading the book because it might not live up to the ending. But this ending is perfectly suited to both characters and to the rest of the story. I adore the fact that Kim doesn’t come to a sudden realization about love — although he and Shane definitely get their Happy Ever After. I love that Shane is so ready to quit…and yet not. I love how they don’t change because of their love, that their love, instead, shows them being more themselves. Kim’s despair and actions, and the way you bring the imagery and themes of the whole book together in the final few scenes is incredible.

I have learned to live with the fact that I can’t turn off my literary critic. I might want to at times, just so I can settle in and enjoy a book without thinking about it, but I can’t, so I deal with it. And it’s books like this one that makes all my training worthwhile. Watching how the symbolism of Kim’s tattoo and the imagery of death and the theme of impulsive actions weave themselves throughout the book was a wonder to behold. It’s done so smoothly, I think, so unintrusively, that it’s not obvious to any but the most obsessive reader. But it’s there and it layers the book, drawing everything together to make everything just make sense by the end.

And it’s unintrusive because you trust your readers to get it. You trust us to get the desert dry humor of these two men, their flaws and foibles and fucked-up motivations. You trust us to understand and in doing that, present us with an amazing story because you’re letting the characters speak for themselves without any unnecessary explanatory narration.

I’ve read this book twice straight through and probably another two times in bits and pieces, rereading for the good stuff — which usually means reading most of it because it’s all good. And I can’t find any flaws. Even the inclusion of Joey and Aaron from Collision Course is integral to the story and well-done and readers don’t need to have any previous knowledge of them to understand their role in this story. I didn’t know if you could top Collision Course, but you absolutely did. This is a perfect romance with stunningly vivid characters, a beautifully constructed plot, and a brilliant emotional arc. Everyone should go and get a copy. Right now!

Grade: A (FWIW, I’ve been reviewing for Dear Author for 18 months now — wow, really? — and this is only the fourth straight A review I’ve given. That’s how good this book was.)

Best regards,
-Joan/Sarah F.

| KA Mitchell’s Website | Samhain | Kindle | Nook |
Fictionwise   | Books on Board

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Over time, the Australia/New Zealand Harlequin Presents (HPs) have become my favorites mostly because I feel that the women are slightly more emancipated in these stories (not always of course). Pleasured features the requisite millionaire but the heroine isn’t a virgin. Instead, she’s provocative and proactive.

Sienna, on vacation in Sydney, is drawn to a band practicing in a club. Inside she finds not only a band but “Mr. Utterly Attractive.”   She wants him and after seeing the mutual attraction in his eyes, she sets out to get him.   Sienna is determined to abide by her new motto of “living in the moment.”

The target is Rhys Maitland, millionaire in disguise.   He’s taking a much needed vacation from his medical career by hiding in this less ritzy, touristy part of Sidney.   Rhys is constantly pursued by women and  the tabloids as he is an heir to a large Sydney fortune.   His attraction to Sienna is surprising, a little unwanted but still invigorating.

Sienna and Rhys have  secrets that they keep from each other because neither of them want to divulge personal information but for differing motivations.   They both fear that the other will react differently if they knew the truth. Sienna fears pity from Rhys. Rhys  wants to get to know Sienna without the   interference of his money and  notoriety might cause.

The conflict rests some on their mutual secrets, some on a standard HP trope of mistrust and misunderstanding (Rhys accuses Sienna of selling their relationship out to the tabloids), but more interestingly on Sienna’s need to test herself and be autonomous and Rhys overbearing concern for her health.   Sienna’s trip to Sidney and parts far aflung was for the purpose of escaping the bonds of those who love her.   One of the things that I appreciate about this HP is that it took turns that I didn’t expect.   Sienna’s decisions regarding her relationship with  Rhys, in the end, were predicated less on the wrong assumptions that Rhys made about Sienna and more about her fear of ending up in the same type of relationship she had escaped.

Rhys was less interesting.   He plays the mistrusting, cynical alpha male role found in many of the HPs. Of course, the standard characterization is partly the reason that we read HPs but given that Sienna was a little unusual, I felt something more could have been done with Rhys.   He was quick to forgive and forget and there is a big dramatic ending which was enjoyable, but I felt there could have been even greater emotional connection had Rhys been a more vibrant character.

In the end, I found the reliance on the old HP tropes were unnecessary and leached away part of the uniqueness.   For all that Rhys’ standard alpha male shtick was mundane at times, Sienna’s vibrancy made up for it.   I’ll definitely be on the lookout for more Natalie Anderson books. B-

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or ebook format from the Sony Store and other etailers.

