Dear Author » Military

REVIEW: Coming Up for Air by Karen Foley

Jane — Sat, 05 May 2012 16:00:12 +0000

Dear Ms. Foley:

I wished I had liked this book more because it was fairly non offensive with likable characters but it read underwhelming to me primarily because most of the story felt forced.

Jenna is a Blackhawk pilot who has made a vow to never get involved with another pilot. One night she hooks up with a major from a bar frequented by people who lived and worked on the nearby Fort Bragg base. She believes him to be Chase Rawlins, a special forces guy, about to be deployed. In other words, a good bet for a good time. The likelihood she will run into him again is slim.

The problem is that it is not Chase Rawlins, but rather his identical twin brother, Chance, whose world is being rocked by Jenna during a one night stand. Chance is an apache pilot and the two run into each other in Kabul.

Jenna feels her position as a female troop amongst the men keenly and I thought it was well evidenced by the mere difference in their call signs:

“Why is your call sign T-Rex?”"What?” Chance was unprepared for the sudden change in subject. Call signs were the nicknames given to aviation pilots and crew members. “I guess because as an Apache pilot, I’m one of the biggest, baddest predators out there. And because I’m from Texas and T-Rex sort of sounds like a shortened version of Texas. Why?”"Do you know what my call sign is?” she finally asked.Chance shook his head. “I have no idea.”"Goalie.”"Ah. As in everyone tries to hit on the goalie?” He’d not only hit on her, he’d scored. Big-time.

Chance shows little sympathy or understanding for Jenna’s position. Given his own long time experience in the military, I was surprised at how clueless he was, responding that her showing interest in him would merely be a sign she was a “human.” Jenna was rude about her assumptions of Army pilots, but Chance doesn’t acknowledge that her flirtation or dalliance with him could affect the way in which the men around her and in subordinate positions.

I also couldn’t figure out why Chance was chasing her so assiduously. I guess their one sexual experience was so mind blowing he can’t forget her. The romance between the two consist of a one night stand followed by few days spent together at various military bases overseas. Jenna’s worries about being talked about for her sexuality slides away as easily as her panties and cavorts with Chance in her Blackhawk helicopter. I’m sure that rumor won’t spread around the base faster than a grain of sand in a sandstorm. And who cares that they don’t have condoms. She’s on the pill and they’ve both passed a military physical (does that work on everyone in the military? “hey baby, no condoms needed, I’ve had my military physical”).

When Chance chides Jenna for not being open to a relationship, I wonder (along with Jenna) what relationship is he talking about? They’ve had two sexual encounters at that time. Jenna is just as frustrating. She agrees to a “relationship” but only if they can see other people. Jenna rationalizes that if she allows them both this emotional out, she won’t be hurt when Chance inevitably strays. I wonder (along with Chance) why she even calls it a relationship.

There is an attempt to insert some character growth. Chance has some intense sibling rivalry with his special ops brother but the story is mostly about Jenna and her fake bad relationship with her father and her inability to have a good relationship with another pilot. Hook up with someone else, then, Jenna! Alas, everything about this book seemed forced and this feeling was only enhanced with how Jenna’s relationship and feelings for her father were resolved at the end of the story.

Finally, when Jenna, the heroine, says un-ironically that The Notebook was “only one of the best movies ever made” the story’s credibility took a long slide downward. C

Best regards

Jane

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REVIEW: A SEAL in Wolf’s Clothing by Terry Spear

Jane — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:00:19 +0000

Dear Ms. Spear:

I mentioned a while back that I wanted to read your werewolf series and somehow your publisher, Sourcebooks, caught wind of this and the publicist sent me your entire series, both backlist and an ARC of the next book. I was overwhelmed with the generosity and sat down immediately with book one. Unfortunately (and I can’t remember why today) book 1 of the series never captured me. I put the book down and never returned but every now and again I would see your name and think to myself, I need to read a Terry Spear book. When “A SEAL in Wolf’s Clothing” appeared on NetGalley, I thought it was a sign. I guess I thought it would be like a Reese’s peanut butter cup: two awesome things smushed together into even more delicious thing.

It wasn’t until I started reading the book that I recognized the ridiculousness of the setup. A shapeshifting SEAL operative? Wolves are not the first animal one thinks of when the ocean is conjured. And what is a werewolf doing working with the US government when the wolves aren’t even “out”? Talk about failing in the “not drawing attention to oneself” test. But the incongruousness of the setup isn’t even the problem here as SEAL is used as a short cut for “hot, strong, and brave.” No, the problem is that the hero comes off as this unrelenting misogynist. I figure by the kind of snarky tone of the hero in his narrative points of view that I’m supposed to find him endearing and perhaps that is how some readers find him. To me, nearly every time the hero opened his mouth he rubbed my fur the wrong way. (Pun intended)

Finn is on the same SEAL team as Hunter. Hunter was the target of an assassin but he is now off honeymooning which leaves Hunter’s sister, Meara, vulnerable. Meara would like to find a mate and with her overprotective brother out of the way, Meara thinks this is the perfect time to assess a field of candidates. Using her family’s vacation cabins as cover, Meara writes a vacancy notice intended to send a message that she is looking for a strong alpha mate. Finn quickly puts the kibosh on this and spirits Meara away for her own good.

Let’s examine how the book opens. An assassin may be after the heroine. Does the hero go to her and say “hey, your life may be in danger. Let’s make a plan together to keep you safe. I’ll help in whatever way you need.” No, instead our hero sneaks into the heroine’s home. He discovers that she is intending to look for a mate by rifling through her notes. He then proceeds to install a hidden camera in her living room and listening devices in her phones and bedroom. When she comes into her home with one of her potential mates, he proceeds to strip down, shower, and then walk around naked in her bedroom to stake out his “territory” in front of the other werewolf. I was waiting for him to whip out his dick and just piss on her leg, but I was spared this.

He does get around to telling her that she is unsafe and that she is going to do what he says or else and the heroine, no dummy, acquiesces. See Mr. Hero, you don’t have to be a crazy stalker dude with a holier than thou attitude. I thought the heroine showed good sense throughout the book, recognizing her limitations and not trying to do things that would put the two in danger, yet, the hero never treated her with enough respect. When they get to an immense and expensive home they are going to use as a safe house, the heroine asks whose it is. “You don’t need to know.” is Finn’s response but he doesn’t even give her a reason for this. Frustrating! Even more frustrating was that Finn would share information with another woman, an “operative” (not sure where she fell into the SEAL dynamic, but a lot of that wasn’t well explained. There was some implication that the woman was part of a SEAL team but since there are now women in SEAL teams, I just wasn’t sure) but not with Meara.

As for the SEAL thing, it gave a reason for Finn to be competent romance hero but I did wonder if there was a contractual requirement that the four letters be inserted every so often because there were strange sentences like Yogi Berra would spout:

Finn had known he’d be taking on a handful of trouble when he made the decision to protect her. But what was a SEAL to do when a wolf needed protection?

On the werewolf side, we had heightened ability to smell and increased strength but almost nothing about the pack dynamic. There wasn’t anything interesting or original and very little effort was given to build a compelling alternate world. Instead, this is primarily a romantic suspense set in contemporary time with the wolf/SEAL attributes tacked on to provide cover for more extraordinary exploits and a packet of shorthand characterizations: “She was a werewolf, and that meant she reacted instinctively. Well, because she was an alpha werewolf. A beta probably wouldn’t have.”

From a romantic suspense standpoint, the suspense portion was fairly tame until the last half to last third of the book. More time was spent building the sexual tension between Finn and Meara and in the head of what will presumably be the next hero in the series. This book may be of interest to romantic suspense fans but I don’t think seekers of werewolf books with pack dynamics will be satisfied. I came away with the feeling that the story was decently written but not to my taste. I think it would have been much better without the SEAL or wolf aspect. C

Best regards,

Jane

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REVIEW: Nightfire by Lisa Marie Rice

Jane — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:00:31 +0000

Dear Ms. Rice:

Sometimes authors and readers have some kind of strange sychronicity where everything that author writes hits all the buttons of the reader and everyone else on the outside looks on in befuddled wonderment. Objectively I can see that there are things that don’t work very well in this book. There is the excessive use of the unsexy word vagina. It is often clenching. There is the ever constant reminder that the previous couples in this Protector series are blissed out on happiness as if they are mainlining pixie dust every morning. There is the fact that monetarily everyone in this book is so rich and so talented and so beautiful that I was momentarily blinded by the bright shining light emitting from the ARC. But my response is to run around with my fingers in my ears and repeating “la la la la I can’t hear you.”

I received an arc of this book and gobbled it down the same night. And the truth is, those issues aside, there is some great stuff going on in this book. Like the hero acknowledging being a manslut is actual NOT a thing of honor. How many times is the manslut held up like some diety because he’s slept around so much that his dick has logged more miles the transatlantic frequent flyer?

Like scenes that are filled with real tension and suspense and enough armory that they could have been ripped from a Michael Bay movie. And that’s a good thing because there is nothing worse than an action scene that is limper than a overripe head of lettuce laid out in the sun for three days.

Like the heroine being bad at everything from cooking to singing to keeping a house but being awesome in her own right in direct contrast to the previous two heroines (one of whom is amazing translator and so beautiful angels sing and the other who is an amazing singer and an amazing bookkeeper).

This is a story that is told in essentially three simple parts. The first part is Mike and Chloe meeting and falling for each other. This takes a day. The second part is Mike and Chloe ripped apart because of something Mike does. Kind of. The third part is Chloe in danger and Mike riding to the rescue. Cue sunset.

Mike Keillor is a manslut. He goes out to those bars where women go specifically for one night stands. Even his friends refer to him as “ Mike, the man-slut. Mike, the man who’d nail anything that moved.” This is recognized by everyone as a character flaw, something which results from Mike being broken. While being a manslut doesn’t always arise from wanting to erase some terrible past, I really appreciated this type of portrayal which is unusual in the genre which generally elevates the man whores.

Mike’s most recent pick up is a mistake and in the midst of coitus, Mike realizes this. He is screwing a cokehead who wants him, no begs him, to beat the crap out of her. His erection deflates and he can’t get out of the random apartment afterward. A day later, he meets what will be the love of his life, Chloe. All his mania subsides when he is near Chloe. Oh, except for his penis.

She rested against him and he wanted to keep her there forever, but when he felt himself harden, he moved away subtly, mentally rolling his eyes.

Goddamn. His dick had never known how to behave itself.

Oh man, way to turn this moment into something that belonged in the dives he frequented when he got his black moments.

He couldn’t really blame his dick, though. His dick was right to move. He felt it wasn’t getting erect so much as trying to get closer to her, close to all that silk and gold.

Chloe has a special connection to Mike’s foster brother, Harry, and because of that Harry exerts pressure on Mike to not sully Chloe with his brokenness. I was a little surprised that Harry acted in this fashion because Harry himself had been broken but I also liked it because I felt like it added some grittiness to what had been a fairly sweet, maybe even saccharine, beginnning. Even though Mike, Harry and Sam were close as brothers, Harry wasn’t going to stand with Mike, not this time. I wasn’t sure whether Mike deserved it and thus the ambiguity of the situation added spice.

I also appreciated the soliloquy of Mike’s when he pushes Chloe away. He tells himself it is because he is afraid he will hurt her but then recognizes that his refusal to extend himself emotionally isn’t because he is afraid that Chloe will be hurt, but really because he is afraid of being hurt. I loved this scene:

Right now he was sending her to his room without even a hug. And why? Because he was a coward.The whole hurting her thing was true but was also bullshit of the highest order.

He didn’t flail around while fucking. He didn’t bite or twist limbs. He could control himself enough not to physically hurt her. That was all a line of crap.

The truth was he was scared shitless. There was nothing here he even remotely recognized as familiar, except his hard-on. And even that felt somehow different. It wasn’t a normal hard-on, the kind he had when an available woman was around. No, it was a Chloe woodie, through and through. Impossible to deal with, impossible to get rid of.

Chloe Mason hadn’t had a great upbringing, something she lays out in great detail in chapter two of the book. Abandoned and then adopted, raised by indifferent parents, then nearly raped by her adopted father, sent off to boarding school, and left alone in the world when her parents died, she comes to Mike Keillor’s business seeking out a connection. When the connection is affirmed, Chloe finds herself drawn into the cocoon of protectiveness that is the RBK family – Mike, his brothers, their wives, and their daughters.

When Chloe inadvertently places the Russian mafia on her tail, Mike does everything he can to protect her, and this serves as the catalyst to finally bring them together.

The tension in the story is primarily external but much of the emotional drama comes from Mike’s point of view, particularly his own feelings of worth and sex. Chloe’s position in the book is more static and less dramatic but that has often been true in LMR books. And frankly, I read these books for the portrayal of the guys. It’s not that the women are doormats and uninteresting but through the lens of the awestruck male, these women are perfect. What you are selling here, though, isn’t that the women are perfect but for this one man, this one woman is divine. For Mike, Chloe is everything good and right in the world and luckily for him, the feeling is reciprocated. The emotions of the characters are writ large. Every feeling is the most heightened feeling. Every orgasm the most amazing ever felt.

Every sense she had was heightened, her entire body turning into one huge receptor. Absolutely every sensation her body was receiving was delectable, particularly the desire.

Oh my. She’d read about it, endlessly. Listened to friends talk about it, thought about it, but never understood it.

