And on the One-Thousand-and-Second night, Scheherazade told this story…

By day, Taqla uses her forbidden sorcery to move freely about the city of Damascus in the guise of an old sage. Her true identity known only by her faithful servant woman, Taqla is content with the comfortable, if restrictive, life that keeps her safe from the control of any man. Until she lays eyes on a handsome merchant-traveler. Suddenly her magical disguise doesn’t rest so easily on her shoulders.

When long-time widower, Rafiq, hears that the Amir’s beautiful daughter has been kidnapped by a scheming djinni—and that she will be given in marriage to her rescuer—he seeks the help of “Umar the Wise” to ensure he will be that man. Yet as he and the disguised Taqla set off, he senses that his prickly male companion is hiding something.

In a moment of dire peril, all of Taqla’s secrets are stripped bare—her fears, her sorcery and, worst of all, her love for Rafiq. Yet the princess’s life hangs in the balance, and there is no running away or turning back. Even though passion may yet betray them all…

Dear Ms Ashbless,

As the opening sentence says, this could be a story straight out of the Arabian Nights. I can imagine reclining on a divan, eating sugared dates, drinking sherbet and listening with rapt attention as a storyteller spins out the tale of Taqla and Rafiq in their quest to rescue the beautiful Ahleme, daughter of the Amir of Dimashq, from the clutches of the evil djinni Yazid. And what a tale it is with twists and turns and adventures galore. There were times when I honestly had no idea of what would come next and instances when I gnashed my teeth at whatever it was that interrupted me from reading the next page. Had I gotten off my duff and read it last year when I got the book, it would definitely have landed on my top ten list for the year.

I used to read vampire books and shifter books and angel/demon books (but not zombies, seriously I don’t understand that one) but once the craze kicked in and that’s all people were writing, I got bored and irritated with yet another shifter book or emo/super alpha vampire hero. Frankly, I had basically given up reading any paranormal or fantasy book except for the Temerarie AU series. But here is a book with the lesser used djinni and djinniyah as well as being chock full of different creatures I’d never even heard of – though multiple Google searches bore out their inclusion in folk lore of the areas in which the book is set.

Horse Most Swift, Lion Most Strong, the Bag that Holds the World, the moving picture scroll offered to the Amir which lures his daughter into capture, the initial room Ahleme is kept a prisoner in which turns out to be hung in midair by a web of glass strands – there is something new in almost every chapter to at which to marvel. Taqla is a sorceress but there are definite limits to her powers and abilities – she often relies on instinct to guide her and she can be thwarted by someone who knows how to. Yazid and his sister Zubaida can conjure and whoosh something into or out of existence in the blink of an eye. The scene and image of djinn at play in a lake of molten fire is stunning and terrifying in turns. The single minded mission of an angel setting right what has been done wrong is chilling.

There are great individual scenes such as when Rafiq and Taqla in disguise flee across rooftops and through the back of stores from his enemies in Dimashq. I kept picturing the early bazaar scene from Raiders of the Lost Arc. Or the narrow escape of these two from the ghoulish Pale People or the giant fish that guards the special apple tree. In fact all through the story I kept thinking “this would make a hell of a movie.” The pacing is good with no draggy middle or drawn out end. It’s colorful, imaginative yet based on the places, beings and mythology of the place and time: the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the nasty little seer Safan inTaysafun, the underwater desert sea, the the fruit from a particular tree. I love how this quest is gently dropped into the story without a lot of fanfare – the tree grew from an apple core that was thrown into the Tigris a very long time ago. My favorite is Senmurw, the Bird of Compassion, who is fantastic. I was actually tearing up a little at what she says to Taqla about love. She makes up for Yaghuth who is particularly awful and I approve of Taqla’s desire to bury that temple with the sands of time. The Pale People were utterly repulsive. The tale of Ardishir and his consort Adhur-Anahid made me shudder. As is her ultimate end – though she seems to have well deserved it.

We actually get two love stories for the price of one here – Taqla and Rafiq and then Yazid and Ahleme. Taqla is older and used to living on her own through her ability to disguise herself as Umar and Zahir which allows her to live without a man in her life. After she tells Rafiq the story of her childhood, he realizes why she’s chosen to avoid marriage as she’s seen firsthand that a man can destroy a woman’s life and that women have less power in this world just because of their physiology. I thought the vision Taqla had of growing old as Safan had also helped contribute to her willingness to change. For his part, Rafiq has also learned a bitter lesson about marriage. He often left his first bride to continue his merchant travels and never bothered to try to either get to know her or learn to love her. He returned to find her dead of a plague and, chastised, only then realized how little he knew her. Each of them has to learn to trust the other and be willing to share a life with another person. It takes their journeying and cooperation in achieving each of the goals to bring this about as they would never have gone beyond surface attraction otherwise. As much as they did, I came to enjoy their bickering – which becomes more playful as the story progresses – and have a vision of them taking verbal shots at each other as they grow old together. And I like that I can see the changes in them slowly taking place over the course of the story instead of BAM! all at once. Though of course neither quite realizes what’s happening at the time.

As for Yazid and Ahleme – here the contrast is between human and djinn, youthful daydreams of love and notions of protecting family honor via virginity vs age old bitterness at the subjugation of a race and determination to eliminate the possibility of future imprisonment of a djinni’s will.
Yazid begins his efforts at conquest with strength and bluster. He’s the big, bad, blue djinni who can create things out of thin air at will, who can become three times the size of a man and shout the house down. He wants what he wants and doesn’t truly care how this will affect an innocent woman. Up to now, Ahleme has been living in a silken prison of the harem in Dimashq so this new prison isn’t far from what she’s used to. She doesn’t have attendants and it takes a while for Yazid to provide her with amusements to pass her time – after he learns the hard way that humans require regular food and water to live – but she has a strong will and won’t bow down or give up her family honor without a fight. It’s not until Yazid does something for her that takes personal effort vs just snapping his fingers that she begins to soften. He listened to her and she realizes she can’t think of a time before when a man has done that. Yazid also doesn’t overpower her when he easily could have. He then tries to turn her innocence against her as he physically woos her. Still she hangs on until she sees the sacrifice he’s willing to make to keep her safe before giving in.

I finished reading with a couple of questions and inconsistencies that popped out at me. The Amir of Dimashq alternately has only one child – Ahleme – or more than one (in the scene where she’s kidnapped at the audience she’s mentioned as the Amir’s eldest daughter and the Amir is said to like to spend time with his children). The Bag that Holds the World seems to be able to hold anything and mention is made of Taqla pulling food out of it during their journey but when they’re forced to spend the night on one of the marsh islands, they have to go hungry because as desert land dwellers they don’t know how to fish. One of the very minor characters mentions the Holy Qur’an yet several times characters drink or are offered wine. But these aren’t things which are deal breakers and none of them impaired my enjoyment of the book.

Is there going to be a sequel? What happens to Ahleme and Yazid? Does Taqla figure out how to control Zubaida or will she get free of the imprisoning spell? Will Taqla and Rafiq travel together and have more adventures? I love it when I finish a book and want more. A-

~Jayne

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Perhaps I wasn’t the best choice to review your latest novel Everything You’ve Got. I’m married to a physician and have worked in and around the medical field for most of my adult life. Your heroine, twenty-seven (I think) year old Dr. Kat Dayton, struck me as unbelievably immature and the problems she faces in her medical practice seem to be in large part of her own making. For most of the book, she annoyed the hell out of me and I couldn’t see why your hero, the literally heroic Luke Hamilton, put up with her.

Kat and Luke have both grown up in the small town of Justice, Nebraska. Everything You’ve Got is the second book in the series Anything and Everything. I didn’t read the first book, Anything You Want, in which Luke and Kat are introduced, but that wasn’t a problem for me. Their back-story is clearly explained in Everything You’ve Got. Kat has been hung up on Luke for years but he spent most of that time stuck on the heroine of Anything You Want, Sabrina. Sabrina is now happily married to Luke’s best friend Marc and Luke has realized the woman he really loves is Kat. The two share a highly charged kiss involving handcuffs the night of Luke’s birthday party and immediately become a couple. As Luke says to Marc after he walks in on the two of them making out madly,

“And we’re both about to have a love life.”

“You’re getting a girlfriend?” Marc asked with a smirk.

“Yep. Terrific gal. You’ll love her,” Luke said.

“And Kat’s getting a boyfriend?”

“Guy who’s crazy about her.” Marc chuckled and Kat rolled her eyes as she took Luke’s hand. “Let’s go. Dining room.” Luke sighed and followed her into what could only be his surprise birthday party.

Kat’s never had a really serious relationship with any man although she’s had many a fling. Not only has she been crushing on Luke for years, Kat has serious intimacy issues. For years, Kat has kept the world at bay with her kick-ass attitude and her physical presentation.

She knew that most people saw her as a tough, confident, no-bullshit kind of woman. And that was absolutely the image she worked to project. Most of the time it was easy and most of the time it made her feel that way. But there were days like this, when even the boots, the makeup, the piercings and body paint didn’t make her feel tough.

It had always fascinated her how outward appearance colored the way people perceived things. She’d chosen her battle armor back in junior high. She changed the color of her hair and the body jewelry and paint she used, but her general look was the same— don’t mess with me.