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I’ve had this in my TBR pile since Keishon’s review last year. I’ve dusted it off (metaphorically since it is an ebook) for Keishon’s monthly TBR challenge. While I agree with some of Keishon’s points (particularly on the extensive world building), I found the romance to be forced in many places.

Dr. Megan Carter is working on a drug that she hopes will help save children with brain tumors. Unbeknowst to Megan, it is foreseen that she may be the instigator of a cataclysmic shift in the futures of gods and humans. Gideon Sinclair, immortal soldier, gets to her first and spirits her away.

Sinclair’s superiors are part of the Eternity Council, a mythic League of Nations, that work together to enforce balance between good and evil. Even the so-called evil gods recognize that without balance their own existence can be put in jeopardy. Of course, the truly evil will always want more power, and thus, there is Gideon and his compatriots who are dispatched to dispense justice.

The external conflict is much stronger than the internal one but smartly overlaps. Sinclair is ordered to terminate Carter to prevent the future that is foreseen by the mystics. Upon meeting her, though, he has doubts as to his orders and deviates from them. Gideon decides to employ a “wait and see” strategy.

Even though Gideon has chosen not to terminate Megan, others aren’t so interested in keeping her alive or capturing her for their own nefarious purposes. Plus, Gideon and Megan must work together to determine what her role is in keeping the future balance and who might be behind the possible creation of an inbalance.

I also found the attraction between Megan and Gideon contrived. When Gideon first arrives on the scene to capture Megan, he reacts physically to her. Even though Megan is being carted off to some unknown location after being attacked by zombies and other creatures, Megan can’t help but noticing Gideon’s “magnificent chest.” “From this position she could see his magnificent, injured chest. She watched it rise, then fall, as if he still breathed.” She was still bound and gagged at this point by Gideon. I think the last thing I would be measuring was the magnificence of someone’s chest who tied me to a chair and gagged me.

The near instant attraction sets an off tone for the book and prevented natural development of the relationship.

Her scent surrounded him. Her body warmed his. Cradled in his arms she was soft and boneless against him. She wore a tissue-thin, copper-colored gypsy skirt that flowed silkily over her curves. Her heat burned him in ways he didn’t want to admit. His groin tightened, a purely male reaction to the sultry female held so close. He was breaking all the rules. He knew this, even as he set off for his SUV. He was breaking the rules, and risking the world and his very life for a hunch, and a mortal woman.

I liked that Megan was smart and capable of fighting back with whatever tools she had at her disposal and, at times, she read like the doctor and scientist she purported to be. But she fell into silly territory early on:

His long, calloused fingers grazed her cheeks as he released the gag. His touch sent shivers to her very core. No, Gideon Sinclair was no dream. He was a flesh and blood man, and he was all too real. She was crazy to be thinking of her kidnapper as some kind of sex god.

The second part of the story was much stronger, presenting more of the details of the worldbuilding and heightening the suspense. If you forego the initial moments of disbelief as to the relationship, the story can grow on you, but overall, I was hoping for something more. Both Keishon and Mrs. Giggles found this to be a fabulous read so I might be totally off base here. C+

Best regards

Jane

This book can be purchased in ebook format from Samhain.

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Here's a problem I have. Sometimes I get authors mixed up in my head. I got you mixed up with another author named Karen and I thought you and she were the same person so I haven't picked up any books of yours since 2005. After reading the Scottish Companion, though, I clearly need to go through your backlist. I'll probably end up buying the other Karen too since I am sure that my imperfect memory will fail me again when I am actually at the bookstore

Grant Roberson had abdicated his role as Earl of Straithern in favor of studying science in Italy for the past five years. The death of his brother, Andrew hastens him home. Shortly after his arrival, his second brother, James, falls ill and dies within 6 months of Andrew's death. Grant is suddenly confronted with his own mortality. It is suggested that his family might be suffering from a hereditary disease. With no immediate heirs, Grant requires a wife and an heir to preserve the earldom for his family. He offers a bargain with his doctor who has three daughters and extracts a promise for one of their hands in marriage. The eldest, Arabella, is designated to be the betrothed.

Arabella is unhappy. She would like to do nothing more than be single and study medicine with her father. Gillian Cameron is her paid companion. This is not a book of hijinks where Arabella switches places with Gillian and a deception is underfoot. Instead, each woman looks upon her role with disgruntled acceptance. Arabella will marry but she isn’t going to be happy about it and acts rudely most of the time. Gillian will be the paid companion, destined to sit in the background; to be neither seen nor heard.