The entire book is written in this fashion such that while you are immersed within the story it all makes perfect sense. Stepping back, it seems over the top, extreme, and flawed but inside the story, inside the world with Chloe and Mike and its oversized, exaggerated fun house mirrors? It’s just right. Grading this book is like an exercise in futility for me. I think from a technical aspect it is likely a C to a C+. There were pacing problems, particularly at the beginning. It seemed like it took 100 pages to get to any real conflict. There was the love that blossomed, nearly knocking me off my metaphorical reading feet in its immediacy. I wished I had seen more development of Chloe. She was surprisingly well adjusted for all of her past traumas and her emotional movement could have been played up for greater conflict. But I gobbled this book up like it was the first thing I had to eat after a four day fast. We’ll compromise at the B-.

Best regards,

Jane

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REVIEW: In Bed with a Stranger by India Grey

Jane — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:00:46 +0000

Dear Ms. Grey:

This is a sequel to the Craving the Forbidden (review here) and I thought it was interesting to take an established relationship, shake it up, and still convince the readers at the end that these two could be happy beyond the pages of the book. Sophie Greenham fell in love with Kit Fitzroy after pretending to be his brother’s fiancée. Kit leaves for Aghanistan and when he returns, he is not the same person. There is a bridge between the two that Sophie is unsure of how to cross. The bridge began to build over Kit’s deployment, with his email responses and his phone conversations becoming terser, shorter.

Kit is suffering from a case of PTSD. It’s unclear how severe it is. He is jumpy at loud noises. He is experiencing night terrors. He is feeling tremendous guilt over the injury to one of the young soldiers in his unit. Sophie acted quite young in this book and I was disappointed by her. While Kit was gone for five months, it didn’t seem like Sophie did much to prepare herself for his return. Her lack of understanding of what Kit might be going through seemed a tad self centered and a bit juvenile.

Both Kit and Sophie mask their relationship problems by enjoying each other physically, but Kit wonders that the shortness of their relationship (only three weeks before his five month deployment) could possibly withstand his mental and emotional difficulties. They were, as Kit acknowledge, virtual strangers. Sophie preferred to believe that their physical closeness could not exist without emotional closeness.

The story transitions from Kit’s return to a trip to Morocco to meet with Kit’s estranged mother and to discover the secrets of his past. Much of the book takes place in Morocco and the simple relationship problem is compounded by standard HP tropes which is where I felt the book faltered. Sophie grew up with a hippy mother who refused to acknowledge ordinary structural bonds like the “mother/daughter”. Her unconventional upbringing made her yearn for a stable home and a love like the one she believes she might have with Kit. However, Kit’s wealth and titled family make her feel like that awkward commune girl trying to fit in with the cheerleaders at high school. Sophie overcompensates, driven by her feelings of inferiority. She never wants to show weakness in their relationship which, in turn, leads Kit to believe that she cannot handle the darkness of his emotions. This emotional tug of war is great and the use of the sexual tension pushing against the emotional tension was moving.

I was less enthused by the mystery of Kit’s parentage. I felt that was an unnecessary complication and conflict and led to too easy of a resolution. Kit hadn’t seen his mother since he was six yet the feelings of abandonment and betrayal were quickly resolved. Combined with all the other emotional struggles Kit had to deal with, this seemed improbable. Further, I didn’t like the quick way in which Sophie became attached to Kit’s mother. In some ways, perhaps it was reasonable because Kit’s mother was like what Sophie wanted her own mother to be, but Sophie’s first priority should have been Kit’s emotional well being, just as making Sophie happy was Kit’s first thought. This desire to push reconciliation on Kit was frustrating and seemed, again, a bit selfish.

This is not to say that Sophie was unlikeable but that this portion of the book was my least favorite. I liked the idea of exploring their relationship at greater length, but I didn’t enjoy the mother complications, particularly because of how it was resolved. I will say that this story is very sexy and I appreciate the open door nature of the book, particularly having come off a stint of reading a few Harlequin SuperRomances where the sexual tension was about as spare as the fat on Heidi Klum’s thighs. C+

Best regards

Jane

REVIEW: You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon

Jane — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:00:50 +0000

Dear Ms. Fallon:

I am a romance reader and rarely read non fiction. While this collection of stories are fictional, they are loosely based on men and women that live in military bases probably across the world. I don’t doubt that these stories have been replayed a thousand times in the real lives of individuals who have sacrificed these last nine years during the war. And for every man who is putting himself on the line, there is a family back home that is struggling to keep things together.

The stories run the gamut from the exultation of a couple reunited to the ruination of those whose relationships couldn’t survive the separation, the infidelities, or simply the emotional toll. Many of the stories do not have a happy and perfect ending, but the emotion vibrates on each page. I could not put the collection down until the last story was told and the sacrifice made by those that serve will linger on for many years in my memory.

Life inside the fenced military base is completely different than a civilian’s neighborhood. There a woman’s tardiness in making her oncology appointment generates a phone call to her husband’s superiors. There gold star parking spaces are reserved for widows. There a logistical team of wives keep other wives informed of their husbands’ safety and their injuries and deaths.

You also know when the men are gone. No more boot stomping above, no more football games turned up too high, and best of all, no more front door slamming before dawn as they trudge out for their early formation, sneakers on metal stairs, cars starting, shouts the windows above to throw down their gloves on cold desert mornings. Baby still cry, telephones ring. Saturday morning cartoons screech, but without the men, there is a sense of muted silence, a sense of muted life.

You Know When the Men Are Gone. A Kosovian woman with twins move in upstairs from Meg. She speaks almost no English, she allows her husband’s dog to defecate recklessly, and appears to be an indifferent parent. However, she and Meg share the same pain of loneliness. Meg can hear her cry at night, much as Meg cried herself to sleep. They also shared the same goal — the safe return of their husbands but the Kosovian woman is burdened from her own war past, her inability to speak English. The loneliness made all the more acute by her separation from the other wives. Meg learns all of this during the time that her husband is gone.

Camp Liberty. David Mogeson, or Moge to his army peers, was an investment banker in his former life. But 9/11 changed him. Unwittingly Moge is well-suited for the military and is promoted almost against his will. As he becomes assimilated into the Army, Moge loses parts of himself and it’s not clear whether he’s losing the better parts or the worst parts. The Army was bringing out leadership qualities he hadn’t exhibited before. He cared deeply for the men for whom he was responsible. He began to care for his female translator. But he had a family and a life back home, one that he could barely relate to when he returned on leave. The cold that hounded him during his two week leave in the Hamptons with his parents and their best friends and the daughter he was expected to marry him dried up immediately upon his return to the desert. Moge doesn’t know who he is anymore and he isn’t sure who he wants to be. But he knows that by staying in, by re-enlisting, he’ll be making a definitive direction about the path of his character, his life.

Remission. Ellen Roddy was diagnosed with cancer and therefore her husband wasn’t deployed. This isn’t the boon that one might think it was. Ellen feels keenly the jealousy and resentment of other wives and because her husband is one of the few men around, he is often borrowed to undertake a multitude of other tasks for other women. She doesn’t see him but she can’t complain because every night he is home and every day he is safe.

“So while all of their friends were getting ready to send their fathers and husbands off to war, the Roddys were going to Darnall Hospital. They started to peel away from the army community; a slight unmooring; their foundation coming loose. There was something unseemly about John being home when all the other husbands were not.”

The guilt that Ellen felt, the emotional toll of having her husband home was almost as great as those whose husbands were away. At least when your husband was away, you had the community support of all the other wives. Ellen had nothing to complain about yet, her life was falling apart. Her daughter was running wild and her husband, beset with his own guilt, was barely with her either physically or emotionally.

Inside the Break. Kailani Rodriguez was the wife of one of the members of Bravo Company and when her husband deployed a new threat went with him, a supply bus with fifteen women (non combat forces who would work at the forward operating base). When Kailani doesn’t hear from Manny like she should have, she broke into his email account and read an email which suggested that Manny’s attentions had been occupied elsewhere. Kailani left her Hawaiian islands for Manny “and his scars” and she doesn’t know if she wants to know the truth, what decisions she should make. “Her husband had just spent a year of his life [in Baghdad], a year she would never know or understand.”

The Last Stand. Specialist Kit Murphy was injured when his Humvee had been hit by an Iranian bomb hidden under the corpse of a dog. He returns home in hopes that he can renew his life with his wife Helena yet her calls to him had become sparse and when she did communicate, she was less lively and interested. Kit could feel her slipping away from him but he didn’t want it to be true. When he was deployed, he would make lists in his head to help him get to sleep. His lists invariably devolved into things he loved about his wife. She became his touchstone and when he returned and she was so distant, Kit felt his world unravel.

Leave. Chief Warrant Officer Nick Cash receives an ominous email from a friend of his who had returned to base. “Stopped by to see Trish. Mark Rodell was there. Just thought you should know.” This email triggers a cascade of events culminating in Nick breaking into his own home during leave to ascertain the consequences he will need to mete out to Trish and possibly this unknown man named Mark Rodell. This short story is as full of suspense as they come. I was scared for Trish and heartbroken for Nick.

You Survived the War, Now Survive the Homecoming. Last Saturday marked the end of the Iraq war. Thousands of troops are returning home. But having lived through the war, these men (and women) have to adjust to life without constant danger and to enduring the mundanities to home. To figure out how to be a father (or mother) to kids who believe the returning troops are strangers. Carla and Ted are trying to navigate the post war life. She with the new infant and he without the dangers and constant responsibilities of war. Their exchanges are short, sometimes profanity laden. Ted doesn’t acknowledge that Carla made sacrifices and Carla doesn’t know the man who’s returned to her. It’s hard to say whether the two will make it.

Gold Star. For anyone familiar with the Army, the Gold Star will have immediate significance. And it will for me as well after reading this story. Josie Schaeffer gets the privilege or ignomy of parking in the Gold Star Family spot. She ordinarily avoids this spot so as to avoid the well intentioned well wishers and the furtive glances of fellow shoppers.

Gold Star, with its imagery of schoolchildren receiving A’s and stickers for a job well-done, was the military euphemism for losing a soldier in combat. Family members received a few special privileges like this lousy parking space, but that menat the pity rising from the asphalt singed hotter than any Texas sun.

Josie is tired of the well wishers and sometimes she wanted to know whether her husband sacrificed his life, consciously made a decision to leave her alone, to save someone else and she resents it. Her grief is palpable and new, a fresh wound open to the elements.

Yes, many of these stories are sad, but I felt better having read them. If those in the military can serve so nobly, the least that I can do is read this book and gain some empathy for the sacrifice, loss and heartache that they all have suffered. B+

Best regards,

Jane

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REVIEW: Because of You by Jessica Scott

Jane — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:00:28 +0000

Dear Ms. Scott:

This is the first original Loveswept title from the new and revived Loveswept line. I’ve been hearing good things about this book from it’s original purchase by Sue Grimshaw earlier this year. Knowing that you are an Iraq war vet, I knew that the authenticity of this book would not be an issue and that’s a good thing because there were a lot of eyebrow raising events in the story.

Shane Garrison is a Sergeant First Class in the Army. At thirteen years of service, Shane is getting ready for action in the Iraq Surge and dealing with the failure of his marriage. As a Sergeant First Class, Shane is in charge of his group of men. He feels responsible for their well being, ensuring that every one is properly trained and equipped. The weight of his responsibility is well conveyed and the future conflict involving his sense of responsibility is signalled clearly. However, I wondered at the point of the Prologue. The prologue actually just introduces Shane and given that chapter one doesn’t begin a uninterrupted timeline, I felt a bit confused.

Jen St. James, a recent breast cancer survivor, and Shane enjoy a smoldering kiss after a night out with mutual friends before Shane is deployed. I was surprised at how emotional Shane was over their interaction. He went from a divorce five months ago to thinking that Jen would be the reason for him to come home:

He’d hold the memory of that kiss with him even as he walked-willing and able-into a war. He’d volunteered to serve, but tonight, for the first time, he was walking away from something precious. Because of Jen, he had a reason for coming home.

The strong and devastating emotions of those in the military was well conveyed. I really felt for the women at home who missed their husbands and the soldiers abroad who weren’t provided adequate equipment to fight. Jen’s poignant post cancer attempts to reconnect with her friends was touching as well. I liked that Jen and Shane’s romance developed over time. The book is very dramatic and angsty and for some it might be overly so.

Shane is beset, not just by the horrors of battle, but by incompetent officers, lack of equipment, emotional breakdowns of the soldiers around him, and his own personal pain. There was a scene with a newbie officer that reminded me a bit of Battle Los Angeles. In fact, Shane reminded me a little of the Aaron Eckhart character in that movie in that they both were Sergeants looking out for a number of soldiers whose well being and safety weighed heavily on their hearts and minds. I wished that the pacing had been more even. The book started out slowly and then had non stop drama until nearly the end.

The opposite side we have Jen who suffered breast cancer at a young age and who had a left sided mascectomy. The decision not to have reconstructive surgery was never addressed in the text of the book, although there is a lot of attention paid to the emotional trauma that Jen endures from being physically imperfect.

On top of Shane’s emotional problems suffering injuries in the war and seeing his men injured or killed, is his own lack of self esteem. His self worth was wrapped up in his soldiering and when his men came back in pieces, he was devastated. He felt guilty he was alive. He didn’t think that he was a nice man (because as Sargeant he wasn’t supposed to be, problematically, he never see Shane being a jerk so the “he doth protest too much” entered here) and that he wasn’t good enough for Jen. Jen spent much of her time telling Shane that he wasn’t god and that he has to let go and open up.