It had worked like a dream in junior high and high school to keep the mean girls away and the cocky boys at arm’s length. A guy had to really want to get close to make a move. She admired those that tried.

The look had followed her to college and even med school. She was very comfortable with it by then and liked seeing how people responded to her. Some avoided her, feeling intimidated, some labeled her a rebel, some a bad-ass slut.

Some found her intriguing, some figured she was just trying to be odd, still others assumed she was disturbed and felt sorry for her….

She was more than a little fascinated by the whole thing. She’d grown up in small-town Nebraska, so she knew she was an anomaly. After all, it was completely on purpose.

No one knew that behind closed doors she preferred baggy sweats, no makeup and that nothing was pierced or painted anywhere others couldn’t see it.

It was armor, a costume, a Spiderman suit for the Peter Parker that lurked inside her—awkward, unsure, and breakable.

Kat thinks maybe she could let Luke in, but then, something bad happens. As she’s admiring her new boyfriend’s butt at his surprise party, her phone rings. A patient Kat saw in clinic earlier in the day—he came in complaining of arm weakness and a headache after working in the yard—whom she then sent home has just had a massive stroke and is unconscious. Kat realizes she misdiagnosed him—his symptoms were those of someone who had a mild stroke. Kat begins to freak out. Had she realized that Tom, the patient, had a stroke, she would have sent him to the hospital for testing and treatment which then, possibly, might have prevented the huge stroke he subsequently had. Kat doesn’t tell Luke about the issue that night nor does she tell him about the discussion she has with the senior partner in her medical practice who, the next day, essentially forces her to take a leave of absence, and begins the process of forcing her to quit practicing in Justice.

In the meantime, Luke, who always has a plan, decides what he and Kat need to do to take their relationship to the “we’re getting married and having six babies” stage is to kidnap her and take her on a trip in an RV to Nashville—it’s a favor, in part, for Sabrina, a musician, who will be performing in Nashville and needs the RV there, but is pregnant and wants to fly rather than drive. So, Luke handcuffs Kat and off the two go—Kat with her secret career problems and intimacy issues, Luke with the conviction she’s perfect for him and everything’s going to be great.

So many things are wrong with this set up—it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with Kat and the way she presents herself. She’s supposedly brilliant and wants nothing more than to treat the small town patients she sees at the clinic. And yet she never thinks that her appearance might make some uncomfortable with her as their physician. She wears black leather skimpy clothes, pierces her face, covers her body with wild body paint and still wants to be seen as a trust-worthy family practitioner in a small town in Nebraska—the 11th most conservative state in the country. Where I live, in a liberal part of North Carolina, most of the hospitals and medical practices don’t allow their medical employees to have visible tattoos or any visible body piercings other than ears. One can argue this is dumb, archaic, and based on an irrational premise—people who are tattooed and pierced aren’t as trustworthy as those who aren’t—but the bias in patients and medical administrators is real and it seemed ridiculous to me that Kat didn’t appear to give it any thought.

Then there’s the misdiagnosis. Kat is a young practitioner—she’s been licensed for less than a year. And it’s true the patient presented with symptoms consistent with a possible minor stroke. But, the misdiagnosis Kat makes is a common one, and it seems unlikely, had she correctly diagnosed the patient earlier in the day, that diagnosis would have prevented him from having a massive stroke less than twelve hours after she saw him in the clinic. Furthermore, if every time a physician made a misdiagnosis or didn’t catch a problem, she were immediately put on leave, we’d have very few working doctors in this country. It made no sense Kat was not allowed to continue to practice and even less sense that she, who is known for being both a medical whiz and a strong woman, would have allowed herself to be professionally treated in this way. This is a woman who has been to four years of college, four years of medical school and, probably, three years of residency. She’s spent years and—although it’s never mentioned—money to become a doctor. One bad call and she’s on the run, terrified she’ll never be able to hold her head up in Justice again, worried she’ll be ruined in a malpractice suit (unlikely given the circumstances), and, in general, overwhelmingly awash in anxious self-pity.

Luke, who knows none of this, kidnaps her—her office tells him it’s fine because she’s due for some vacation—and Kat goes with him, running away (for most of the book) from the nasty senior partner threatening her professional life. Kat, while on the road with Luke, when she’s not freaking about her awful horrible no-good mistake, is freaking out about having Luke see her without her makeup and body paint. She hasn’t let anyone—anyone!—see her without makeup or body paint since she was in ninth grade. She doesn’t normally take off her clothes when she has sex. And now, she’s stuck in an RV for days with a man who says he wants to marry her and she’s terrified to show him the real her. So, she spends her time alternately trying to get in his pants or panicking her life is going to fall to ruins. One page she thinks she loves him and he can be trusted; the next she’s sure he’ll leave her when he finds out the people of Justice will all think she’s fatally flawed. She’s so all over the map emotionally, I found it hard to either like her or make sense of her feelings.

Luke is also a cipher. He was apparently in love with Sabrina, or thought he was in love with Sabrina, for years. After she hooked up with Marc, Luke realized he just wanted to take care of Sabrina because he’s the kind of guy who wants to take care of everyone and everything. I don’t know why he loves Kat initially—he has a hero complex and she, on the surface, comes across as someone who doesn’t want anyone to be her savior. Then, as the two travel and she opens up to him, he sees she is a far more complex person than he thought and he begins to feel hurt she isn’t offering him much more than just her body. Luke also, unlike Kat, fits in beautifully in Justice. He runs a restaurant there he loves, he’s involved with the community, someday he’d like to be mayor. His dream is to marry Kat, have tons of kids, grow old in Justice, and be the most loved guy in town. He can’t seem to see Kat might not be the right person for that specific future and Kat, who is sure she is not, in the wake of her medical practice problems, that person, punishes them both for this disconnect. It’s an annoying version of the “I love you but I can’t be with you because I’m wrong for you” thesis and, by the middle of the novel, I wanted them to both start seeing other people—in Kat’s case, I hoped it would be a good shrink.

Finally, in the middle of the book, Kat comes clean to Luke in more ways than one. She allows him see her “naked,” tells him about her professional problems, and lets him go down on her. (She’s only ever let anyone do this to her once before—it makes her feel too vulnerable.) And, at this point, I had hopes the two might begin to resolve their issues constructively. My hopes were dashed. I disliked the way this story resolved itself. Kat never really stands up for herself in Justice and Luke, in order to have Kat, not only puts up with way too much crap from her, but gives up almost everything he cares about. The ending is written as though it is a happy, even blissful, one but I didn’t by it. I wanted to say, especially to Luke, (stealing the words of the great country music songstress Kathy Mattea), “Darlin’, you’re not dreamin’ big enough if that’s what you call love.”

The book is dedicated to “to anyone who’s ever been bullied or made to feel like you’re less than you are.” (Is there anyone who hasn’t, at some point in their life, been made to feel less than they think they are? And is that necessarily a bad thing? There’s a reason the ancients were obsessed with hubris and that the ability to succeed is closely tied with the ability to fail.) It’s clear the message of the book is we should all accept everyone on his or her own terms, not judge others by their appearance, or try and force people to fit into limiting social expectations. And yet, in her own way, Kat has a very difficult time not doing just those things. She’s judgmental, struggles to compromise, and needs to control how others see her. She sees the people of Justice as less than they turn out to be and she, one could argue, bullies Luke into a relationship based far more on her needs than his. I have a hard time with pat morality inherently—I had an even harder time with it in this book given the actions of the heroine.

I did like the writing in the book. The sex scenes are pretty hot and parts of the novel are funny. Anyone who has ever waited in a doctor’s office has to smile at this passage:

An hour and forty minutes later, Luke was sitting in the waiting room of the Alliance Medical Partners clinic flipping through a Cosmo magazine from 2009. Still, he couldn’t argue with the seven ways to seduce a man outdoors and the position-by-position guide to “The Best Sex of Your Life” seemed timeless.

But, overall, Everything You’ve Got did not work for me. I give it a C-.

Dabney

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I received a number of recommendations for this story and the recommenders were correct.  Ride with Me was right up my alley.  It was a well paced, contemporary featuring a non clingy heroine and a caretaker hero set on a bike ride across America.  The only downside was that Tom, in particular, came off as contrived in certain places.

Lexie Marshall has planned on riding the TransAmerica bike ride for years. This was the year she would ride with her brother until he had to drop out.  Using Craigslist, Lexie looks for a riding partner.  After being turned down repeatedly after finding the respondents discover she is female, Lexie strikes up an email conversation with Tom Geiger using the handle “Alex”.  The two agree to meet in Astoria Oregon to start the trip.

Only Tom was actually Tom’s sister, the only member of his family that still spoke to him, pretending to be Tom.  The real Tom wants nothing to do with another a person and he certainly doesn’t need a riding buddy. (Say the term as a curse word to get a real sense of how Tom feels). He reminds his sister that he is the serial killer on the road, not the target of one.

“I don’t need a babysitter.”

“Please, Tom. You can’t ride your bicycle across the country alone. It’s insane. You’ll end up being slaughtered by a serial killer.”

“Taryn, I’m thirty-five, single, tattooed, and antisocial. I’m the serial killer.”

“Okay, point taken. But you could get hit by a car and bleed to death by the side of the road.”

“How would riding with another person prevent that?”

“It wouldn’t, but he could call me on his cell phone so you could tell me you love me with your dying breath.”