Dr. Fenton took Gillian in after her family threw her out for some unknown disgrace. Gillian is told that she will lose her position as Arabella's companion if she doesn't get Arabella to shape up and ready for marriage.

Grant takes interest in Gillian even though he is betrothed to Arabella. Even at the outset, the interest is improper and Gillian reluctantly turns away from it. Yet, the temptation of a little freedom and a little attention to her starved ego, and Gillian finds she cannot stay away from Grant nor him from her. She was angry and she wasn't certain who she was angrier at: him for being so fascinating or herself, for being lured too easily. At times her helpless attraction to Grant is nearly palpable.

All of the characters were nuanced. Dr. Fenton was devoted to his family, indulgent even, but would not allow Arabella to weasel out of marriage and not above treating Gillian poorly to get what he wanted. Grant's mother was not a harridan, but a grieving woman who felt her opportunities had not lasted long enough. Arabella, frightening in her coldness, was made into that person by circumstances. Gillian recognized she gave up even the most simplest of dreams in her careless youth. She regrets it but understands her place. Grant is both scientist and reluctant landowner, the pressures of his father's legacy serve to both drive him away and bring him home again. He is haughty proud and not above engaging in an indiscretion with his wife to be's companion.

The flaws in the book were minor. Grant and Gillian's attraction in the face of the impending wedding seemed a bit too brazen; a bit too dishonorable. My other complaints related to the end of the book and would be too much of a spoiler to reveal but let me obliquely state that I thought Dr. Fenton's character veered a bit too much of a caricature and that Grant's actions in regards to the use of his laboratory seemed inconsistent with his dislike for the structure. Finally, the villainy that leads to the climactic scene is a common one and overused in the romance genre. Still, I'll be digging out my old copies or buying new ones online. B

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased in mass market or ebook format.

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I haven’t bought a book written by you in years. My neighbor bought this one and offered it to me. It’s hard to turn down free books and I thought I remembered you fondly. After reading the first 100 pages, it was brought back in stark relief why I had stopped buying you. Your writing is awkward – filled with info dumps, interchangeable characters and spotty world building.

Libby Drake is one of the seven magical sisters. She is a doctor and her special trait is her ability to heal people. Some of her other sisters have this ability, but she has the strongest ability. Strangely, she can bring two people back from the brink of death after gunshot wounds, concussions, and brain trauma but she can’t heal a young boy who has cancer. That makes perfect sense.

Tyson Derrick is the hero. Strike that, he is a SUPER hero. He fights fires, speeds around in expensive cars and motorcycles, and goes on rescue missions. AND, he is a brilliant research scientist. AND he is a multi millionaire from money he inherited from his parents. Of course, his flaw is that he is abrupt with people and he has a self pity complex from the fact his parents didn’t love him enough.

I would think that after so many years of writing that you could have polished up on the showing v. telling technique because this book was completely told to us. Every character sounds the same and talks in four to five sentence paragraphs. There are no exchanges in this book, only lectures. The lectures are really awkward exposition or, as my friend likes to call it, “As you know Bob dialogue.” For example, all the sisters are together and talking. These women are very close but Hannah feels the need to say this:

“All the girls hated me,” Hannah said. “I walked into a room and they immediately got really nasty looks on their faces. I was so painfully shy I couldn’t have talked to them anyway, but it made it worse. They all thought I was stuck up and haughty. I didn’t even know what haughty was the first time I overheard someone call me that.”

If Hannah had said that to someone she was getting to know, that would make perfect sense. For her to announce this to her sisters is a sloppy way of telling the readers an important character trait of Hannah (versus showing).

The villian couldn’t have been more obvious if you just came out and labeled him. Your attempts to move the suspicion onto other people was ineffective. You demonized the villian too greatly to have any other outcome.

The main characters were completely overshadowed by the sisters’ relationships, particularly Hannah and Jonas’ interaction. Further, your world building and magic were inconsistent, particularly with Libby’s ability to heal some people and not others. You kept telling us that it was sooo dangerous for Libby to heal people and yet, you have her do it time and again with no real repercussions (oh, you tell us how dangerous it is, but it is not shown to us in any measurable way). I couldn’t bring myself to be interested in the main characters or the world building. I liked the glimpses of Hannah and Jonas and that’s probably what saved the book from being a true wallbanger. C- for you.

Best regards,

Jane

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