I was also surprised at how little attention was paid to the issue of Jen, the nurse, having a relationship with Shane, one of her patients. In some ways, this conflict was used to humorous and touching effect such as when Jen has to remove Shane’s catheter but I did wonder at the ethics of the situation. I understood that the point of the four chapter lead up was to make the readers believe that Shane’s feelings for Jen developed far before she nursed him back to health, but those four chapters involved so little real interaction between the two that I found it to be a shaky foundation.

There are two developing storylines in this book, both of which remain unresolved at the end. The dual cliffhangers are meant to keep us coming back for me, but it also made the book feel a bit unfinished for me. Given how much of the book was spent on Jen and Shane’s emotional agnst, their emotional healing seemed too quick. The ending felt abrupt, as if I had looked away and missed something important.

The two wounded souls seeking comfort and peace will be appealing to many readers and the fast paced non stop drama adds a different flavor to this military romance. The war scenes were highly charged and I appreciate the unflinching look at how awful it must be over in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wouldn’t have minded a few emotional respites and a less truncated ending. B-

Best regards,

Jane

REVIEW: The Long Way Home by Cheryl Reavis

Jayne — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 09:00:56 +0000

Dear Ms. Reavis,

I’m so glad that by the time I’d heard of these books, the second one was already out and the third one wasn’t too much of a wait. In Little Darlin’ you make me actually like a secret baby book and toss in a marriage of convenience just for fun. In this follow up book, you take a woman who pretty much showed her ass by her actions in that book – and who showed her ta-tas for a living in the strip clubs on Bragg Boulevard – and make her into a character I wanted to stand up and cheer for as she finally gets her knight in shining armor – though his armor is slightly dented and she as much rides to his rescue as he does to hers.

Rita Warren grew up without much and that included people who cared about her. After running from her mother’s latest grabby boyfriend before she’d finished school, she found that dancing – the only thing she’d ever truly been good at – was the only thing she knew how to do that could make her any money. Her dream was Las Vegas but when she found herself without rent money, locked out of her apartment and unable to provide for her hungry young daughter, she did what she knew she had to – even if she didn’t want to – and handed Olivia over to her, up to that point unknowing, father SSgt Matt Beltran.

With Olivia settled (in Little Darlin’), Rita followed her dream to Vegas and actually made it. But she discovered that she wants more from life and that includes being a bigger part of Olivia’s life. So she heads back to Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg but this time she’s got money, the intention to get her GED and plans to turn her life around. After a less than happy meeting with Matt Beltran, Rita learns that an old friend, Spec 4 Calvin “Bugs” Doyle, is in (Womack Army) hospital following a Black Hawk crash that killed almost everyone on board. The other survivor is Lt. “Mac” McGraw who is in a room across from Bugs and who is buried under self recrimination and determined to make life hell for those around him.

Mac might have most of the nursing staff running scared but Rita is less than impressed as she proves when she hurls back at him the magazine he throws at her. Rita isn’t Army and feels free to give Mac any number of set downs. It’s this lack of pity – and the fact that he thinks she’s drop dead gorgeous – that piques Mac’s interest in her though “guy like” he shows it by acting bratty at times. Not that this has any affect on Rita who brazenly asks for his help with her GED algebra class. Slowly the two begin to spend time together though neither is looking at the other as relationship material. With their unsettled personal lives needing to be sorted can these two damaged souls find something special in each other?

Rita and Mac both begin the book as difficult characters. As the villainess of Little Darlin,’ Rita has some serious shit to make up for before she can move into the heroine role. Meanwhile Mac is non-heroically struggling with the physical and emotional aftermath of his crash along with a wandering fiancee

Rita’s still in “two steps forward and one step back” mode. She has a plan but she still suffers mental set backs and has things to fix about herself before she’s ready to move on: personal growth issues, new ways to cope with roadblocks – ie not running as a way to fix the problems in her life. She has to learn to stand her ground and work things out rather than just fleeing from them since she’s discovering that even though she thought it worked in the past, it only prolongs the issues and solves nothing. But she does face up to this, admits it to herself and works on it.

I like how she advances in her interactions with Olivia, Corey and Matt. That situation isn’t going anywhere either and Rita demonstrates that she’s getting her act together and learning new normals as she faces up to what she did and how she acted. She also doesn’t take any gruff from Mac’s mother even though she’s quaking inside. She looks the woman straight in the eye, tells her what she can do with her insinuations and leaves with her head held high.

Rita has a past, a major one that lots of people know about – the stripping – and a private one that fewer people know about – Olivia. These will be with her for life and are things that she makes sure Mac knows about when they’re working out their HEA. Here’s another thing that would have been better had she confronted it and told Mac to begin with but as she says, she didn’t count on a relationship with him, didn’t plan on it and why should she tell him all this when she first meets him? But when the rubber meets the relationship road, she does insist that he figure this into their future and be ready for it. This is the point when I knew she’d finally reached her goal and could advance into a forever HEA.

Mac is doing the wounded warrior thing. As an officer, he blames himself for what happened to his men and for surviving when most of them didn’t. Up until this point in his life, he’s had it pretty easy. From a moneyed background, he’s used to privilege and the belief that things will go smoothly to whatever he wants. He has broken slightly from the family mold by going into the Army but still caved to family pressure in the choice of his “perfect” fiancee. Now he’s faced with the reality that life can suck and at first he reacts badly. He’s certainly far from perfect and noble and I like that you let him be that way.

Rita doesn’t try and make that easy for him, doesn’t pat him on the hand and try to sweep it under the rug. She tells him she understands, she gives him time to process, she supports him when he needs it and she doesn’t let him wallow. She also makes him stand on his own two feet – literally – and face the fact that his body is going to be slightly dinged from now on. One thing I really like is that Mac knows full well – thanks to his mother – what Rita’s past is before he goes and proposes to her. He knows the good, the bad and the ugly and still wants a future with her.

I enjoyed watching these two snipe and snap at each other over the course of the book – they definitely have the “for better or for worse” part of the vows already worked out. They are both strong willed individuals and clashes are inevitable but they learn to give and take, they complement each other and they are both better for being with each other. The epilogue is also one of the few that I truly enjoyed as it shows them dealing with both the ups and the downs that come with marriage and life in the military. I like that these are two real people dealing with real issues and solving them giving me the feeling that whatever else life throws their way, they’ll be able to deal with it together. B+

~Jayne

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REVIEW: Deadly Descent by Kaylea Cross

Jane — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 17:00:28 +0000

Dear Ms. Cross:

I enjoy romantic suspense but I like a good military romantic suspense primarily because other RS often rely upon serial killers for the suspense but the military setting or paramilitary setting is more action driven, less psychological. I also like the camaraderie between the soldiers but rarely do we ever read about female soldiers. I was excited to see that this series is about a number of females, at least a couple of them pilots, in a combat setting.

I had read an article back in 2006 about a female helicopter pilot in the Army so good that the troops nicknamed her “Saint”. When I read about “Saint,” I thought she would be an incredible heroine for a romance story. Five years later, Deadly Descent and its progeny aim to deliver on the female led military romantic suspense. Hooah.

Captain Devon “Spike” Crawford lost her boyfriend Ty, an Air Force Pararescueman, during a failed mission in Afghanistan. They hadn’t been dating a long time and Devon was ready to end the inappropriate relationship when Ty was deployed overseas. She didn’t though and thus was still considered his girlfriend when he died. Her lack of strong feelings for Ty coupled with his death and her involvement with him, fuels a strong sense of guilt. Devon had also felt something toward Ty’s best friend Tech Sergeant Cam Munro. Cam has always returned these feelings, although both never acted on them. I felt a little uncomfortable at how the two of them reacted so strongly to each other directly after Ty’s funeral, particularly with Cam trying to ferret out the depth of Devon’s feelings for Ty, as if to measure whether he would have a chance later. Perhaps for soldiers who are constantly in danger, living is done moment by moment.

The story fast forwards and puts us back at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan where Cam is currently stationed and to where Devon is being deployed. Devon flies BlackHawks on medevac missions.

The issue of Devon, an officer, having a relationship with an enlisted man, Cam, is addressed but it wasn’t really resolved well and I think individuals with a lot of military knowledge might be put off by this. When Dev gets to the base in Afghanistan, she learns from one of the other female pilots that a female lieutenant has been brought up on fraternization charges. For all their attempts to hide their relationship, it was fairly well known amongst their friends and things like that can’t stay secret. Further, there was some implication that fraternization wasn’t an issue for the two of them when they weren’t deployed. My understanding is that fraternization is verboten regardless of whether the soldiers are deployed.

It may have been less of a problem because Devon was in the Army and Cam was in the Air Force, but that wasn’t addressed in the book so I don’t know. While the fraternization issue was the basis of conflict for Devon and Cam, it was my least favorite part of the book. I think it is because I know it is wrong, that it endangers both of their career advancements and even with the overt acknowledgement that they shouldn’t be doing this, it still seemed as if the book ignored the consequences, suggesting that marriage would solve any problem. What’s possibly worse is that it appears future books in the series deals with the enlisted/officer pairing.

Having said that, while some of the narrative prose was a little rough, particularly in the transitions, the battle scenes were very exciting. I don’t recall reading a military book that took place on an actual base other than maybe Linda Howard’s MacKenzie book. The part of the story that took place on the base and in the rescue and war scenes was vivid and fascinating. I felt immersed in the action. I loved how the women were portrayed as completely competent, involved in the rescuing instead of being rescued. In large part, the prominence and importance of the role of women in this story; their friendships; their portrayal as capable soldiers, are what appealed to me the most and what sets this book apart.

I wasn’t sure if it was intentional messaging or part of the world building but there are several scenes from an Afghani militant’s point of view and through him we hear the opinions of an Afghan warlord. The warlord expresses the belief that if they kill enough troops the US will withdraw and that will be a victory. The Afghani militant was a man set on revenge for the death of his brother. For romance readers, this story will sound very familiar. How often have we seen the hero have the very same mind set? I liked that we saw both an extreme and dangerous viewpoint from the Aghanis but also one of a man driven from peace to revenge. These are universal emotions.

I was a bit surprised at the way in which everyone on base seemed to accept Cam’s feelings for Dev and his near constant concern for her, particularly out in combat. I know that one of the arguments against women in combat is that the men will be overprotective of the women instead of treating her like any other soldier and thus weakening the whole unit. Cam’s actions didn’t put any one in danger as that isn’t how the story was written but it made me feel vaguely uncomfortable, as did Dev’s overt response to Cam being placed in danger. Wouldn’t she, of all people, understood his need and desire to save others?

While I had some problems with it, I did find the story to be very engaging and I am interested in reading more about the men and women at Bagram Airfield. I only hope that there aren’t too many more of the fraternization stories. C+

Best regards,

Jane

REVIEW: A Night to Surrender by Tessa Dare

Jane — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:00:55 +0000

Dear Ms. Dare:

You are well known for your cute toy filled book trailers (Stud Club Trilogy / Maya Banks’ Highlander Trilogy) and I was tempted to do a lego review for this book. After all, I have a castle.

I bought some canons.

I have minifigs where the girl’s boobs look like they are busting out of her top like any decent romance heroine.

I don’t have a carriage but I did debate buying one. I have cows though which can depict a gentle, pastoral setting.

But alas, my Lego helpers have abandoned me for other things.

A Night to Surrender is the battle of the sexes story. It’s a very cute and sweet romance. At times, I just wanted to squeeze the book it was so darn adorable. However, the battle of the sexes stories are notoriously difficult to do because you have to make sure that you don’t demonize one sex in order to elevate the other. On the macro scale, I thought you were less successful in portraying this because the entire story is about how this bucolic retreat for women was made better by a male outsider coming in and changing the male/female dynamic. On the micro scale, I felt that the two protagonists were portrayed as much more balanced.

Spindle Cove has gained the reputation as a retreat for women, so much so that it is called Spinster’s Cove by some (a term probably coined by a male to be derisive). But Spindle Cove is a safe place for women to come. Susanna Finch is the daughter of the only local “gentleman”, Sir Lewis Finch, albeit an ignored daughter, and is the leader of her community. She is revered by both the men and the women. A gentlewoman by the name of Mrs. Highwood is considering sending her three daughters to stay at Spindle Cove. Susanna realizes that the bookish Minerva and the slightly asthmatic Diana whose treatment at the hands of male hacks has led her deeper into illness could do very well at Spindle Cove where they would gain self confidence and good health. Susanna’s plans to enfold the Highwood girls into the town’s embrace is placed in jeopardy by the arrival of Lieutenant Colonel Victor Bramwell. Bram plans to convince Sir Finch that Bram is fully capable of going back into battle despite his gimpy right knee.

Sir Finch is a “celebrated innovator of fireams and artillery”, is an advisor to the royals, and as such has enormous pull with the British military. A recommendation from Sir Finch all but guarantees Bram’s return to active duty. Bram believes that his place is life is one of a soldier. It’s all that he knows how to do and it’s how he measures his self worth. Not soldiering feels like a diminishment to Bram.