Lexie is supposed to be the romantic and Tom the pragmatist, but in truth, Tom is really the romantic whose idealism was crushed.  Lexie’s romanticism stems mostly out of nostalgia. Her parents met and fell in love on the same bike ride decades earlier.

Tom realizes that he can’t allow Lexie to bike by herself and commits to riding along until he can find a replacement.  In the beginning of the story Tom was portrayed as Angry Antisocial Tom but as the story unfolded and the readers needed to get to know Tom better, Tom transformed into talkative, social Tom. This transformation wasn’t natural and it made his anti social behavior seem like a construct rather than his personality.  Angry Antisocial Tom provided a bit of comic relief and the right amount of sexual tension and conflict in the beginning.   In the beginning, Lexie felt lucky to wrench a two syllable “mmm-hmmm” from Tom.  Later, however, Tom has no problem carrying on conversations with other bike enthusiasts and even waitresses (even though he once derides Lexie for this).  The characters, both of them, failed to maintain a certain consistency, mutating according to what the plot called for.  For instance, Lexie hooks up with a very easy going, attractive young man at one point. He’s very friendly to the point that he can’t take a no and virtually assaults Lexie. I never felt like this was true to the young man’s character but it provided a leaping point for Tom to play protector.

That said, this is a genuinely enjoyable story.  Neither Tom nor Lexie are perfect individuals.  Tom withdrew from society, in part, because of something that happened in his past.  Something that he did that could be viewed as both heroic and cowardly.  Lexie, for all her good cheer and friendliness, often has an unkind thought about her fellow bikers. (I was rather repelled by her describing another rider as “gross” because he was “huffing and puffing like a steam train” but at least she wasn’t a perfect maiden from a Disney movie).

The story takes you from one side of the U.S. to the other and I loved the descriptions of the country as seen by Tom and Lexie. It was one of the things about the book that really surprised me. I am not much of a biker or traveler and worried that this aspect of the story would be boring but it is not. Instead, there is a true love for both that is expressed in the narrative. I never found it boring and it made me want to travel that same route.

This was why she was riding her bike across the country. Not for the miles, not to see the towns, not even to meet the people. Just this. The rain, the wind, the hill, and her legs powering her up toward the summit.

When she crested the top, she didn’t even stop. The rain had slowed, and she was craving the descent. She worked up a little speed, bent over the handlebars, tucked her body into a crouch, and let her hands off the brakes. Inside of a minute, she was flying, her bike computer clocking upward of thirty miles an hour. Her front tire pulled water off the road to wet her cheeks, while the rear threw a spray of wet grit up the center of her back. It didn’t matter. Below her, the Camas Prairie stretched out for miles, the intense bright yellow of rapeseed set off by purple-blue patches of camas flowers. She could see forever, and forever was breathtaking.

The dialogue and internal monologues are fun, peppered with a dry wit. “Lexie wasn’t the type of person who would do well in isolation, even with a really hot hermit who could kiss like Tom.” Even the sex scenes were often infused with mild humor:

Tom brushed his stubbled cheek over the sensitive skin along the side of her neck, which made her shivery. “You have to understand, this is just a typical day I’m talking about. I could fill a book with all the fantasies you’ve inspired in Missouri alone.”

One minor note. Lexie pretends to be married and she carries the deception on fairly long. Tom acts as honorably as possible and often wishes that her husband would appear and quench Tom’s inconvenient lust for Lexie. I wish Lexie had given up the ghost earlier.  I also wondered why Lexie, who loves riding her bike so much, didn’t join a bike club. I had a very hard time believing that there was no one in the Pacific Northwest that shared her outdoor enthusiasm.

What is even more enjoyable beyond the scenery is watching the two characters who really do not like each other at the beginning of the story fall in love. Their intimacy grows, almost grudgingly, over the course of their trip.  They both need to rely on each other from time to time and the long days and nights result in sharing of their hearts before their bodies.  And when they engage physically, it is built upon a foundation of personal admiration.  My guess is that fans of Kristan Higgins would enjoy this book.  B-

Best regards,

Jane

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Why did I decide to try your novella? It sounded cute, it has a sorta Christmas-y theme, and …..well, that’s it, actually. Yes, I know it’s now after Christmas but it’s still the Holiday Season so I figure I’m still good. Right?

Darcy Burkell and James Jones grew up together but both escaped their small Tennessee hometown. She now runs a travel agency while he’s a photographer. Six months ago, Darcy’s brother Chip hooked them up professionally and since then, James has done what he loves – traveling far and wide taking gorgeous photos which Darcy now uses in her travel brochures. The day before Darcy was planning to begin her drive home for the Holidays, James unexpectedly shows up and offers to drive with her. To Darcy, it was an “out of the blue” offer while to James it was the natural progression in the relationship he thought they were forging.

But Darcy’s got two issues that cause her to turn him down flat. One: She doesn’t like surprises and this one floors her. Two: She’s got claustrophobia – bad, bad claustrophobia and she doesn’t want James to find out because then he’ll pity her plus she knows there’s no hope of any relationship between them since he loves to travel and her traveling is limited to car rides with lots of pit stops.

Thus they find themselves on the same road home at the same time with the Weather Channel predicting a record snowfall/ice storm for the region. When the inevitable happens and traffic grinds to a halt on the now iced over Interstate parking lot, will these two find a way to stay warm without running car engines and using up gasoline? And what will James do when he discovers the real reason Darcy doesn’t want to date him?

I’m glad I read this book for a couple of reasons. I have this thing about the first book I read/finish in the new year. If it’s good, I take it as a positive sign for the year to come and for me this is a B+. So far, so good. Secondly, it’s funny. Darcy ogling James at the rest stop is funny, Darcy spilling jelly beans all over her car and in her bra is funny. Darcy and James’s truck rocking being interrupted by kindly, good Samaritans is hysterical. And the post Holiday scenes at both the Jones and Burkell households are family dynamics at their best – or worst, as the case may be.

The conflict between James and Darcy is certainly different, or at least I’ve never read it before. At first I thought Darcy was not giving James any benefit of the doubt but then the explanation of her past relationships illuminated her thought processes. James does seem to jump the gun about dating Darcy, and my, his family gets the bit between their collective teeth and runs with it, but I guess that just shows how much he cares for her in his guy way while maybe his family really wants to marry him off.

I did worry a bit when it appeared that James was going to try and force/strong arm/guilt Darcy into changing but she stands up for herself and James snaps out of his idiocy/thoughtlessness. And his apology was nicely done and neatly delivered. Although I’m not generally a fan of epilogues, this one is a beauty and ends the story delightfully. Yes, thanks to “Claustrophobic Christmas” I’m off to a good beginning for 2012. B+

~Jayne

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When I found out the news that this story is about Harry and Dizzy’s daughter, I was initially excited. Until I sat and thought for a minute and realized that it’s been so long since I read “As You Desire” that I have absolutely no recollection of it and its two principals at all. With that in mind, when I sat down to read “The Other Guy’s Bride,” I did it as if it’s a stand alone book about a bunch of people I’ve never encountered before which turned out to work just fine.

Ginesse Braxton is the eldest child and – so far – only daughter of famed Egyptologists. She’s been raised around the subject and in Egypt for most of her life and feels the burden of “proving herself” in a famous family. She also seems to attract trouble where ever she goes and whatever she does to the point that her exasperated parents finally sent her back to England where she’s finished a degree in ancient history at Cambridge. It’s while studying some ancient texts there that she came across clues that might lead her to the ancient lost city of Zerzura. This! she feels might be her redemption and chance to establish herself in the field of Egyptology – if only she can work out how to get there.

Taking her fate in her own hands, she sets off for Egypt where she meets a fellow passenger with a spectacular case of mal de mer who is traveling to Egypt to marry a British Army officer stationed at an outpost not far from where Ginesse feels her lost city might be found. The officer, Colonel Lord Pomfrey, is to send a troupe of soldiers, lead by a man he describes as a scoundrel, to escort his betrothed after she arrives in Cairo. But poor Mildred can’t take another minute of sea travel and in this, Ginesse sees her chance. Talking the young woman into disembarking and taking the long scenic route to Egypt by train – and I’m thinking it’s going to be a long trip from Italy around the Mediterranean to Egypt – Ginesse travels on under Mildred’s name where she meets Jim Owens who has been charged to bring Mildred to her fiance.

Jim is the scoundrel Pomfrey describes him as but he’s got quite a backstory which includes being indebted to Pomfrey which is something Jim is desperate to escape from. Doing travel duty across barren desert seems like a relatively easy way to pay it off until Jim starts to get to know his charge. She’s intelligent, willful, resourceful, can get into a scrape in the blink of an eye and seems to know a hell of a lot about a country she’s never set foot in. She’s also the most – to him – attractive woman he’s ever met and as the journey proceeds through various and assorted issues and problems, he’s finding that delivering another man’s bride might end up being the hardest thing he’s ever tried to do.

Before I really get started talking about the book, I have to get some name issues off my chest. Ginesse. At first glance I debated, “Hard G? Soft G? Hard G or soft G? How the hell do I mentally pronounce this? Finally I resolved on soft G because I didn’t want to think of drinking in an Irish pub the whole time I was reading the book. Then there are two secondary characters Magi and her nephew Haji. Sorry but the two names together sound like a comedy team. But I digress.

The first part of the book is interesting. I like the character set ups and watching Ginesse manage things to her own satisfaction. She’s supposed to be intelligent and she acts that way. She’s supposed to be inquisitive and imaginative and, again, that’s how she acts and what she does. Watching her overcome the obstacles in her path is fun. Jim isn’t really so much of a scoundrel as he is a man who’s had a tough road in life but who has fought to maintain his sense of self, to live life on his own terms and not be trapped by the circumstances of it. He has a deep sense of honor about this debt he owes Pomfrey and as Ginesse gets into various predicaments, I can almost see him grinding his teeth as he’ keeps on keeping on’ to get her where she’s supposed to go and off his hands.

But then comes the lusting. Lots of lusting. On into the desert and more lusting which then changes to standard “No, no we can’t do this. Wait, let me tilt my head so you can kiss my neck better. ” During this section I lost the feel for the Edwardian Egypt setting and felt I was trapped in any number of historical romance books I’ve read before.

Just as I was wondering if we’d ever get back to some interesting action, Ginesse and Jim are stupid with lust and let danger sneak up on them. Idiots. Now comes some good stuff with the Tuaregs and then! the rescue – which is sort of anticlimactic but okay if you want to downplay that I’ll go along. That is until the supremely stupid consummation scene. Yeah, he’s been worried and she’s been worried, for days, about what’s happening and going to happen but even with the slavers momentarily – momentarily! mind you – out of the picture that is NOT the time to give into their lust. And what happens then is more silly standard romance nonsense on Ginesse’s part – he didn’t say he loves me so I will deny my own love, turn him down and potentially face all the ruination that Jim has so thoughtfully laid out. WTF? I am so tired of this ” I won’t settle for 70 % if I think there’s 100% out there” romance heroine logic. He’s sure as hell not going to ever fall for you if you push him away and out of your life, is he? Sigh…

These push/pull interactions continue as everyone who needs to be there ends up at the army outpost then the mystery of the lost city of sorta solved, and along the way Ginesse discovers what is and really isn’t important to her about Egyptology. Now that is one part I feel is well done since the end of the book requires Ginesse to switch gears about what she wants from life. Often a romance heroine will – seemingly – toss out her life’s ambition once twue lurve hits her but here clues as to how she’s really feeling versus what she’s always felt she wants are laid out well enough that I can buy her ultimate decision regarding continuing the search for Zerzura. I also really like the humor and bantering dialogue from all – well most – of the characters throughout the book. And the fact that two characters – Mildred and Professor Tynesborough – don’t turn out anything like I initially thought they would.

My dislike of the fact that Ginesse won’t accept Jim’s many proposals until he says the magic three words is countered by the wonderful proposal he tenders to her once he realizes what the issue is. That whole scene in the cave as the sandstorm rages around them is wonderful – though I did wonder how the horse was handling the shirt over his eyes for the extended period of time. The slightly overdone romantic gestures back in Cairo and the Happy Family epilogue don’t light my fire but at least Jim now knows what his lady wants and he does deliver them.

So there are elements of the book I really do like while others leave me flat or with feelings of romance ennui. I think the book stands on its own merits and if readers either haven’t read “As You Desire” or if, like me, that book is a hazy, happy memory, I feel they’ll do just fine jumping into this one. Yeah for the Edwardian/Egyptian setting and thank you for the explanations of the liberties you took with things in the story and the fact that the facts you include in it don’t come off like a history lecture. B-

~Jayne

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Harlequin’s Treasury reissues are allowing me the relatively easy opportunity of trying some authors completely new to me without having to laboriously track down their OOP books. While scanning the offerings at their website, your book “40 Tons of Trouble” caught my eye because of the heroine’s occupation. I can’t recall ever reading about a female big rig, long haul driver so with a click of a button the chance to remedy this was mine.

Cat DeAngelo lives for the road which is a good thing since her family business is a trucking company. She’s never more happy than when she’s out driving truck in her shiny, cherry red Peterbilt. But lately family issues are beginning to take their toll. Her younger brother has quit business college and wants to drive instead of eventually handling the company finances. Her younger sister is stressed as the office manager and their mother has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. So after Cat gets into yet another argument with her brother and he quits right at the start of a cross country job, Cat has had about enough.

When Ricky Steele responds to her job notice at a truck stop and seems to be reliable and has a commercial driver’s license, Cat reads him a list of the company policies and off they go. But Rick isn’t quite who Cat thinks he is though his name rings a bell. He’s actually the owner of a local trucking business but has his reasons to sign on for the cross country trip and back. As the miles roll under the truck wheels, the two start to get to know each other though Cat still doesn’t tell Ricky about the dirty tricks she suspects that another trucking company owner has instigated in order to force her to sell DeAngelo Trucking.

When several incidents occur that nearly get Cat and Ricky killed, the truth comes out along with those pesky details Ricky has been meaning to tell Cat all along. Can their blossoming love survive the revelations or will that and DeAngelo Trucking fall prey to a greedy owner, a man out for revenge and a surprise enemy Cat never suspects?

I don’t know anything about driving an 18 wheeler beyond the fact that it seems like a job that takes a lot of skill. This book taught me a lot but it’s done in such a way that it becomes an integral part of the story instead of merely being a boring recitation of facts of life on the road. Cat is good at what she does and her love of the job and the life are evident from start to finish. It would take a tough woman to make it in this world and Cat is one strong lady. She’s also stubborn to the point of idiocy at times and more than once I wanted to smack some common sense into her.

Ricky gets frustrated with her and I did too. Her reasons for her obstinacy about refusing to sell the company or stop driving make sense based on the background you’ve given her but when she pushes on in the face of attempts on her life that, for all she knows, aren’t finished yet, I was taken aback. Preserving your on time record is one thing but not getting yourself killed is another. There were also a few “inappropriately timed” moments of hot sexing that I found slightly ridiculous.

One villain is immediately known but the other one and the inside snitch took a while to be unmasked though I did catch onto their identities before they were officially revealed. It makes sense who they are and one of them serves as a believable source of conflict in Cat and Ricky’s growing relationship as does the Big Mis which could be seen coming a mile away.

The romance is quick but Cat and Ricky basically live together in a box for a week and the fact that they’re both in the same business probably tells them a lot about each other so…okay. And you don’t have them rushing down the aisle after the I-love-yous which also makes a difference. Usually once a romance couple falls in love, they’re portrayed as eternally happy so the rip roaring “differences” that Cat and Ricky are mentioned as having up to and after their marriage are a touch of reality not often seen in the genre and one that I found slightly refreshing.

Cat isn’t always an easy character to like but she does stay consistent. Even though it takes until the very end of the book, she also grows and learns from what happens and does make changes in her life. There was a point when it appeared that Ricky might try and strong arm her into giving up driving but luckily for my liking of the book he backs off somewhat and just presents her with options which allow her to make her own decisions. I didn’t fall in love with this book but it is an interesting peek into a career I knew little about and features a strong – though at times too stubborn for her own good – heroine. C+

~Jayne

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I wanted to read this book because of the Tudor time period and the fact that the hero is not only a commoner but a bastard as well. Also, I had heard good things about your Harlequin Historicals of the 90s. It’s slightly bawdy for the time with Dicken doing his share of bodice diving amongst the wenches of the inns and manor houses of England and the heroine takes to public performances like a duck to water but methinks this is a book I would have enjoyed more “back in the day.”

It starts off well enough with Lady Elizabeth fleeing from her piggy wanabe husband after her father dies in mysterious circumstances. She and Tarleton meet and greet and she tells him her tale after which he agrees, for a fee, to escort her to her godmother, the Queen. So far so good. He devises a “Chick in pants” disguise, treats her like an apprentice of the day would be (ie badly) but then clucks and hovers over her at all other times. Even after someone penetrates Elizabeth’s disguise and tells Tarleton it was his mooning over her that gave away the game.

And everyone loves Elizabeth. The fiendish lout who covets her lands, Tarleton – of course, the pot boys they meet along the way, the students at Oxford who save their lives – yes, everyone loves Elizabeth the sweet angelic soul. Just once I’d love to have heard a man look at her, shrug and say, “nope, does nothing for me.”

There are lots of details – the good, bad and ugly about life in Tudor England and life on the road for the po’ folks. Elizabeth gets an eye opening view of life among the rushes and ale houses and at the country fairs. This well done local color is what truly kept me going. That and the image of Elizabeth trying, and failing, to ride a goat.

But the story also circled endlessly while all these events were taking place. Tarleton is soon smitten with Elizabeth but knows that a titled lady with property is as high above his head as the moon. To keep his mind off her and her luscious body and how badly he wants to tumble her, he first jests with her then – when she in all innocence jests back and he gets hard enough to hammer nails – he treats her coolly. And she gets wounded and miffed until the next day when it all cycles. And/or something will happen to frighten Elizabeth and she’ll dissolve into tears and sobs and Tarleton will enfold her in his manly arms and rock her like a baby. Which is definitely not how a master and apprentice would behave. I got so damn tire of Elizabeth boo-hooing over and over I wanted to shake her and snap, “get over it.”

The way the villain is caught and Tarleton finally gets his dream girl is cool and apropos to the times. Points for working the Babbington Plot into the works and initially circumventing the vast difference in status between Elizabeth and Tarleton. But, alas, just when I thought I was home free with a commoner hero, the Queen comes along and changes all that. Sigh. Oh, well, that part was good while it lasted.