Bram is then tasked with mounting a 24 man militia to march in the midsummer year’s fair. Bram eagerly accepts this challenge before realizing that finding 24 able bodied men to serve in the militia in Spindle’s Cove may be more difficult than spotting comets without a telescope. His cousin says that there are no men in Spinter’s Cove what with the women in the town completely emasculating anything that may have balls and stalk between their legs. Bram, however, is completely undone by a smart woman and Susannah with her talk of battle strategies and her competency with a gun nearly has Bram swooning.

The introduction of Bram, Colin, and their manly men set the town a flutter and none of the ladies can talk of anything else. While some the book is a clever poke at societal expectations such as when Bram is told that he should marry and raise a family and give up soldiering, something undoubtedly told to hundreds of girls, there is also an unconscious undertone that something is wrong with Spindle Cove. Before Bram comes to town apparently none of the men could stand up to Susanna and thus their tavern is turned into a teahouse and the smithy is not banging out horseshoes and swords but fashioning clasps on lockets. The truth is that Susanna is a good leader and the overt text of the story acknowledges this toward the end.

The story is funny and charming. The sexual tension between Susanna and Bram is immediate but believable. Susanna and Bram, both individually and together, are sharp and fulsome characters. There are no wasted scenes and the dialogue is snappy. I also felt that Susanna and Bram made a great couple and that their strengths and weaknesses overlapped. The story is very romantic with both characters making big gestures (and Bram making the biggest).

But I admit that throughout the book I felt uncomfortable. The idea that you seem to be heralding is that a balanced community is better than an unbalanced one, i.e., that everyone will be happier if the men are integrated in a equal fashion with the women. I think that this worldbuilding works better on a grander scale as in a science fiction where the entire world is unbalanced. When the Cove, however, is one bastion of retreat for women where they can come and be judged not on the basis of their ability to pour tea and bear offspring, but on their intelligence and capabilities, does it really need to be changed? “They included the sickly, the scandalous, and the painfully shy; young wives disenchanted with the wrong men…All of them delivered here by the guardians to whom they presented problems, in hopes that the sea air would cure them of their ills.” The book goes on to say “No ‘cures’ were necessary. They didn’t need doctors pressing lancets to their veins, or daily doses of poison. They just needed a place to be themselves. Spindle Cove was that place.” Did Spindle Cove need to change? It seemed like a question that was never asked, let alone, answered. The absence of that debate, particularly given the stance of the leading female protagonist (aka heroine) was one that made this book a B- rather than a B.

Best regards,

Jane

REVIEW x 2: The King’s Courtesan by Judith James

Janet — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:55:34 +0000

Dear Ms James:

I think I have been waiting for you to write a book like The King’s Courtesan since I read Broken Wing. This book has a confidence and maturity, a depth, in fact, that impressed me, despite the numerous well-used genre tropes and devices it employs and the predictability of the overall story arc. As I was reading, I was actually highlighting passages simply for their narrative force, and I was impressed at how immersive and detailed the Restoration setting felt to me. While not a perfect book, The King’s Courtesan took me by surprise in the best sort of way and made me happy I spent several hours in its company.

When a young soldier rescues Hope Matthews from a clumsy fall amidst a parade celebrating Cromwell’s triumphant return to London, she believes she has found her very own prince. Until, that is, she returns to the Covent Garden bawdy-house she calls home, where the brothel’s owner, Hope’s mother, informs her that she has just sold Hope’s maidenhead to a rich nobleman: “You’re a whore, my dear. Born into it right and proper, though I was married to your father for all that. You’d better get used to the idea because you can never be aught else.” Hope’s mother goes on to tell her that she is actually doing the young girl a favor, since marriage makes women “property,” and even Hope’s father was “a useless bastard,” while Hope will be “no common whore,” but “a rich man’s mistress.” Hope stands to earn half of what Sir Charles Edgemont will pay for her, a price that will be conveniently inflated in a staged “auction” for Hope’s innocence. Edgemont, predictably, disbelieves Hope’s untouched state and, enraged, forcibly drags her off to her fate.

Noting the irony of her own name, Hope “took the name and made it a talisman. She did was she needed to keep her own hopes alive,” which meant that she “stopped dreaming about what couldn’t be, and started planning for what might.” From that point on, Hope is forced to forget her dreams of marriage and respectability, trading them for the dubious power of knowing how to please and manage rich men, and over the next decade Hope becomes one of Charles II’s mistresses, a year after he is restored to the English throne.

Charles is very fond of his beautiful, vivacious mistress, and even after a year with her he is still smitten. Hope feels as close to Charles as she has to any man, which means that she still has emotional distance but is very fond of him. Still, she values her independence above any man, and with Charles’s impending marriage, Hope knows that her lack of title and property will make her persona non grata with the new queen. Having saved quite a bit of money over the years, Hope now wants to lead a quiet life, by herself, well out of court. Charles, though, is not ready to let his common-born mistress go, and when the wife of one of his former cavaliers begs Charles to help one of her old friends keep his family estate in Nottinghamshire, Charles sees the perfect opportunity. He will marry Hope off to this man, give him an earlship to make Hope a countess, and stash them in the country until he can recall Hope to court as his titled mistress.

Only a desperate man would agree to Charles’s scheme, and Robert Nichols is, indeed a desperate man. A soldier since his mid-teens, Robert has spent all of his adult years trying to stay on the right side of English politics while privately pursuing the five men who took his young sister’s life right before his eyes. Haunted each night by Caroline’s screams and pleading eyes, Robert has managed to dispatch all but one of his sister’s murderers, and not coincidentally, it is that man who has managed to convince the Crown to grant him Cressly Manor, Robert’s country estate.

Except for a long-ago crush on the wrong woman, Robert has relished his independence, albeit for different reasons from Hope. So how do you get a woman who wants nothing more than her hard-won independence to marry a man who wants nothing more than to be left alone to avenge his sister’s death? The circumstances of that event demonstrate how little independence either Hope or Robert really has and set in motion a drama that shows how intertwined the political and personal are in the world of the novel.

Reading The King’s Courtesan reminded me of how often historical Romance glosses over, discards, or diminishes the political in order to focus on the personal triumph of love. Before the Enlightenment, though, personal autonomy did not have the same philosophical primacy it does by the 19^th century, and this novel acknowledges that fact by bracketing the romantic development between Hope and Robert with the incredibly fickle political realities of the time. For even though Hope and Robert are technically married, both are subjects of the king, and subject to his whims, whatever they are, making love a risky proposition.

Beyond that, though, we have the Romance stereotypes of the good-natured courtesan who loves kittens and flowers and the steel-hearted soldier bent on vengeance. If the political layer did not add complexity to these characterizations, I think the novel would have been a very derivative, uninspired read for me. But because the political truly shapes the personal for these characters, the clichés took on more depth. For example, Hope may have a luminous personality, but, as she points out to Robert, she has learned to be a good actress:

“My mother sold me . . . I stayed with a man whose touch made my skin crawl and made him believe I liked it. I didn’t have the delicacy or decency to die of shock or heartbreak. I locked my soul in a gilded cage and I laughed, I joked, I thrived!”

She has endured numerous jibes and insults, being called “Cinder Whore” and derided for her own background. Interestingly, it’s not the sexual experience that brands her, but her lack of title, good family, and independent property that makes her suspect. When the king gives Robert a “dowry” for Hope, she realizes, cynically, that it was more than what her mother sold her for but less than a necklace that Charles gifted to his other mistress, a countess. She rails against the idea that she had no choice in her marriage to Robert, a man who, she fears “thinks to treat me like a whore and rule me like a husband.” For Hope, seeming gay, winning over people’s loyalty, learning to negotiate delicate situations, are all part of making her own way in a world that otherwise has little use for her beyond her beauty and sexual appeal. She is not naïve despite her appearance of innocence, which is an interesting twist on the stereotype of the virtuous woman of supposedly low morals.

I found Robert’s character less interesting than Hope’s in part, perhaps, because his misery is much of his own making, something Hope actually points out to him:

“It is not the sweet sister that you played with in the garden that plagues you. You torture yourself. She sought to save you just as you sought to save her. I can’t believe she wanted you to be unhappy or to spend your life in a prison of your own making, my love –“ her voice was urgent “ – and perhaps, perhaps it is you who refuses to let go. Perhaps it is you who traps her.”

This has never occurred to Robert, of course, and he is not particularly open to the idea, for it would contradict the purpose of so much of his life. It would force him to take a different kind of responsibility of his feelings, the kind of responsibility Hope has never even had the luxury of. Which is what makes her feelings for him so dangerous. Despite her seemingly innate idealism, Hope understands very well the dangers in becoming dependent on a man. Robert, on the other hand, cannot decide how to see Hope. Part of him wants to see her as a scheming jade of a woman, a whore, as she fears, while another part of him wants to see her as his “elf,” as a fae beauty whose goodness only serves to accentuate his darkness and feed his brooding suffering. Neither view of Hope is realistic, but both serve his own emotional limitations.

Because the set-up of the novel was so interesting to me, I enjoyed the first half more than the second. There are a number of places where it feels that a genre blueprint constructed the behavior of the protagonists, especially in the way the romantic tension is sustained through the couple’s mutually aggravating trust issues. The middle of the novel, in particular, suffers from this, ironically making the resolution to the numerous conflicts seem a bit anti-climactic.

Still, one of my persistent problems with both Broken Wing and Highland Rebel was the feeling that the history and politics of the era were not well-integrated into the lives of the characters and the plot. And in The King’s Courtesan that fracturing is absent and the world of the novel feels authentic, detailed, and much more naturally rendered. From an elaborate May Day celebration to the architectural contrasts between London and Nottingham, I felt there was a true sense of place and time in the book that I really appreciated. There is even a debate between Hope and Robert over the true nature of Robin Hood – vigilante or hero – that beautifully illustrates the difference in their social positions. Robert sees the legendary thief as a man who exploited the poor to facilitate his thievery, while Hope sees him as rebelling against the dominant social structure. It was clever details like this that compensated for the clichés elsewhere.

I described The King’s Courtesan to a friend as a Jo Goodman-esque novel of the Restoration. The writing styles are not the same, but there is a psychological authenticity and a thematic preoccupation that the two authors share, I think. Goodman is currently a stronger and more seasoned writer, but if James keeps growing, I think she could become a master of pre-19^th C historical Romance. For The King’s Courtesan, however, a B/B+.

~ Janet

REVIEW: Primal Law by J.D. Tyler

Jane — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 09:00:44 +0000

Dear Ms. Tyler:

The first half of this book detailed a setup that I found pretty incredible, so much so that I set the book aside and didn’t finish it for 2 months. The latter half of the story worked far better, but only in isolation. Together, neither the romance nor the worldbuilding held up.

The premise is that there is a bunch of werewolves that were changed from human to shapeshifter after an attack 5 years ago in Aghanistan and they now all have special X-men like powers. Some are pre cogs, some can start fire with their fingers, and so on. Why shapeshifters get additional powers is unexplained, as it is also unexplained why there are other “gifted” people (such as the heroine) who have gifts that are not imparted by a random act in Afghanistan but are simply born with such powers. Someone within the government is gathering these gifted individuals in a compound in Wyoming. There is every sort of being one can think of in this compound: shapeshifters of different sorts, sorcerers, a blue fae prince, vampires, witches, gremlins, and a basilisk.

The story opens with a prologue with some of the Alpha Pack being savaged and dying. The implication is that they all die but Jaxon (I know, the names are ridiculous too). “Her scream of outrage, promising vengeance, and the moans of his dying teammates chased him into the darkness.” When I get to chapter one, though, nearly every member of his team is still alive. I kept flipping back and forth in the book to figure out which ones had died in the prologue and which had not. By the end of the story, I am guessing that none of them died and the point of the prologue is completely lost for me.

The heroine is Kira, a lab assistant at a gene therapy company. She’s stupid but everyone loves her. How stupid? She overhears some of the scientists discussing their evil experiments and sees some document on her boss’s computer that is not consistent with what they are supposed to be studying.

Her brilliant plan had included getting them out of here, not where to go afterward. Or who to give them to.

She decides she will break into her high tech gene therapy company and steal some samples. She has no plan for what she will do with these samples, of course, and her plan to abscond with the samples is no more complicated that waltzing in, taking them, and leaving the way she came in, even though she is going into a restricted area with supposedly high security. Inevitably, she gets caught stealing samples because she is somewhere she is not supposed to be. Having no real plan, she simply runs for an elevator and then drives her car out the front gate. Of course she is chased down and the security guards corner her in a dark Las Vegas alley where, instead of apprehending her, they decide to rape her in the alley. (Still in chapter 1)

Let’s recap. Kira’s escape plan is to drive out the front lot after breaking in. That’s her plan. Break in. Drive away.

Fortunately for Kira, Jaxon is nearby getting a blowjob from his regular call girl who he sees whenever his buddies and him make the trip south for sex. He hears her cries for help. He shifts, kills the two guys. His buddies come to help. She accepts that he is a) a werewolf and b) that she must go with them to Wyoming. On the flight to Wyoming, they explain that they are shifters with a secret government organization. She’s all “okay.”

Let’s recap. Still in chapter one. Kira is in an alley about to be raped. She is saved by a guy who shifts into a werewolf. He requires her to go with him and three other men to Wyoming. To a secret government compound. She’s not only totally fine with it, she’s turned on. Because her thoughts aren’t “what the hell is going on” but this:

All those rippling muscles, that soul patch, spiky black hair, and the wicked ear piercings lending the man that slight air of irreverence. Confidence. Here was a guy who knew how to handle his business.

She’d love to know whether he could handle himself as well in bed as he could out of it.

Once she is at the secret government compound, they just let her wander aimlessly in and out of the buildings until she stumbles upon a place where she supposedly should not be because there is apparently no security at this secret government facility. Keycards are beyond them? She finds a number of strange paranormal beings (see above reference to every creature under the sun) in cells. And they all look very unhappy. Oh noes, thinks Kira. This is just not right. “Why are those poor creatures locked away like criminals? What are you planning to do with them?” Kira demands.

Let’s recap. Kira just found out that there are shapeshifters. She is taken to a secret government facility. She finds crazy strange creatures, some that growl and bare their teeth at her, and she is incensed that they are being caged. Incensed.

While logic may make most people think that Kira should just keep her mouth shut for the time being until she learns a little more about this brave new world to which she has been exposed, this book allows Kira to decide who is going to be set free and who is going to be caged.

Let’s recap. After one day in the compound, Kira, who is a LAB ASSISTANT decides that one of the incarcerated beings, a fae winged creature, should be let free. Because she can sense he is telling the truth about being a good guy. She convinces the leader of this secret government compound that she should be in charge of rehabilitating these beings and she can rehabilitate them in three weeks! SHE IS A LAB ASSISTANT. She is not an expert in paranormal beings. She is not a counselor, therapist, or psychologist. She was a genetic lab assistant.

After talking to the Fae prince who is HANDCUFFED and in a cell, she decides he is sincere that he just wants to be free to live a life away from his murderous daddy. Based on a two page discussion with this guy, she convinces the Alpha Pack guys to LET HIM OUT. Then, as they are leaving the cell block, they run into the woman who is in charge, whom Kira refers to as an “alpha bitch”.

She turned her attention to Zander and Hammer as the others with her exchanged whispers. “Where do you think you’re going with Blue? I didn’t authorize any order for my patient to be moved.”

The woman’s chin lifted, dark eyes snapping with anger. Her tone left no doubt about who ruled this little corner of the compound. Behind her, Mackenzie gave Kira a nod, her expression encouraging.

Kira returned the gesture and turned her attention back to Mac’s friend. She immediately recognized this woman’s type from her own work experience. The names and address had changed but the song remained the same. This steely woman with the short cap of black hair would be the alpha bitch, the one who could choose to make her life here a living hell, or not. Whether or not she was also a fair-minded person and well liked among her colleagues, Kira would soon find out.

All the men in this book are hot and awesome, but a woman in charge is an alpha bitch? Oh no you didn’t! But on her say so, Alpha Bitch agrees that the Fae winged warrior should be let loose in the compound.

In sum, the world building in this book is ridiculous. There are no boundaries in the world. Every sort of creature is included. There are even other dimensions, like the fae dimension, although thankfully unexplored in this book. The melodrama quotient is high. For example, the leader of the Alpha Pack, is this precognitive talent only he never shares his visions because he doesn’t want to unfairly impact those around him. Instead, we are treated to dramatic scenes where the leader sits in his office bemoaning the sad fates that await those for which he cares.

As for the romance, this is a mate story. It’s the worst kind of mate story in that unless Jaxon mates with Kira, he is likely going to die. Fuck or die. It doesn’t matter one’s feelings because the mythical mate bond is stronger than that. Thus there is no romance. It’s lust brought on by the mythical mate bond that must be appeased or else.

Additionally, new characters are discovered because apparently there are not enough possible sequel baits in the Alpha Pack team. In all, this is very ordinary PNR and in a crowded field, it offers nothing new. It’s the same old group of guys who meet their breedmates and live happy ever after in one big military compound or they die. D

Best regards

Jane

REVIEW: Little Darlin’ by Cheryl Reavis

Jayne — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:00:02 +0000

Dear Ms. Reavis,

The books which make up this series have been favorites of mine for years. First published in the late 1990s, they’ve also been out of print for about that long so I was delighted to notice them among the Harlequin Treasury reissues. I hope that this will allow more people to try them and enjoy them as much as I do.

Corey Madsen really doesn’t want to take the foster child who social worker Lou Kurian needs to temporarily place. She and her minister husband used to foster children but since his death she hasn’t had the energy or heart for it. But Lou isn’t the kind of woman who takes “no” for an answer and Corey finds herself agreeing to foster the unknown named little girl for “just a few days.”

Shorty, as she quickly comes to be known, was left in supposed father Staff Sergeant Matt Beltran’s red Corvette by her supposed mother, a Bragg Boulevard strip club dancer, though Beltran denies all knowledge of her. But remember Lou won’t accept anyone’s “no” and Beltran is no exception. There must be some reason Rita Warren left her little girl in his car and Lou is going to sweetly hound him until he does his duty.

Matt honestly had no idea he’d fathered a child but the more he thinks about it, the more he can’t be exactly 100% sure he didn’t. There was that one night he went to a club looking to get drunk after the death of a friend so maybe….But regardless of that, he’s on active duty in the 82nd Airborne with no backup plan for a 14 month old child. Lou’s “few days” end up being weeks for Corey to bond with and fall in love with Shorty though she has her doubts about the way Lou’s attempting to force Matt to fatherhood. Still the tough jump master is coming around, meeting with Shorty and doing very well with her.

When Rita appears on the scene again, hiring a lawyer and making noises about custody, Corey can’t bear the thought of the little girl reverting back to the dirty, ill clothed, mistrustful child she was. But since Matt is an orphan himself, how can they keep this from happening? A marriage of convenience, that’s how. But can these two who think they’re polar opposites come together and create a family for Shorty? And what will happen if, despite all their efforts, they don’t get custody?

I’m not usually a fan of secret baby books but this takes the trope, twists it and still allows Matt to be a sympathetic character. Matt isn’t perfect by any means nor does he try and hide this. He went to a strip club, got drunk and had sex with this woman. He was hurting over his buddy’s death but he still acted like a dick.Yes, Shorty is a secret to Matt but Rita has never made any move to either tell him or hide her from him. She’s just never told him anything or contacted him in any way and since they only had a one night drunken stand, he’s never had any reason to think he fathered a child.

And when he is finally told, it’s by having the child dumped in his Corvette. Of course he’s going to be pissed and unwilling to believe in it since he’s never had an inkling that Shorty/Olivia exists. And now he’s got social services breathing down his neck over this. But he’s also a decent guy under it all and can’t seem to put it out of his life or mind. Still, he doesn’t push for full custody because of his single status and job in the military where he can and is sent away at a moment’s notice with no clue as to when he’ll get back. Guy like, he’s content to let things ride until Rita appears again and then he agrees to Corey’s proposal which blind sides him. All this makes Matt real to me. When he finally comes to terms with his role in all this, he steps up, mans up and thinks of his daughter first.

Corey isn’t hot to get involved in this in the first place either. She’s got her issues and is still grieving for her husband Jacob but does the right thing for Olivia. She’s also as wary of Matt as he is of her. He doesn’t disappoint her initial expectations of him – low as they are. Yet as she gets to know him, she revises her opinion upwards based on the man he shows himself to be. Though when she proposes the marriage of convenience, it’s for Shorty’s sake rather than because she loves Matt. She thinks she’s already had her great love marriage but she feels that she and Matt can make it work. She does know what she’s getting into when she makes the proposal and doesn’t seem to have any starry eyed notions of changing Matt or that they’ll fall deeply in love. However she’s also more than willing to have this be a real marriage instead of in name only. She is physically as attracted to Matt as he is to her and doesn’t hide the fact.

When Matt tells Corey that he’s loved her since he got mad at her one day when her grief for Jacob caused her to drive recklessly it makes a strange kind of sense to me. He doesn’t come right out and say he loves her, instead he gets upset because he’s worried about her and it’s his actions which say it. His next move is to spend time with Shorty before he’s even sure she’s his daughter just because he wants to and not to impress Corey. He’s also concerned that she really wants Shorty in her life given how Social Services initially pressed her into duty. It’s just the way Matt is – taking care of those who depend on him. And yeah, the bit of jealousy he shows when he sees another man interested in Corey does help clarify his thinking a little.

Corey doesn’t start by falling for Matt. Her progression to “I love this man” comes gradually as she gets to know him and is boosted by her growing respect for him as a person and by the way he does right by Olivia. She’s brutally honest with him when she says she’s marrying him to get custody of Olivia. But after she does begin to fall for him, she’s honest with him about that too. She does start looking in the direction of martyrdom at the end but thankfully you pulled the story back from that with Matt’s no nonsense “what’s going on here?” request for clarification.

I enjoyed the realistic view of military life. It’s his job and Matt’s good at it but he knows it will make life rough for Corey and Olivia and is honest about this. It’s also got its share paperwork, hassles, overseas duty and asshole fellow NCOs. but the cooperation he gets from his subordinates speaks well of his leadership and organizational abilities – how good he is at what he does and is supposed to do and that’s lead people and get the job done. The book also shows how the military can intrude into Matt’s private life as well as jerk around his professional one. And I like that you don’t gloss over the realities of how many soldiers spend their off duty hours – at strip clubs and getting drunk – but also don’t dwell on them. It is what it is. The wedding coordination scene is hysterically funny too. Hoo-ah!

Rita acts as a dea ex machina to get Corey and Matt united together. And the threat she poses is real since Social Services would probably give her back her baby should she make the effort – but she still doesn’t have her act together enough for that to be the right thing for Shorty. The main part of the book ends with this issue still unresolved – which has a realistic air to it – though in the epilogue it’s clearly almost settled. I think it’s enough for the people who don’t want to go on to read the next book in the series though I would advise that just because “The Long Way Home” is such a wonderful book.

I hope that readers don’t let the title make them gag and swear to never read it. I enjoy your books and this is another winner. The wedding scene alone is worth the read. Go Airborne! The ending seemed just a touch rushed and there was a teensy Little Mis which took the book down to a B for me but all in all it’s a wonderful read and not too goo-goo baby sweet.

~Jayne

REVIEW: With No Remorse by Cindy Gerard

Jane — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 17:00:24 +0000

Dear Ms. Gerard:

Sue Grimshaw, formerly of Borders and now acquisitions editor for the newly relaunched Bantam Loveswept line has always been after me to read you. When the ARC of No Remorse hit my doorstep, I decided it was time to stop dithering and give you a try. I’m glad I did. This series has all the elements of standard romantic suspense fare and I mean that in the best way. If readers like the connected series books featuring former military heroes, then they’ll like this series.

After reading No Remorse, I began to buy all the backlist titles to the BOIs. or Black Ops Inc. I haven’t finished them all as I began to feel burnout (reading 4 books in the same series over the course of three days will do that to a reader) and I’m not sure where No Remorse falls. I liked Risk No Secrets the best of the four I have read because I liked the complicated love story. No Remorse offers a pretty straightforward love story: one of the last of the single operators gets caught in Cuzco trying to save a famous supermodel in hiding.

I think you can read No Remorse without having read the first four books but having gone back and read three of them, it has filled in a number of details (like the reason for the ridiculous name of the company that Luke works for – BOIs). Luke does a lot of referencing former characters and their now happy home lives and how the changing face of the lifestyles of his friends and co workers is affecting him. Luke is feeling dissatisfied with his life, wondering whether he really is the

Valentina is a Heidi Klum-ish character. Discovered at a young age by a modeling agency, she parlayed that into nearly 20 years of celebrity success and a marriage to a golden California senator that ended badly. Attempting to get out of the public eye, Valentina is trying to enjoy a low key vacation (much like Luke) in South America. But someone is hunting for Valentina and it looks like Luke is her only way to safety. Like Breaking Point, much of the story is a sort of road romance as Valentina and Luke make their way through Peru.

I liked that the story took place not in the US because so much of what goes on would be implausible in the US (and possibly implausible in Peru but given my unfamiliarity with the country, it’s easier to by into the realism of the story). I also liked that this paramilitary organization was headquartered in South America.

Valentina was scared and mad and lashed out and that Luke, despite his teenage (and adult) crush on her, got upset and frustrated and lashed back. But was it just a little creepy how much Luke seemed to know about her? LIke he read all the tabloid/People/TMZ articles he could? Yes, a little. And while I believed that Luke was a military person, I had a hard time buying into Valentina as a super model celebrity.

The story had good range with action, humor and agnst:

He pushed himself up on his elbows, suddenly full of concern. “What? What’s wrong?”

Her eyes were pinched shut, her face contorted in pain. “Po . . . potato.”

He scowled in confusion. “What? Is that some sort of safe word?”

Her laugh was part pain, part frustration. “No. The potato. It rolled under my back.”

The bad guys kept coming like the hydra, no matter how many you shoot, there is always something to replace them. (Why is there no limit to bad guys? It’s like someone churns them out by the dozen).