I enjoyed parts of this book, am glad I have now read one of your books, liked the detail and the way all was taken care of in the end but the endless loop of Elizabeth’s tears and Tarleton’s, “there, there now, chuck” wore me out. As I said, if I’d read this when it was first published back in the 90s, I’m sure it would have made a better impression on me. But now, it’s a C.

~Jayne

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Once I’d seen “Say Anything,” I knew I’d eventually have to finally, after all these years, watch this whole movie. Yep, I’d seen bits and pieces of it on TV but always ended up flipping the channel, maybe because I’d never seen it from the start. It’s cute, it’s sweet, it’s dated but it’s much better than I thought it would be.

Freshman Walter “Gib” Gibson (John Cusack) is headed to California over winter break to hook up with a bikini wearing hot young thing (Nicollette Sheridan) whom Gib’s friend Lance (Anthony Edwards) assures him is a “Sure Thing.” Along for the ride is fellow Ivy League student Alison (Daphne Zuniga), with whom Gib has already struck out, on her way to see her boyfriend Jason (Boyd Gains).

Goaded by Gib during an argument on whether or not she’s repressed, Alison pulls a stunt that gets them both tossed out of the car somewhere along the roadside in Georgia. Now they’ve got to hitch their way to LA, keep from killing each other and, just maybe, fall in love.

Oh wow, the music and clothes take me straight back to the mid 80s and my days in college. Director Rob Reiner says the music dates the movie but still the songs are all so lyrically perfect for their spots in the film that I wouldn’t see them changed even if it made the film more “timeless.” I was puzzled by Reiner’s statement that they did some faux ZZ Top music for the 18 wheeler scene because the production couldn’t afford the real thing when most of the other songs were also by top stars of the day and they were included. Oh, well.

Cusack plays another sorta angsty older teenager. He’s not as perfect a man as in “Say Anything” but then it’s his job here to become more like that wonderful character. He starts out as a typical – let’s be honest – horny young man interested in using the usual pick up lines men try in order to get laid. Yet it’s obvious, as he saves Alison from a hitchhike gone wrong by doing a crazed maniac routine, that he’s a decent guy underneath. Zuniga does one of her clenched personality roles – see also “Gross Anatomy” – here and is in some serious need of fun and letting loose. She’s wound so tight I’m amazed that she doesn’t explode. Her role is to discover that you can be studious and still have a good time. And to learn to shotgun beer.

There are some great actors in secondary roles including Edwards before he becomes “Goose.” Here he’s got the superficial, frat boy charm down pat. Plus I love his imported beer decorated bedroom. I remember frat rooms like that! Boyd Gains plays the wonderfully repressed boyfriend who looks like he starches the boxer shorts he probably wears under his all beige wardrobe. Watch for his tea collection and start saying “Earl Grey” the way he does. Tim Robbins and Lisa Jane Persky are hilarious as the earnest “gee whiz, this is fun” show tune singing couple driving the car during the start of the journey to CA.

The way that Reiner goes about getting these characters to see life from the other side is, as one commenter at IMDB says, tender and innocent. Sure it’s predictable how things will turn out and even some of what’s going to happen along the way but no one acts like an ass. Even when Gib gets drunk in a cocktail lounge, he still doesn’t come back to the hotel room and vomit on anything. During the scene where they end up sharing a bed and wake up curled around each other, there’s no groping, there are no dirty jokes, there’s just Gib confused by the feelings he’s starting to have for Alison.

By the end of the movie, of course Gib has now gotten past meaningless, shallow sex while Alison is willing to listen to him and believe his declarations. As in “Say Anything,” it’s a public declaration though this time instead of using a boom box, it’s an English term paper that wins the heroine’s heart. This is a sweet coming of age movie with a HFN ending of two people learning that sometimes the best person for you isn’t someone who is the same as you, but one who compliments you. B

~Jayne

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It recently dawned on me that I haven’t reviewed all that many Westerns. They’re just not the first genre of films I think of when I’m looking for romance. So in an effort to remedy that I give you “Two Mules for Sister Sara” though where the second mule comes from, I don’t know. Guess it sounds better than “A Mule and a Burro for Sister Sara.” From what I understand this film received lackluster reviews when it was released. People wanted more of Eastwood in his “High Plains Drifter” mode but weren’t sure what to make of MacLaine in her role as the nun on the run in Mexico. It did okay at the box office but not much more. I think now though, people can appreciate it for the humorous pairing of these two stars doing something not seen before.

A lone, dusty rider (Clint Eastwood) comes upon three lowlifes about to rape a young woman. He’s nobody’s hero but takes exception to the men’s idea of fun. Gunning down two of them, he throws a stick of dynamite at the third then shoots him in the back when he runs. Pulling the too long fuse from the dynamite, he suggests the redheaded woman (Shirley MacLeane) dress before she sunburns then calmly goes through the pockets of the dead men. When he turns around, to his astonishment he discovers the woman he saved isn’t what he thought. “What the hell is a nun doing out here?”

Sister Sara demands that Hogan help her bury the three men to which Hogan replies “Sister, I don’t mind shootin’ em’ for ya, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna sweat over ‘em for ya.” True to his word, he sits and watches while Sara does the honors. That explains his character in a nutshell. Just as the two are setting out in different directions, they spot a French patrol headed their way. Desperate, Sister Sara pleads for Hogan to help her escape because the French are after her due to her Juarista activities. Hogan obliges though he tells her if she weren’t a nun, he’d leave her to save herself.

Later as they eat, Sara tells Hogan about her life and volunteers her knowledge of a French garrison where she tells him she taught French officers to speak Spanish. Sara despises the French for what they do to the Mexicans and Hogan makes a deal with her for them to travel together because he’s got a job to help the Juaristas in exchange for half of the money in the treasury of the garrison. Sara asks why Hogan isn’t helping these people out of convictions and Hogan replies – of his military service during the Civil War – he was allowed to be a sucker just once.

So the two of them head out and along the way to the Juarista hideout they remove a Yaqui arrow from Hogan’s shoulder, blow up a train, scandalize a bar full of peasants before finally reaching Colonel Beltran (Manuel Fabregas) and his men. Will their plan work to surprise and subdue the French garrison? Will Hogan have a change of heart? And what’s the secret Sara’s been hiding from him all along?

Filmed on location in Mexico, the movie starts with a great, almost comic score from Ennio Morricone that includes “braying” sounds. Listen to it throughout the movie and I almost guarantee it’ll stick in your head for hours. The title sequence also shows what kind of countryside and hazards these two will be facing – and animal lover that I am, I still laughed at what the horse stepped on. Some inaccuracies have been pointed out such as the type gun Hogan carries and the fact that dynamite had only recently been invented but they aren’t enough to douse my vibe for the movie.

Eastwood does a great job with Hogan’s frustrated facial expressions when confronted by a holy sister whom he happens to find damned attractive and who, in whiskey veritas fashion, he tells that he can’t stop thinking about her almost naked. He’s got his trademark scruffy beard, chomped cigar, serape and snarl. Added to those are some delicious deadpan lines that cracked me up.

Hogan: [Sara has stopped at a small shrine by the road, and begins to pray] Now what’re you doing?
Sara: I must say a prayer at this shrine.
Hogan: You said your prayers last night and this morning. You’re gonna’ wear ‘em out.
Sara: It’s a sin to pass a shrine without praying.
Hogan: Not if you close your eyes, it isn’t.
Sara: Please, Mr. Hogan.
Hogan: All right. It’s a small shrine. Let’s make it a small prayer.

MacLeane is delightful as the beautiful nun who serenely puts Hogan in his place whenever he questions or snaps at her. Her replies are conveniently religious and thwart Hogan at every turn. But I have to agree with her that the false eyelashes she wore were a touch much. Plus she must have been baking under that black habit. From an early point in the film, clues are spread about that the holy sister isn’t quite what she seems to be and it’s fun to watch her hide this from Hogan. She also has some great lines especially when a drunk Hogan isn’t steady enough to aim properly to set off some dynamite.

Sara: [Helping Hogan practice shooting, before the train arrives at the trestle] Sober up! Sober up, you dirty bastard, or I’ll kill you!
Sara: Dear Mary, Mother of God, help this no-good atheist to shoot straight.

Hogan: Did I or did I not hear you call me a bastard?
Sara: Well! I suppose whiskey can make a man hear anything. Oh, Dear Lord, forgive him for the impurity of his thoughts!

This is basically a two person, road “romance” movie during which the Juarista cause doesn’t become reality until we’re into the last third of the film. The sparking and feuding that makes the movie so much fun are toned down and lost as Hogan and Sara are now working together almost harmoniously. Though I’m glad to see that Hogan never loses his “me first” cynical attitude and becomes a fervent adherent to the Cause. When the battle for the garrison starts, there are explosions, stabbings and shootings galore – almost too many which makes the sequence drag out to a conclusion. But director Don Siegel makes up for the overly extended fight with a bang up finish as Hogan wheels the treasury strongbox to where Sara awaits him in a bathtub. As he steps – fully clothed – in with her, he replies to her question of if he’s even going to take off his hat “I haven’t got time for that.”