I know that there was an attempt at solid character development but it was never fully fleshed out. In amongst the action scenes, there just wasn’t enough space given over to making Luke and Valentina change over the course of the book. Valentina recognizes that she had lost control over her life yet she never really gained it back. She was largely dependent on the BOIs and Luke. Luke didn’t believe he was a hero anymore and yes, he got to save someone and that made him feel good but it never examined what it was about heroism that he identified with and could he live with himself if that wasn’t an option (like an athlete having to retire)

But obviously making me care about the BOIs group, both the men and the women, was done well enough that I glommed onto the backlist. I like romantic suspense and adventure stories and this one kept me turning the pages all night long. B-

Best regards,

Jane

REVIEW: Darkness at Dawn by Elizabeth Jennings

Jaclyn — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 09:00:20 +0000

Dear Ms. Jennings,

I’ve been reading thrillers since high school. My mom introduced me to Eric Van Lustbader’s series, The Sunset Warrior Cycle, which is more fantasy/sci fi than straight up thriller, but in a search for more Lustbader I found a whole lot of Robert Ludlum in the mass-market section at my little neighborhood branch library and have been reading thrillers ever since. It was a highly round-about way to find my way to a genre that has become such a staple of my reading diet over the years. I enjoy these books for the intrigue, the heart-pounding chase and fight scenes, and the intense high brought on by racing against the clock to save something (people, the world, a city…). When Jane suggested I read Darkness and Dawn I figured it was right up my alley.

One of the best elements of Darkness at Dawn is that Dr. Lucy Merritt—our heroine and the woman who is the key to stopping the release of a world-destroying plague being manufactured by terrorists—restores rare books at the Smithsonian. Yes, it’s true, in Darkness at Dawn the CIA turns to an art historian to save the world (with a little help from an Army captain).

Lucy is no ordinary art historian. The daughter of two CIA agents who died in the line of duty and the god-daughter of the current Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA, Lucy grew up in some of the world’s most dangerous places as her parents worked to undermine terrorism around the world. Lucy blames the CIA for her traumatic childhood and has left it behind for a quiet, controlled life that includes rare books, art, and quiet evenings in her sumptuous Washington D.C. town-house. Being drawn back into CIA games of intrigue is her worst nightmare, and yet, to save her closest childhood friend, Princess Paso, Lucy agrees to return to Nhala, located in the Himalayas, using the work of restore a supposedly ancient manuscript as the cover for her real mission of locating a secret lab where the biological weapon of mass destruction is being manufactured.

An Army captain from the Tenth Mountain Division, Mike Schafer is the muscle of the mission: he is assigned to pose as Lucy’s fiancée, protect her, and do the actual investigating to find the secret WMD producing lab.

Darkness at Dawn is a thriller for readers who want to know how everyone is feeling. The tension and action are heavily intertwined with descriptions of the characters’ thoughts and emotions, and the growing attraction between the hero and heroine takes center stage in the middle of the book, despite the urgency and seriousness of their mission.

The story opens with a U.S. government operative dying by bleeding, liquefying, then turning to dust in a matter of hours (creepy, huh?); think Ebola with an extra step: the victim turns to dust. And like any good thriller the tension continues to tighten for the first third of the book while Mike and Lucy are preparing to leave for Nhala and their mission. Once Lucy and Mike are alone together—from the moment they leave for Nhala, the heavy focus on the emotional state of the characters results in a weaker spy drama and a sweet romance. The tension picks back up at the end with a fast-paced race against the clock to save both Lucy’s life and the American east coast.

From the moment he meets her, Mike underestimates Lucy. Like an intricately woven pattern, Lucy is a complex woman with rich detail and hidden depths that Mike continually discovers as they get to know each other. With each new thing he learns, Mike’s respect for Lucy and his admiration of her many talents grows. (All this learning and discovering happens over the course a week, but it’s an intense week.)

For Lucy, Mike has two things she craves but has never really had: a devoted, loving family and emotional stability. Mike takes care of her during the mission in Nhala, no matter what that means—seeing that she gets rest, taking her to a secret rendezvous with Princess Paso, or carrying her unconscious body over hostile mountains to save her from a deadly virus.

But even though Mike was the man-of-action, throughout the story it was Lucy’s quick thinking that saved them. Take this moment—General Changa is questioning Mike and Lucy about their suspicious activities:

“There was absolutely nothing Mike could do. [General] Changa would either accept the explanation or not. It was a good thing Lucy was able to think so fast on her feet. His admiration went up another notch. … Right now Mike’s main weapon was Lucy’s brain.”

After Mike and Lucy successfully evade the General, they have this conversation:

“You were so great,” Mike said, and Lucy rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, right.” Lucy Merritt, Superwoman.

“No, no,” Mike actually look a little shocked at her reaction. “You were incredibly brave. You didn’t show any fear at all. You were just amazing.”

Watching Mike, the highly trained, strong, and capable Army captain, discover the depth of Lucy’s intelligence and ingenuity is the heart of their romance. Lucy got what was long overdue to her—a devoted and loving relationship; but Mike—he’s the lucky one in this story because he didn’t even know what he was missing until Dr. Lucy Merritt came along.

The story has some weaknesses that I was willing to overlook because the romance was so sweet, but they resulted in an overall weakening of the story.

I found the way Lucy slipped right back into the customs of Nhalan society and her immediate grasp of all of Princess Paso’s unspoken communications (after a dozen years with no communication) way too convenient.

Another dubious element was that the ruthless mastermind of the WMD manufacturing plot, General Changa, fell for Lucy’s every prevarication and evasion throughout the story. General Changa doesn’t come off as very smart, especially in his interactions with Lucy and Princess Paso. This offers some “Yeah! Go Lucy!” moments, but it results in a lack of respect for the villain’s capabilities; I’ve found that the thrillers I like best are those where the bad guy is formidable and the hero/heroine wins through a combination of ingenuity, better strategy, and sometimes, luck.

I’ve been calling this a light thriller, which I mean as a compliment. For instance, Robert Ludlum’s books focus first on the spy drama unfolding and deliver the necessary emotional elements to move his plots in one direction or another. Darkness at Dawn does the reverse: it focuses on the relationship between Lucy and Mike and uses the circumstances of the spy drama as tools to evolve the emotional plot. I’m planning an Elizabeth Jennings read-a-thon later this summer and see if her other books are similarly constructed, because this book made for satisfying entertainment.

Readers who want some shoot-‘em-up and occasionally tense spy drama to go with their romance and happily ever after will enjoy this book. B-.

Cheers,

Jaclyn

Unpacking the Navy SEAL hero in romance or the magic in “Let me take care of you”

Jane — Tue, 10 May 2011 09:00:14 +0000

Since last week, there has been an increased interest in romances featuring Navy SEALs. The Washington Post and Glamour magazine both took a stab at what makes these archetypes popular with readers but they only skim the surface.

“They have all of these abilities that the average guy doesn’t even have,” White said. “They appeal to the side of women who want to know there are really strong men in the world who aren’t afraid to take responsibility. SEALs are not not going to pay their child support. They are not couch potatoes who don’t care. They are active in making the world better.”

In the romance world, the competency of SEALs knows no bounds. “They are trained from Day 1 to notice the tiniest detail,” Melton said. “A man who can pick up on the smallest little nuance is bound to be able to please a woman, if you catch my drift.”

Glamour:

They’re highly trained in narrowing in on targets, finding objects in demolished buildings and even underwater, and tracking down pretty damn un-track-down-able enemies. This is appealing for two reasons. They’ll never ask for directions—because they don’t have to. And, if SEALs can find a terrorist who has eluded capture for 10 years, we’re pretty confident they can also find a clitoris.

I think the appeal of the Navy SEAL is not only the competence that the archetype is deemed to possess, but also the safety and certainty that is embodied in the Protector archetype. This is particularly appealing right now. There are natural disasters occurring left and right. Earthquakes and tsunamis. Floods and tornadoes. People are being laid off and families are being put out on the street. It’s a very uncertain period in our lives. The Protector archetype brings certainty and safety. No matter what the costs, no matter how difficult the effort, no matter what the challenges, and no matter how long it will take, this archetype will take care of you.

I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy the Lisa Kleypas hero. She once described her alpha heroes as being so capable and FULL OF CARE for the heroine (and I am paraphrasing here) that the heroine doesn’t even need to worry about her own orgasms. Her three trilogy of contemporaries featuring the Travis family is replete with examples of this.

In Smooth Talking Stranger (review), Ella is trying to negotiate a settlement for her sister who was impregnated by a man of a big, famous church. This negotiation is taking place without the consent of the sister who calls to yell at Ella for interfering. Jack is present when the sisters’ phone call takes place:

I looked up at him bleakly. “Do you have Mark Gottler’s number? I have to call him.”

“Got it right here on my cell phone. You’re welcome to it.” Jack studied me briefly. “Would you trust me to take care of it?” he murmured. “Can I do that for you?”

And Jack goes on to take care of it:

“Hey, Mark. How are you doing? Great. Yeah, things are okay, but we have an issue here, and we need to get it straightened out. Ella just got off the horn with Tara? about that meeting we had, the contract? yeah. Ella’s not too happy, Mark. Tell you the truth, neither am I. Guess I should have made it clear that it was confidential. But I didn’t expect you to go talking out of school.” He paused to listen. “I know why you did it, Mark.” His tone was quiet but blistering. “And now you got these sisters as aggravated as two cats in a bathtub. No matter what Tara says she wants right now, she’s not in any shape to make those decisions. You don’t need to worry about if or when she signs the contract. Once my lawyer sends it over, you have your boys look it over, you sign the fucker, and you send it to me.” Jack listened for a moment. “Because Ella asked me to be in on it, that’s why. I don’t know how you usually handle these things? yeah, that’s what I’m implying___Fact is, Mark, I’m here to make sure Tara and Luke get their due. I want them to have what we talked over and what we shook on. And you know what it means to cross a Travis in Houston. No, of course that’s not a threat. I consider us friends, and I know you won’t back down from doing what’s right. So let’s be clear on how the next couple of months will play out: you’re not going to bother Tara with this stuff again. We’re going to nail down this contract, and if you cause any problems for our side, I guarantee you’re going to have even bigger problems. And I don’t think any of us want to go there. Next time you want to talk about any of this stuff, you call me or Ella. Tara’s out of the loop until she gets well enough to leave that clinic. Good. I think so, too.” He listened for a half minute or so, looked satisfied and said goodbye, and closed the phone with a decisive snap.

Jack just doesn’t help Ella out here but he does things like put together the crib for Ella, spends some morning time with the baby so Ella can sleep in.

In Sugar Daddy (review and guest review), Gage takes in Liberty’s confession that she’s not very good at sex,

“We’ll work at it,” Gage said. “Believe me, I’ll have no problem helping you practice.”

I dared to touch his thigh, which felt like concrete beneath my palm. “What’s the other rule?”

“I’m in charge.”

I blinked, wondering what he meant. Gage’s hand closed on my nape in a light squeeze that sent an erotic shock down my spine. “Just for tonight,” he continued evenly. “Trust me to decide when and where and how long. You don’t have to do anything except relax. Let go. Let me take care of you.” His mouth lowered to my ear, and he whispered, “Can you do that for me, darlin?”

I think the fantasy is this. This hero archetype knows you are capable of doing everything but they are willing to “take care of things” once you give them the go ahead and then able of following through and accomplish whatever task is set before them. Encapsulated within that “ableness” is the concept that they get things done. For Jack, he gets it done with a simple phone call.

In Breaking Point (review), former SEAL and current deputy US Marshall, Zach McBride, leads the Natalie, the heroine, across the desert between the Mexico and the U.S. for four nights. He knows every supply they’ll need:

ZACH READ OVER the list of supplies he’d just written, checking to make certain he hadn’t forgotten anything. Handheld GPS. Batteries. Compass for when the GPS fucked up. Wristwatch. Night vision goggles. Infrared binoculars. Night scope for the AK. Box of 115 grain +P jacketed hollow point rounds for the Glocks. Cartridges for the AKs. Double shoulder holster. Flashlight. Two backpacks. Sturdy trail shoes, athletic socks, BDU pants and jackets for both of them. Thick leather gloves. Bandanas. A heavy wool blanket. Duct tape. Sunscreen. Lip balm. Hats. Rope. Powdered electrolytes. Moleskin for blisters. Antihistamine. Insect repellant. Snakebite kit. Codeine-caffeine tablets. Hard candy. MREs if he could find them. Canned food and a can opener if he couldn’t. Hand wipes. And eight gallons of water–enough to last three or four days if they traveled at night.

And this is a comfort to her:

She’d be lying if she denied that what he’d told her had made her feel safer. A short trek across the desert into the U.S. was surely a cakewalk for a man who’d fought in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. He’d probably had lots of outdoor survival training. He would know what supplies to bring. He would know how to navigate with GPS so they wouldn’t get lost. And if they ran into armed traffickers in the middle of nowhere, he would know how to deal with them, too.

Contrast these types of heroes to say, Sam in Rachel Gibson’s Any Man of Mine. While Sam is good for child support, he breaks promises to his kid and lives a life of unadultered self pleasure. The first thing in Sam’s mind when he gets up isn’t “how can I best take care of my kid” but “how can I get the most pleasure out of today for myself.” He’s an incredibly selfish creature and one who probably doesn’t know where the clitoris is.

“I’d be with him more if I could. You know my schedule makes it difficult.”

“If he were a priority in your life, you’d make time.” She pushed her hair behind her ears. “You had this past summer off, but you only spent three weekends with Conner. You canceled on him at least eight different times, and every time you did, I had to try and make it up to him. Every time you’ve ever let him down, I’m the one who has to tell him that you love him and would be with him if you could. I’m the one who has to lie to him.”

The Navy SEAL archetype would not act like Sam in Rachel Gibson’s Any Man of Mine (dueling reviews). What the author Pamela Clare (aka P White) explains above isn’t universally true obviously. Spousal abuse is high in the military as is divorce and infidelity. Just because a guy is a SEAL and can take out a compound of a terrorist in under 40 minutes doesn’t make him a good partner or a good husband. (In fact, I believe you aren’t allowed to enlist in the SEAL program if one is a single parent). What is being sold in romances is, of course, a romanticized version of the SEAL, one where the attributes that make someone a good SEAL are extended into the ordinary routines of life.

What evens out the power balance, at least within Breaking Point, is the fact that all Zach feels he is capable of doing is soldiering.

But the bottom line was that he didn’t know how to live a civilian life any longer. He could never be the family man with the house in the suburbs, the wife, the two kids, and the dog. The only way he knew how to go on was to keep fighting.

Despite all of his abilities, his competence, his ability to keep her bodily safe, he is not a good bet emotionally.

Natalie deserved a full and happy life with a man who wasn’t fucked up or in the line of fire, and he aimed to see she got her chance at it. He would get her safely home even if it cost him every last drop of his blood. But then they would go their separate ways. It sucked for him, really, because if ever he’d met a woman who made him feel . . .

Of course, this is a sort of paternalism in and of itself. In other words, Zach knows best here when really, maybe Natalie would rather have a few years with Zach than none at all. (And this is later brought to bear as Zach agrees that life is only worth living if he is with Natalie). By removing himself from her sphere, she doesn’t get to make that decision. (This is the crux of the conflict in Miranda Lee’s Not a Marrying Man).

Allowing someone to take care of you implies a lot of trust. In other words, by ceding control to the partner, the heroine has to know that the other person will still hold her with the same esteem. With someone you trust, the power exchange can happen. I think it is important that in each of the scenarios above, the heroines are asked permission. With the Navy SEAL archetype, men are not only trustworthy, but honorable and full of integrity. This type will understand that the directive is not to get in take control and hold control, but to take control for the moment in time that it is allowable. Let me take care of you.

I think that the appeal of the Navy SEAL archetype is less knowing where your clitoris is and more the concept that this is a type of man who will go to the ends of the earth to take care of you. The fantasy power balance is that he is emotionally fulfilled if you let him and the heroine ultimately controls the hero’s emotional happiness. I’ll leave you with this excerpt from Blue Eyed Devil.

Jack grinned. “I almost pity the bastard. Okay — you handle Cates, and I’ll set Dad straight on a few things.”

“No,” I said automatically, “don’t do anything about Dad. You can’t fix my relationship with him.”

“I can block or run interference.”

“Thanks, Jack, but I don’t need blocking, and I really don’t need any more interference.”

He looked annoyed. “Well, why did you waste all that time complaining to me if you didn’t want me to do something about it?”

“I don’t want you to fix my problems. I just wanted you to listen.”

“Hang it all, Haven, talk to a girlfriend if all you want is a pair of ears. Guys hate it when you give us a problem and then don’t let us do something about it. It makes us feel bad. And then the only way to make ourselves feel better is to rip a phone book in two or blow something up. So let’s get this straight — I’m not a good listener. I’m a guy.”

Hoo Rah: A Giveway for the Troops

Jane — Sun, 08 May 2011 17:00:28 +0000

Update: The Kindle is ordered. According to Len, they want the K2 or K3 in wifi so that is what we have purchased.

WINNERS of Into the Crossfire by Lisa Marie Rice are:

1) Winnie P
2) Victoria Zumbrum
3) Tracy
4) Amy P.
5) Dana
6) Breanna
7) kzoet
8) Julie
9) StacieDM
10) Jessie Patterson

Please use this form:

Pamela Spengler-Jaffee, the publicist for HarperCollins, emailed me yesterday and asked if I was interested in doing a giveaway to support the troops and celebrate their service. Absolutely! Together we came up with the following. LIsa Marie Rice writes books about former special forces heroes. Her 2010 book is Into the Crossfire features Sam Reston, a former Navy SEAL. We are giving away 10 copies of Into the Crossfire to any random commenter.

But that is not all. Regardless of whether you comment or how many people comment, HarperCollins is donating a couple hundred books through books for soldiers AND a brand new K3. To match that, Dear Author is also going to be donating a K3 to the ebooks for soldiers.

If you would like to get involved here are the two links:

Additionally, Dear Author is interested in adopting a platoon and if you are interested in helping us do this, drop me an email and let me know what you would be interested in doing. I’ve emailed the Adopt a Platoon organization to find out what kind of commitment would be required of us and how we can best help to boost troop morale.

Thanks guys and happy reading.

REVIEW: Into the Crossfire by Lisa Marie Rice

REVIEW: Breaking Point by Pamela Clare

Jane — Fri, 06 May 2011 19:03:13 +0000

Dear Ms. Clare:

My takeaway memory of this book was me gripping my book and saying “oh no she didn’t”. And by she, I meant you, and by “oh no” I meant, wow, I didn’t see that coming. If a reader is looking for a book containing a great special ~~forces hero~~ operations (former SEAL, in fact), this would fit the bill. It has a smart and capable heroine, a powerful and adoring special ~~forces~~ operations hero, and a thrilling action/adventure storyline.

Natalie Benoit moved away from New Orleans after Katrina. She had lost so much that just being there hurt her heart. She took a job with Denver Independent and while she loved her job, she wasn’t loving her life. She felt stuck and in an effort to snap out of her ennui, she takes an assignment that brings her to Mexico. She is captured by Los Zetas, a criminal organization, and taken hostage. In her dirt cell, she meets Zach McBride, former Navy SEAL, and current DUSM.

Zach was undercover seeking intelligence information that would lead to the capture of Arturo Cesar Cardenas, the head of Los Zetas. He receives a tip but it is ultimately betrayed by a female who must have been in the employ of Cardenas. The two bond over their shared captivity, one from which Zach believes they will not escape. Zach’s goal is to make sure he doesn’t reveal any information via interrogation before they kill him and after questioning by Natalie, he frankly tells her that her fate is likely rape over a period of days or weeks after which she will be sold and killed. In some gallows humor, Natalie responds “M-my mother always told me there’d come a day when I’d regret asking so many questions.”

Natalie has to trust Zach even though credible circumstances lead her to believe that Zach stole cocaine from Cardenas. Some of Zach’s exploits seem far fetched but given what we know about SEAL training which includes Hell Week, a week of training that is five days of intense physical training wherein the trainees get only five hours of sleep the entire week. Consider that to even be considered for the program, you must be able to swim 500 yards within 12 minutes 30 seconds; perform 42 push-ups in 2 minutes; 50 sit ups in two minutes (I can actually do this so …); run a mile and a half in under 11 minutes. I find it believable that Zach, after days of torture, could have enough reserves to take action. And I appreciated that Natalie was not portrayed as a helpless woman even though she didn’t have the physical prowess Zach possessed.

. When it came to fighting, her only assets were her intelligence and her courage.

That’s why Zach had been trying all night to prepare her mind, channeling more than a decade of combat and law enforcement experience into a few stolen hours.

This book is full of action and adventure but more importantly, an emotional plotline between Natalie whose heart had never really restarted after her Katrina loss and Zach who had always wanted the wife, kids and home but after the war was never able to find that right person. At times, Zach even believed he didn’t deserve to have that kind of contentedness.

Many of the characters of previous books appear, particularly the guys because there is action! and adventure! and if one finds themselves in Denver, CO, then these guys are going to show up. I didn’t mind their insertion because it was a natural inclusion. Given their roles in past books, it would be more odd for them not to appear.

However, I did feel like the biggest part of the plot relied on what I considered to be a coincidence. It didn’t bother me, but it didn’t quite fit into authenticity that permeates every other part of the story.

Finally, this story, unlike many RS books out there has a high degree of sexual tension. You never close the bedroom door and the physical attraction and the consumation of that attraction is just as exciting as when characters are rappelling off the roof in the cold rainy night.

So for that scene where I went “Oh no she didn’t” (which was accompanied by an audible gasp), I won’t reveal it because readers have to discover that scene themselves. But I will say so many stories in romance take a disneyfied approach where a person is captured by a bad guy and nothing bad ever really happens to them which isn’t very believable. Bad things happen to good people in your books and that makes the HEA all the more precious. B

Best regards

Jane

Monday Midday Links: Unscientic conclusions put forth as real science (what else is new)

Jane — Mon, 02 May 2011 15:00:24 +0000

Yesterday it was announced that members of the U.S. special forces had successfully executed a mission to kill Osama Bin Laden. People acknowledged this news in various ways but while we don’t know what will happen in the future, President Obama made a point of noting that

As we do, we must also reaffirm that the United States is not — and never will be — at war with Islam. I’ve made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam. Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims. Indeed, al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own.

This mission was years in the making and involved a number of individuals in our military from the intelligence committee to the Navy SEALs. One way to acknowledge this mission would be by donating money to the Twin Towers Orphan Fund or to the military

txt HUG to 85944 to donate $10 to the Twin Towers Orphan Fund.

Log on to the following Web sites to show support, to include greeting cards, virtual Thank You cards and calling card donations to help troops stay in contact with loved ones:

Our Military — http://www.ourmilitary.mil/index.aspx

Operation USO Care Package — http://www.usocares.org/

Operation Dear Abby e-mail to Navy personnel

Based on the Twitter feeds last night of my romance reading buddies, there appears to be a run on military romances. I would recommend the Maya Banks’ KGI Series, Lisa Marie Rice’s books (more on her here), and Stephanie Tyler, Suzanne Brockmann’s Silhouette Intimate Moments series starting with Prince Joe (Tall, Dark & Dangerous, Book 1) and Books 1 through 4 of the Troubleshooter series. My favorite is Over the Edge but be warned that there is a painful rape that happens to one of the secondary characters in that story. More good military reading includes the Samhain shorts by Elle Kennedy.

*****

In a remarkable display of what social media can do, an information technology professional living in Abbattabod, Pakistan, tweeted about strange helicopters hovering over Abbattabod, crashing to the ground, and then a bomb going off. He did not know, at the time, what he was tweeting about at 1 am Pakistani time was the special forces invasion of Bin Laden’s compound. Sohaib Athar’s tweetstream (img) is one of the more remarkable artifacts of social media I have seen.

*****

We are slowly adding the publisher lists for 2011 to Dear Author. You can see them in the sidebar or in the “Readers Resource” menu item right under the carousel of book images. The publishing lists are a quick way for you to see what publishers are putting out every month and it can help you organize your book buying budget. I still have Berkley and Avon lists to put together. Kensington has sent me a list and we will be posting a contest with the list later today.

*****

The Cover Cafe contest is open for business! Voting starts to day and runs until May 31, 2011. Head over and vote for your favorite (and least favorite) covers of 2010. I know it is hard to believe, but The Perfect Play by Jaci Burton did not make the cut as a Contemporary finalist. ~~The cover was robbed~~! Said book is a 2011 publication. Sigh.

*****

Sunita has a takedown of an offensive article at the Wall Street Journal by Ogi Ogas, the author of the piece in Psychology Today which Robin took apart last Tuesday.

Ogas equates a woman’s search for a mate with the way Miss Marple goes about solving a murder, and calls “this unconscious evaluation [is] the source of ‘feminine intuition.’” I have no idea what this means, but falling in love with someone you want to spend your life with doesn’t seem to me to have much overlap with solving a crime. He then draws an analogy between romance novels and pornography. Women, who are complex, read romance novels while men, who are simple, look at pornographic visual material. Women don’t buy subscriptions to porn sites, but they read lots of romance novels. In fact, there are as many people reading romance novels in English worldwide as there are people visiting porn sites in the U.S. and Canada (which suggests that many more people visit porn sites, but whatever).

…..

Finally, in the next-to-last paragraph of the article, Ogas completely undermines everything that has gone before. Granted, it wasn’t very good to begin with. Let’s recap: (1) Women go online to find romance novels, erotica, and fan fiction in order to figure out through fictional heroes the kind of man they want; (2) Men are visual and solitary, women are textual and communitarian; and (3) Reading romance and erotica, and writing fan fiction, is about “satisfying sexual curiosity” for women.

Whoever is giving Ogas a platform should stop. Not because he is insulting to women but because his science is so bad he is insulting knowledge.

REVIEW: Mitzi’s Marine by Rogenna Brewer

Jane — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:00:03 +0000

Dear Ms. Brewer:

Mitzi’s Marine is about a solder who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and lost his best friend, his brother, and his leg. I like these stories because I really want to believe that these soldiers can come home and live happy lives. Maybe it is romanticism of the worst kind but I think we all have loved ones that are fighting or have fought and you don’t want them to just live, but actually prosper and while the Marine in this story gets his HEA, I found the romance to be bittersweet and a bit incomplete.

Mitzi Zahn and Bruce Calhoun grew up next door to each other. They were each other’s firsts and meant to be the other’s last. Bruce signed up for the Marines and became a part of Marine Recon and Mitzi went into the Navy and became an AIRR, an aviation rescue swimmer. She is part of the team that goes in and rescues the Navy SEALS and Marine Recon. Bruce and Mitzi fell in love but their respective enlistments kept them apart more than they were together but Bruce felt like Mitzi was slipping away from him and proposed, to her and her family’s utter delight. Freddie Zahn, Jr., Mitzi’s older brother, was Bruce’s best friend.