MacLeane and Eastwood managed to generate crackling chemistry onscreen despite the reported problems on the set during filming. The Mexican scenery is beautiful and lovingly shot. If you’re looking for something a little different than the usual white hatted good guy shooting it out with the black hatted villains then look no further than the mercenary and the nun. B

~Jayne

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As part of our Georgette Heyer week here, I’ve decided to do lightning reviews of Heyer’s very early series. This series includes Heyer’s first runaway bestseller, the first Regency Romance evah, one of the most well-researched books about Waterloo evah, iconic heroes and the cross-dressing heroines who shoot them (well, not quite), duels, highwaymen, and Beau Brummel.

The series “starts” (sort of) with The Black Moth, which I’ve already reviewed here at Dear Author. This is Heyer’s first book, written when she was 19 (and doesn’t that make me feel like a slacker?). It’s set in 1751 so is a Georgian, NOT a Regency romance. It’s notable, in my opinion, mainly for the hero of the secondary romance, but also for the villain, Tracy Belmanoir, Duke of Andover. To the heroine (and, one assumes, to his author), he’s repellent and yet utterly compelling:

It was not what he said that alarmed her, but it was the way in which he said it, and the vague something in the purring, faintly sinister voice that she could not quite define, that made her heart beat unpleasantly fast, and the blood rush to her temples.

Repulsion or attraction?

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Well, four books (one each set in the 17th, 18th, and 15th centuries, and a suppressed contemporary) and five years later, in 1926, Heyer publishes These Old Shades, her first best-selling novel. She takes most of the characters from The Black Moth, gives them different names, and uses The Black Moth as the back story for These Old Shades, the hero of which is Tracy Belmanoir, now Justin Alistair, Duke of Avon. He’s nicknamed “Satanus” and lives up to it. The novel is still Georgian set, and one of the joys of the books is to read Heyer’s enraptured-historian’s descriptions of Avon’s elaborate outfits. Avon buys a fleeing boy off the boy’s brother in the slums of Paris. He does it for his own nefarious purposes — purposes he carries through with utter ruthlessness at the end of the novel. He makes the boy his page, but of course, his page is much more than he seems…

The novel is problematic: class is innate for Heyer. The blood of aristocrats will always tell, as will the blood of peasants, no matter their education or upbringing. But Avon is the ultimate in the depraved hero reluctantly saved by love and the climax of the novel in which all Avon’s machinations come together and he tells the story of Leonie’s background is riveting reading, not least because he’s wearing a gold suit.

But when I read this book at 13, the two line conversation –

“You do not love me?” she said, like a child.

“Too — well to marry you,” he said

– just about killed me. That little hitch in the middle…SO romantic.

Grade: B

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Six books (three contemporaries, an 18thC, a 16thC, and an 11thC set book) and six years later, Heyer publishes Devil’s Cub (1932), the story of Avon and Leonie’s son, Dominic, the Marquis of Vidal. He’s 25, wild, and utterly entitled. The book starts with him shooting to death a highwayman and leaving the body in the road. Although he hasn’t had time to become as totally depraved as his father, when he has to flee England after a duel (he leaves because of his father’s displeasure, not because he broke the law), he tries to take with him his latest light o’ love, the middle-class (not demi-monde) Sophy Challoner. Sophy, however, has a determined and entirely respectable sister Mary who refuses to allow her sister to lose her virtue to Vidal. So she swaps herself for Sophy, assuming Vidal would let her go after he discovers the switch. He does not, however, and drags her aboard his yacht, where she defends her honor by shooting him. The rest of the novel is a wild romp through France (as was These Old Shades), with Vidal determined to marry Mary because he’s destroyed her reputation and Mary equally determined not to be married to the man she loves for the wrong reasons.

Devil’s Cub has to be one of my favorite Heyers, because I adore Mary and her relationship with Vidal. When Vidal first insists on marrying Mary, she finds herself daydreaming:

She was so shocked to realise that for a few breathless moments she had forgotten Sophia in a brief vision of herself wedded to his lordship. ‘So that’s the truth, is it?’ said Miss Challoner severely to herself. ‘You are in love with him, and you’ve known it for weeks.’

But it was not a notorious Marquis with whom she had fallen in love; it was with the wild, sulky, unmanageable boy that she saw behind the rake. ‘I could manage him,’ she sighed. ‘Oh, but I could!’

There are no words for how much I love those lines. Stripping away the mask of the dissipated rake and making him a “wild, sulky, unmanageable boy” who needs managing is just…brilliant, in my opinion. And Vidal’s realization that he needs managing, while talking to his cousin, is perfect:

‘You were not very kind to Mary, apparently.’

‘Kind!’ ejaculated Vidal. ‘No, I was not – kind.’

Juliana ate another morsel of capon. ‘You seem to me to have behaved as though you hated her,’ she remarked.

He said nothing. Juliana peeped at him again. ‘You’re very anxious to get her in your power again, Vidal. But I don’t quite know why you should be, for you meant to marry her only because you had ruined her, and so were obliged to, didn’t you?’

She thought that he was not going to answer, but suddenly he raised his eyes from the contemplation of the dregs of his wine. ‘Because I am obliged to?’ he said. ‘I mean to marry Mary Challoner because I’m devilish sure I can’t live without her.’

The duel that enterprising Mary breaks up, the extended-family conversations we’re privy to, and the conversation between Mary and the unknown gentleman who saves her from herself in France are all absolutely priceless. But this is one book in which Heyer, most uncharacteristically, does not shy away from depicting full on romance at the end, and I adore it for that more than anything else.

Grade: A-

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Five books (four contemporary mysteries and one final Georgian historical) later, Heyer FINALLY publishes Regency Buck, the first Regency romance. I’ve reviewed this one as well. It’s not directly connected to the previous books until the next book, however. Really, everything I need to say about this book, I said in my other review, so I’ll wait here till you’re done…

Finally, An Infamous Army (1937), tells the story of Charles Audley, the brother of the hero of Regency Buck, and Lady Barbara Childe, granddaughter of Dominic and Mary from Devil’s Cub. The timeline between TOS, DC, and IA don’t quite work out, but it’s good enough. Dominic and Mary, now the Duke and Duchess of Avon, have a cameo in the book, but this book is most famous for the brilliantly researched and amazingly accurate description of the Battle of Waterloo that takes up almost its entire second half. The book is so accurate and so readable that for many years it was used as a set book at Sandhurt, the Royal Military Academy. I will admit, however, that I read it once as a teenager and never again, so I don’t actually have much I can say about it, except: the married brother of the heroine of Regency Buck is embroiled in a flirtation with the heroine of An Infamous Army. Pretty much the only thing I remember of this book besides Bab’s painted toenails and dampened skirts, is Harriet, Peregrine’s wife, lamenting that although they survived Perry’s infatuation, she’ll never fully look up to Perry anymore as her hero, that she sees his faults now in ways that she never had before. And as accurate and realistic as that might be, I found it very melancholy. I don’t feel I can really grade this book. But it needed discussing as part of the series.

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As much as we might adore her, Heyer is not an unproblematic author, as we see. But I don’t think anyone can deny the impact she had on the romance genre as we know it today. This series of five books is a mini-catalogue of Heyer’s career in historical romance. She finally settled down into writing Regencies almost exclusively in the 1940s, but these five books show how she got there, not only through her dedication to research, but also in her ability to create amazingly appealing characters.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Sylvester by Georgette Heyer
2. REVIEW: Black Moth by Georgette Heyer
3. REVIEW: Cotillion by Georgette Heyer

Sylvester Rayne, Duke of Salford, is looking for a wife, but is horrifying his mother with the bloodless, passionless way he’s going about the search. She casually mentions her (deceased) best friend’s daughter, so Salford decides to check her out. Phoebe is not at her best in social situations, especially around her scary step-mother, so when Salford meets her (again — they met once during Phoebe’s season the previous year), he is unimpressed and can’t wait to get away. Phoebe, however, mistakenly thinks that Salford will definitely propose to her, and so runs away with her best (male) friend during a snow storm. Tom, however, breaks his leg on the flight, and Salford comes to his and Phoebe’s rescue (it makes sense in the book — that its ridiculous is part of the point). They spend a week together, snowed in at an out-of-the-way inn, becoming friends. Salford then helps Phoebe get to London when they’re discovered. There they set up a flirtation, until the truth of Phoebe’s book comes out.

After her utterly unsuccessful season, Phoebe wrote an utterly improbably gothic novel that also happened to be a roman a clef. It’s published when she and Sylvester are at the height of their flirtation and takes the ton by storm. She used Sylvester as her villain because of his villainous eyebrows and because of his abominable pride. If there’s one thing wrong with this book, it’s how many times the characters and the narrator attempt to describe exactly what’s wrong with Sylvester’s pride. They go on and on and ON and it’s almost like Heyer doesn’t *quite* have a handle on it or was trying to convince herself that Sylvester’s pride was actually wrong. That pride is damaged by Phoebe’s book and he confronts Phoebe in public, ruining her.

Much like Charlotte Bronte who unwittingly dedicated Jane Eyre to William M. Thackeray who had a mad wife hidden in his attic, Phoebe coincidentally gave her villain a young child as a ward who is completely under his control. Sylvester’s deceased brother’s son is his ward and completely under his control. Sylvester, of course, is nothing like Phoebe’s villain, and loves his nephew, but Phoebe’s book gives Sylvester’s sister-in-law the idea to spirit her son away to France. The book turns into a road romance at this point, with all the character careening around the countryside of France. But it’s hysterical, character driven, brilliantly plotted, and so perfectly done.

I adored this story on reread. It’s always been one of my favorite of Heyer’s books, but I fell into it and just didn’t come out until I was done, even though I knew exactly what was happening. Most of all, I love how Sylvester and Phoebe fall in love:

His sense of humour, too, was lively: often if a fatuous remark were uttered, or someone behaved in a fashion so typical as to be ludicrous, Phoebe would look instinctively toward him, knowing that he must be sharing her amusement. It was strange how the dullest party could be enjoyed because there was one person present whose eyes could be met for the fraction of a second, in wordless appreciation of a joke unshared by others: almost as strange as the insipidity of parties at which that person was not present.

This is one of Heyer’s more romantic books — of course, it’s still Heyer, so “more romantic” means that love is, in fact, mentioned at some point. But still, the understatedness of Sylvester when

looked around quickly, and saw her. Something leaped in his eyes; she had the impression that he was going to start towards her. But the look vanished in a flash, and he did not move.

doesn’t make it any less powerful for all that. And the climax and denouement of the book are among the most romantic Heyer wrote: “O God, Mama, I’ve made such a mull of it. What am I to do?”.

This book is one I recommend for conversion kits. It’s not too heavily filled with Regency cant, like Cotillion, the characters are brilliant, the story is delightful, and the scenes with Edmund and both the button and the tassels are just not to be missed.

Grade: A

Next up, a visit by Sabrina Jeffries, and we’ve added Venetia to the syllabus for the last class! So you get one more review out of me.

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Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Cotillion by Georgette Heyer
2. REVIEW: Regency Buck by Georgette Heyer
3. GUEST REVIEW: Cotillion by Georgette Heyer

One thing that I often find lacking in romances is seeing the actual courtship, particularly if you read paranormal romances with soulmate stories. I think that is why I like the friends to lovers trope or the marriage of convenience trope because we get to see the two characters navigate from viewing each other in one light to awakening to feelings that weren’t there before. SEALed with a Kiss is neither a friends to lovers trope or a marriage of convenience, but I really felt like I got to see two characters actually fall for each other and I believed, at the end of the story, that they not only belonged together but that their end would indeed be happy.

Rachel Sutherland is one half of the Sutherland sisters. It was her idea to rescue Sutherlands, a bed and breakfast that had been in her family for several generations. Now that Sutherland’s has been saved and is flourishing in the San Diego region, Rachel feels anxious and unsure of herself. Her feeling of discontent is heightened when Hailey, Rachel’s sister, prepares to welcome home Hailey’s husband after a six month deployment. Rachel has enjoyed their sisterly solitude but recognizes that she likely won’t see Hailey emerge from the inn for at least a week. Hailey convinces Rachel to come down to the pier to welcome home Riley, a fellow SEAL and best friend of Hailey’s husband, who won’t have anyone to great him.

Rachel gives a token protest but given that she’s been attracted to Riley ever since Hailey and Nate hooked up (SEALed and DELIVERED, in case readers were wondering), she ends up on the pier with a box of cookies.

Riley Wilkes tells himself that he doesn’t care that he doesn’t have someone to greet him; that he isn’t jealous of Nate’s new marriage to Hailey; and that he’s enjoying the neverending smorgasbord of women who throw themselves at Navy SEALs. Seeing Rachel, someone that he has secretly lusted after ever since Hailey and Nate hooked up, waiting for him brings out feelings he’s tried to deny.

Rachel wasn’t here waiting on some other guy. No, she had stood there for over an hour waiting for him.

Something deep and elemental punched him in the gut. This was what it was like to have someone waiting for him. His return.

The romanticism of the moment carry the two away and they hook up. And the sex scenes are actually rather naughty for a Blaze. Or maybe I haven’t been reading enough Blazes. In any event, I thought it’s ramped up sexuality fit the story but also verged on being a good erotic romance.

Riley is the youngest of six children and he equates family with chaos and neglect. He’s been on his own, enjoying his solitude, or so he believes but when he finally gets a chance with Rachel he deviates from his usual, casual relationships. The problem is that Rachel sees Riley as one night stand material. She wanted him; she had him; and now she’s unsure why he’s back asking for more. Riley’s even more disturbed when an ex girlfriend calls him the “good time guy”. A guy doesn’t become a SEAL, however, without the ability to pursue something to the exclusion of all others, overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Thus begins Riley’s courtship of Rachel. He gets to know her, her dreams and what makes her tick and vice versa as Rachel and Riley travel around California visiting other B&Bs who have turned to Rachel for renovation advice. During these trips, Rachel brings along love letters she finds in the wall of the Sutherland Inn and reads them while the two are driving.

What I found interesting wasn’t Riley’s sudden reversal from rake to responsible family guy but the reasoning behind it. As the youngest of six kids, he received the leftovers of attention from his family, particular his mom and he undervalued himself. With Rachel, Riley realized he wanted to be the special person in her life. Rachel, however, struggled with allowing anyone in because her parents had a great marriage and she was waiting for that epiphany as to who would be the ONE for her.

I felt that some of the pacing was a bit slow and that the story used sex to fill in the transitions. While I appreciated that the one night stand was used as a source of conflict later (Rachel wonders aloud how she can trust her feelings when the encounters between her and Riley seem to be sex and more sex), I did wonder whether the multitude of sex scenes weren’t a crutch in the story. This may sound contradictory to my paragraph above where I thought that they scenes were well done but it isn’t. The sex scenes were well done. I just thought that perhaps character development took a backseat to the sex scenes from time to time.

I also felt conflicted about the use of old ancestral love letters found by Rachel in wall of Sutherlands. Obviously these were used to push the conflict along, but the letters combined with the playing cards that Rachel and Riley used (Fate cards) seemed a bit too artificial. Yet, I did like the letters and how the ancestral romance played out.

While no new ground is broken in this book and there is no subversion of romance tropes, I still found this gentle, sexy story to be quite romantic. Maybe it was the letters. Maybe it was the sweet way in which Riley wooed Rachel. Maybe it was the road romance traits. Whatever the reason, I thought this was a worthy follow up to SEALed and Delivered despite my conflicted feelings toward some of the plot elements. B

Best regards,

Jane

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Related posts:

1. REVIEW: SEALed and Delivered by Jill Monroe
2. REVIEW: Tall Dark and Filthy Rich by Jill Monroe
3. AuthorTalk: Jill Monroe and Gena Showalter Interview CJ Lyons

I’ll be honest and say that it’s the slight resemblance to the plot of “Romancing the Stone” which got me to look at then buy your book, “Along Came Quinn.” I’m a sucker for that film and for adventurous road romances. Danger, villains, treasure, jungle rot and watching a hero and heroine face the worst and come out on top and in love gets me every time.

Alex Montgomery has no idea that the man who breaks into her antique store looking for an ancient treasure map will be the love of her life. I guess it’s a good thing she didn’t kill him when she shot at him. And that she lied to the police about why she dialed 911 and that she bandaged his wound and called him a cab. Because soon they’re partners on a quest to track down the low down, dirty bastard who stole the real map and who, along with his cohort in crime, has a head start on them in tracking down the legendary treasure of the 5 Mayan Kings. Will Alex be able to keep up with Quinn Rafferty as they trek through the Guatemalan jungle? Can Quinn keep from strangling this woman who drives him nuts in more ways than one? And who will end up with the loot after the big show down?

Okay so in the end, this isn’t “Romancing the Stone” though there is a lot of jungle slogging, machete swinging and insects. And Alex manages to keep up with Quinn and their guides though she doesn’t completely refrain from complaining at times. But for her first time on an adventure like this, she does pretty well. And I like that she takes some serious revenge on the man who lied to her and used her to get the ancient map. Even Quinn is impressed with her job on Rod’s nuts. And I can see her point in not telling Quinn the whole truth about what she thinks will be at the end of the hunt.

Quinn is basically a decent guy who’s totally honest with Alex about leaving her behind behind if she can’t keep up with him. His reasons for going on the quest are also honorable but I do wonder if he thought about the fact that the Guatemalan government would want the lion’s share of anything that was discovered? However, he proves his cojones along the journey and seems like a man anyone would want covering their back in a tight situation.

I wondered how you would bring this “new adventure every year” man and this “settled in with a business” woman together in the end but by gosh you did it. I like the plan Alex comes up with to merge their lives and interests together and the way that they slowly change so that she’s a bit more adventurous while he’s a bit more willing to stay in one place for longer than 3 months.

After 3/4 of the book with only Alex or Quinn’s POV, which tended to jump back and forth within a chapter, it was a surprise to suddenly get inside Rod’s and Victoria’s heads. I also didn’t care for the pages of explanations and expositions as everyone fills everyone else in on what they did, what they plan to do and other and assorted things that in many cases a reader doesn’t need to know. I also didn’t buy that Victoria is going to have such a complete change of heart after a lifetime of crime.

But overall I found the book entertaining and a quick read. It’s a fun road romance with a twist on the treasure that I think is different yet believable. And it just goes to show that sometimes you can’t see what’s right under your nose. B-

~Jayne

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Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Mr. Cavendish, I Presume by Julia Quinn
2. REVIEW: Viscount Who Loved Me, Second Epilogue by Julia Quinn
3. Saw Julia Quinn on the escalat…

Since publishing your first romance in 2008, you have quickly become one of my favorite and most dependable authors; I have not given any of your first three books a grade lower than an A-. So I looked forward to Wicked Becomes You with a fair amount of anticipation.