When an RPG rips apart an Army truck containing Bruce, his brother, Luke, and Freddie, only Bruce walks away but with a left leg that has to be amputated. Torn up with grief at his losses, Bruce drives Mitzi away. Eighteen months later, he walks back into his hometown where Mitzi is stationed as a recruiter and realizes he misses Mitzi more than he misses his left leg. The problem is that Bruce still wants to reenlist. More and more amputees are making it back to the front lines. Mitzi, however, wants to settle down. She always has and Mitzi has moved on. She’s dating a new guy, a former Army soldier and current high school basketball coach.

The best parts of this book were when Mitzi and Bruce were both grappling with missing Freddie. There were some great scenes such as Mitzi affixing Freddie’s watch on Bruce’s wrist and the times that they spent together at night trying not to think about the past, but not being able to help themselves. It seemed apparent that you knew a ton about the Armed Forces and I actually felt like I learned something. I did have a problem with how the two sides of the recruiting process weren’t well addressed. Bruce didn’t want his youngest brother to sign up but he was a recruiter and had no compunctions about guiding a young woman on how to get around the rules so she could sign up. The failure to address his hypocrisy bothered me.

There were a number of issues raised in the book that were never resolved. The story seemed like it couldn’t decide what the emotional conflict was for either character. There was another vet in Bruce’s town that had an amputated right leg and was currently homeless. Was this supposed to represent what would happen to Bruce if he didn’t get back into the field? Was this what was keeping him away from committing to Mitzi again or from pursuing her again? Was it because he truly belonged in the field? Was it because he felt guilty he was alive? None of these questions were well matched by the ending. Perhaps the story was mean to address all of these things but none of them were well articulated. Mitzi seemed to be more understandable. She wanted to marry and settle down. Or did she? She thought about reenlisting which would take her back out into the field and into combat. It’s not that I don’t think that characters can be conflicted, but it seemed like the emotional conflicts changed to suit the story rather than naturally evolving.

Some appeared to be setups for books far down the road such as Bruce’s 18 year old brother’s entry into the army and a love triangle of his own. I felt, though, that the stories weren’t well integrated into the overarching plot in this one. There were too many characters introduced in this story and not enough time spent with each of them. One reason that all these people were difficult to keep track of was that you used both the first name to the last name to refer to the characters (I.e., Bruce or Calhoun) and it became confusing and it wasn’t consistent, nor was it dependent on which character’s POV we were seeing.

There is also an interesting love triangle and I really vacillated between who would be better for Mitzi. Again, the issues involved here didn’t seem to be worked through but rather the denouement was presented in a summary fashion. How did Bruce arrive at the conclusion that he did? Or Mitzi? Was it just the sex that drove them back together?

The subtle and not so subtle maneuvering and competition between Bruce and the guy Mitzi was dating (Dan) provided a nice bit of levity. But the triangle became uncomfortable for me because I felt that Mitzi acted without honor toward Dan when he was nothing but sweetness and kindness with her. SPOILER

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

For all my complaints though, I really liked the voice and the style of writing. I liked how you imparted a lot of information without boring me or making me feel like you were being didactic. If only I had believed in the romance more. C.

Best regards,

Jane

REVIEW: Here Comes the Groom by Karina Bliss

lazaraspaste — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 10:00:24 +0000

Dear Ms. Bliss,

Jane sent me Here Comes the Groom after I told her how much I loved your last book, What the Librarian Did. Like What the Librarian Did, Here Comes the Groom takes a fairly cliched romance novel convention and gives it the kind depth and re-charge that I think is lacking in so many contemporaries.

Here Comes the Groom is a best friends to lovers story. Jo and Dan have been BFF since childhood. They know each other and understand each others’ weaknesses and strengths like few other people do. And they’ve always had a platonic relationship. Or they did until that awkward night over a year ago when a very drunk Jo made a pass at Dan just before he was to be deployed to Afghanistan. Nothing came to pass from the pass, as Dan rejected Jo’s advances. But now Dan is back in their New Zealand town of Beacon Bay insisting on cashing in on their old marriage agreement-’a promise scrawled on the back of a menu years ago due to heartbreak and booze. At first, Jo thinks he’s joking, but it quickly becomes clear that Dan is dead serious about wanting to marry her. To complicate matters, there’s Jo’s rapidly deteriorating grandmother, Dan’s feuding parents, and a lot of nosy townsfolk. In the summary version, this book sounds like every contemporary romance you’ve ever read.

But it’s not.

Before I talk about what makes this book great, I want to talk about the pitfalls of contemporary romance because it is those very pitfalls that you so beautifully avoid while still using the conventions and tropes that we all like to see to energize the story-’all of which, ultimately, make it a satisfying read.

The problem with contemporary romance is that it always feels like somebody’s mom wrote it in 1983. By which I mean, that even though the characters are supposed to be around my age (25-39ish), they all sound like were rounded up at a mid-1980′s romantic comedy anachronism convention with all the quasi-post-second-wave-feminism gender politics associated therewith and executed with the kind of heavy-handed myopia you usually attribute to aging relations political opinions. You know what I mean. It is the story in which the hard-headed business woman-’who may or may not be wearing shoulder-pads despite it being 1998-’has to be taught the value of family and American value systems via the sexy, sexy courtship of a small-town, blue collar mechanic who reads Dickens and possibly has either an orphaned child or an orphaned dog to raise. The hero, invariably, has to learn to love again after the death/abandonment of his wife/mother/flighty younger sister and is also, possibly, in the process of trying to save the dying family business. Together they save the economy of Treacle Town just in time for Christmas/The Big Festival of Celebratoriness/The appearance of badly dressed businessmen. If it is a 1980′s teen romantic comedy, there also may or may not be a downhill ski-race and/or boat race that will save Grandpa Nick’s estate/bed & breakfast. This is also the plot to every Hallmark Christmas movie, all of which have aired within the last 3 weeks and all of which I have seen. Along with this entree of romance, you can choose five of the following side-dishes to mix and match: a wedding, a dog, a child, interfering parents, interfering friends, a Big Misunderstanding regarding a smoking hot member of the opposite sex who always turns out to be either gay or a sister, a sudden fear of commitment when no fear of commitment existed prior (let’s call the Deus Ex Matriphobia), the re-appearance of an ex-flame, and a serial killer.

A lot of people complain about the lack of historical accuracy in historical romance novels. Nobody complains about the lack of historical accuracy in contemporary romance novels. In fact, I would argue that there is more historical inaccuracy in contemporaries, and it is, in my not-so humble opinion, a much less forgivable sin. Presumably, the authors of contemporaries live now and thus should be aware of their own historical context. Alas, this is not the case as above aforementioned plot devices detail.

Which brings me back to Here Comes the Groom. On the surface your books uses a lot of these tropes, but it never descends into a cliché. If I had to summarize what I think the skill of a good romance author its, then it is this ability. To use what everyone loves about the romance genre, without letting those conventions take over. And you do this really well. Jo runs a newspaper that her grandfather and grandmother started. Dan’s a sheep farmer and ex-soldier. Jo’s trying to save her business. Dan’s trying to woo Jo. Jo’s gran is sick. Dan helps her. Dan’s parents are fighting. Jo helps him. Dan’s suffering from PTSD. Jo helps him deal with it. There’s a wedding. There are wacky friends who do wacky things. But all of these aspects are used with a great deal of thought and care.

To illustrate my point, let us take the opening scene of the book. Jo’s drunk and in the process of seducing a some yuppie schmo for a one night-stand, when she runs into Dan, who is on his way to the Middle East with his unit:

"Who cares?" Jo planted his palm against her curves.

"Tell me I'm sexy again."

Brad's brown eyes darkened and he smiled, spreading his fingers to encompass her breast. Leaning closer, he opened his mouth to speak.

"Hey-sexy."

Jo jerked her head around to see who the deep, masculine drawl belonged to. "Dan!"

Her instinctive delight at seeing her oldest friend subsided into embarrassment as he took in her slutty top, the scarlet lipstick and Brad's intimate caress. Grabbing her pickup's fingers, she tried to act casual. "What are you doing here?" She enunciated her words carefully so Dan wouldn't know how drunk she was. "Weren't you on a surf trip down south?"

Amused, he lifted his teal-blue eyes from her pushedup cleavage. "No swell- When I heard you were on your own in the Big Smoke, I figured you could use some company." Dan grinned, shrugging his wide shoulders. "Guess I figured wrong." Turning to Brad, he held out a hand. "Dan Jansen-I grew up with Jo in Beacon Bay."

Brad tried to disentangle from Jo's restraining grip.

"Brad Wilson. I met her tonight."

"Rea-a-ally?" Dan drawled and she felt the beginning of a blush. "Relax, Swannie," he added. "What happens in Auckland stays in Auckland."

The two men shook hands and Jo squirmed as she watched Brad deliver a bone-crusher. Dan responded by stroking the other man's knuckle with his thumb. Brad couldn't release fast enough. Her best friend looked at her. You can't be serious.

The best part about this scene is that Dan isn’t concerned that Jo is interested in a one-night-stand with a douchie investment banker, but that Jo’s drunk. When he ruins it for Jo, he does mostly just by being there and freaking the guy out. When he figures out it mattered to her, he’s sorry. The point is Jo and Dan are friends.

Dan looked skeptical, and impatiently Jo jiggled her up-thrust cleavage. "Isn't it obvious I dressed to get laid?"

"Can you quit bouncing those things in front of me?"He sounded irritated. "You're making me feel like a pervert."

"That's because all guys are shallow."

"Yeah, and you're only interested in Brad's personality."

"My point is," she said, sticking doggedly to it, "quit with the third degree. I'm not chasing blue-chip investment here. Bad-’I mean, Brad and I are all about mutual-asset stripping and quick returns."

"You wouldn't have sex with him if you weren't drunk though, would you?"

"Tracy," said Jo. "Mandy- Shall I go on? Angie."

He held up his hands. "Fine, you've made your point, I'll say goodbye and disappear."

In the time between this conversation and the beginning of the story proper, a lot of things happen to Dan. He loses two of his close friends-’one of them his cousin-’in an ambush while in Afghanistan. When he comes home for good, he immediately puts a wedding announcement in the paper without even talking to Jo first.

Jo’s reluctance is understandable. Based on this behavior she has every reason to believe that this wedding thing is somehow related to Dan’s PTSD and his unaddressed grief over the loss of his friends. Plus, you know, he totally rejected her one pass at him. Jo believes that marrying Dan under these circumstances would be wrong. She also believes this because of a secret of her own, one that she’s been keeping from Dan. Not out of contrived Big Misunderstanding-ness, but because she didn’t/doesn’t want to further burden him when he needs time to recover from the death of his friends.

Besides her secret, Jo’s grandmother-’the woman who raised her-’has dementia. Everyday her grandmother forgets a little more, confuses Jo with her dead mother, confuses the year. Jo knows she needs to put her in a home, but she can’t let her go. On top of all this emotional and family fall-out, Jo is in the process of trying to save the newspaper business her grandparents’ built. Jo’s refusal to marry Dan makes total sense.

Dan, in the meantime, struggles throughout the book to come to terms with his feelings for Jo, which he isn’t even sure about when he starts this whole wedding business. He also has to learn to let go of the deep sense of guilt he has for not being on the mission when his unit was attacked. He has to come to terms with his sense of responsibility for the death of his friends, his inability to face his godson, and the real reason he wants to marry Jo. Add to that bag of mess the fact that his family is falling apart-’and not in a quirky, cute way-’and the man has a lot on his plate.

You convey the complexity of emotions-’the love, the attraction, the doubts, the other obligations, the fears, the hopes, the exasperation and frustration, etc.-’that both Jo and Dan feel for each other. But for all that, it is still a funny and delightful romance. You never reduce Jo into a ball-breaking business woman or a petulant child. Nor do you make Dan’s stubborn refusal to accept Jo’s "no" for answer the act of an "Alpha-hole." And that, right there, is why this story is so satisfying. You allow a breadth and depth of emotion for the characters, but you still make it fun to reader. The term is one you coin later in the book. But it isn’t said about Dan. The phrase shows up when Jo calls Dan’s best army buddy an alpha-hole:

Ignoring Jo, Ross opened Delwyn's door. She was leaning against it and toppled sideways with a tipsy giggle. "Oops!"

He caught her falling weight, instinctively bracing on his bad leg. A grimace of pain tightened his features.Diving forward, Jo propped Delwyn to a sitting position.

"Don't you ever listen to good advice?"

"I'm fine." Under the motion-activated outdoor lights his face was ashen.

"Let me guess," she said, exasperated. "Pain is weakness leaving the body." It was a favorite saying of the Special Forces. And in Jo's view, an idiotic one.

"You've got a smart mouth on you, Swannie."

"And you're a stubborn alpha-hole. Go wait in the car."

Clearly, Jo is awesome.

You set up complex people with complex problems and you don’t let those complex problems be solved by magical sex. Jo and Dan are forced to confront their problems, their feelings for each other and deal with the baggage both of them have from being human. Nobody is a virgin. This is the story of how two close friends, stay friends and become lovers. It is the story of how two strong-willed, independent people who’ve been damaged a lot-’not by crazy melodramatic things like twins being switched at birth, but by things that happen to people you know-’learn to lean on each other, and love each other even though they are both still damaged, and may never be whole again. That’s a much better love story than a hard-headed businesswoman/man learning that Christmas is a magical time of year. I will continue to look for your titles in the future because I know now that I can trust you to build complex and interesting characters who actually sound as if they belong to the 21^st century. A.

Lazaraspaste