The book opens in 1886 with a prologue that takes place at the funeral of Richard Maudsley; Richard had been stabbed after venturing into a casino on a lark. His best friend, Alex, feels guilty because he had refused to accompany Richard; Alex is an aristocrat but on his way to being a self-made businessman  (he is a younger son)  and he is dedicated to his work. He also feels guilty because before Richard died, the two men had quarreled over Richard’s sister, Gwen; Richard was suspicious of Alex’s attraction to Gwen. At the funeral, Alex returns Richard’s ring to Gwen, a precious remembrance of her last living family member (her parents are already dead).

Gwen was the golden girl of her family; her parents, who had climbed up socially from a background in trade, had hopes that Gwen would make a brilliant marriage. Standing with Gwen in the chapel, Alex remembers his promise to Richard that he would see Gwen settled. It’s a promise that he has some ambivalence about, but all the same  he feels obligated to try.

The action then moves forward four years, to another church; it’s Gwen’s wedding day and she’s about to get jilted – this time at the altar – for the second time. Alex is there to witness her humiliation (along with the rest of the ton, most of whom regard Gwen with fondness because she’s just so darn nice). Alex generally stays out of London; his business concerns take him around the world, and he’s only stopped in to see his older brother, the Earl of Weston, to find out why he sold a piece of family property. Alex doesn’t care about the property, but he does care about his family, and he cannot resist his twin sisters’ pleas to get to the bottom of the sale; he suspects the earl may be having money problems. So it’s only chance that Alex is there in the pew when Gwen’s prospective groom literally bolts, and also that he’s at Gwen’s home later participating in  a powwow to determine What To Do About Poor Gwen, while the lady herself is upstairs in bed, distraught and enraged.

Gwen had not loved her fiance, Thomas, but she had more or less believed his assurances that he loved her; she knew he needed her money, at least. Gwen longs for a family of her own; at a young age her parents had sent her to live with the aristocratic but slightly-down-at-heel Beechams, in the hopes of giving her some town polish. Now her parents and only sibling are dead, and the people she’s lived with for most of her life, while not particularly unkind or abusive, are nothing but paid guardians. Lying in her bed,  Gwen feels herself break free; she realizes that all her attempts to be good and proper and perfect have earned her nothing but the degradation of being jilted twice and the pity of the ton, and she’s still as alone as ever. She resolves that since no good has come from being good, she’s going to try being bad.

Writing this out, Gwen’s resolution strikes me as childish and silly, but you never make it feel that way in the story – I empathized with Gwen enormously and actually mentally cheered for her when she essentially said, “screw ‘em” and decided that she would do what she wanted to from there on out.

One thing she wants, she decides, is to get back her brother’s ring, which she had given to Thomas as a token of affection. But Thomas has apparently fled to Paris, and so Gwen determines that she will follow him there, demand her ring back, and give Thomas a piece of her mind while she’s at it. To achieve this goal, she has to face up to the disapproval of those concerned about her – namely her foster parents and Alex’s twin sisters, Caroline and Belinda, who are her closest friends. Alex views the “new” Gwen with some confusion which he masks with an infuriating, condescending amusement, as when he considers Gwen’s slightly manic behavior after the jilting:

Really, somebody needed to cast a trophy for her. In Recognition of Her Tireless Dedication to Utterly Groundless Good Cheer.

Alex and Gwen meet up again in Paris; she’s chasing Thomas and he’s trying to find out more about Rollo Barrington, the mysterious stranger who has purchased the family property that Alex is trying to buy back. Alex witnesses Gwen’s nascent attempts at being daring, and they clash a bit over their differing views on responsibility, obligation and freedom.

From Paris, the book turns into a sort of road  story. I generally really like road  romances (and they seem to be one of the more popular romance plot conventions), but I did have some issues with this portion of the book. Alex accepts Gwen’s help in unraveling what is going on with Rollo Barrington (after Barrington takes a shine to Gwen). Alex’s willingness to use Gwen in this manner struck me as contrived and not true to his character. Much as he tries to hide it, Alex is a caretaker, and he takes his duty to Gwen seriously. It doesn’t make sense, exactly, that he would go from wanting to protect Gwen and watch over her to using her as bait in a situation that he senses is not entirely safe.

Honestly, the entire subplot involving  Barrington and his buying up of property felt muddled and a bit pointless. It only really served as a device to bring Alex and Gwen together (and allow Gwen to play Alex’s mistress, which gave them much more freedom to be alone together than they otherwise would’ve had). That’s okay, but I felt that maybe more time was spent on the subplot than needed to be spent on something that had no real significance to the story otherwise. I also felt that the resolution was anti-climatic and a bit confusing.

I like the humor in your writing, which is especially evident  from Gwen as she begins to break free of the bonds of perfection. Here, musing on her commitment to knit sweaters for an orphanage:

Ten sweaters in a month!

Gwen was not a loom!

And then there is her indignant letter to her erstwhile fiance, which includes uncharacteristic (up to this point) digs at his lack of funds:

Good luck with the roof at Pennington Grange, by the way. I will hope it does not rain too much this season.

I liked Gwen a lot – she is a bit unformed at the start of the book, having been trained to be good and virtuous and unobjectionable, which along with her great fortune, is expected to net her an aristocratic husband. She doesn’t really know herself, and in the course of the book she grows up and finds some balance between virtue and authenticity.

Alex is an appealing if not entirely original hero – he’s a younger son of an aristrocratic family, chafing under the weight of expectation that come with his position. His attitude is given psychological depth by the circumstances of his youth; he had been afflicted with terrible childhood asthma, which eventually led his parents to banish him alone to a remote country house, so as to avoid any excitement that might trigger an attack. Alex still harbors a great deal of resentment towards his dead parents for the stifling restrictions they placed on him as a child and towards his siblings, for continuing to treat him as fragile although he has long since proved that he is anything but. I thought this aspect of the story was quite intriguing; I wish that it had been developed a touch more. Perhaps Alex needed to have a discussion with his brother and sisters to bring some closure to issues that honestly did seem to be having a continuing psychological effect on him as an adult.

There has always been an unspoken attraction between Gwen and Alex; as well, they share the connection of loving and mourning Richard. The conflict between the two of them is no less poignant for being rather basic: Alex’s lonely childhood makes him wary of connections, whereas Gwen’s makes her long for them. Alex has farther to go, in a sense, because he has to learn that love and concern for others do not have to be fetters. Gwen needs to learn to let go and not always feel that she has to be perfect in order to be worthy of love.

I did notice, particularly early on, a few possible anachronisms – in his meeting with Gerard, Alex tells his brother that he shouldn’t get so upset; he’s liable to give himself an aneurysm. Later in the same scene, Alex thinks to himself that Gerard is acting like the “schoolyard bully” he once was. I have no concrete knowledge of whether “you’ll give yourself an aneurysm” was a phrase in usage in the 19th century (I more often see “apoplexy”, which isn’t exactly the same thing, medically, but I think conveys the same idea). I also doubt that “schoolyard bully” (or schoolyards, for that matter) would have been familiar to 19th century English aristocrats. Late in the book Gwen uses the word “conned”, which I also question being in common usage, particularly by someone of her background.

These anachronisms were minor in the larger scheme of things and may have been in fact more noticeable because the setting otherwise did feel authentic. Once I notice such things, though, I feel compelled to mention them (if only so someone can correct me on whether they are in fact anachronisms!).

Despite my quibbles with certain aspects of the plot, Wicked Becomes You was definitely another successful story for me. My grade is an A-.

Best regards,

Jennie

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This is a mass market published by Simon & Schuster, a member of the Agency 5. For some reason I cannot find any S&S books at Sony and few at Kobobooks.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Bound by Your Touch by Meredith Duran
2. REVIEW: Written on Your Skin by Meredith Duran
3. REVIEW: The Duke of Shadows by Meredith Duran

I admit I never thought I was going to make it out of the first chapter.   The setup was so farcical.   Three friends are in a gentleman’s club where a nude painting is hung. The nude is said to be of a lady of a ton. Conveniently three young men appear in the club when all the other members are gone and all the servants are to bed (in a gentleman’s club?) and try to steal the painting. The three friends catch them and find out that the three young men are actually women.   The three young woman play Spartacus and all declare the nude body is theirs.

The three men know the three women.   In  fact, they are friends with the brother of two of the women.   Says one of the gentlemen:

Rebecca, Susanna, your bother is my friend.   He has helped me in so many ways I cannot recount them all.

Yet despite this brotherly devotion, the three gentlemen make a wager amongst themselves that they will discover who is the model for the nude painting.   Further, they make lewd comments toward these women:

“We could settle this right now,” Leo responded.   ”You could each remove your clothing and let us see the truth.”

Sure, because this is how all honorable men treat the sisters of friends who have helped in so many ways that they cannot be recounted.   Why not take the painting down? Why not, as a favor to said friend, try to insulate these women from further scorn and humiliation and shunning?   Why try to portray these men as honorable when their initial actions show them anything but! They are wagering on the honor of these young women.

If a reader can get past the cliched and gimmicky setup that paints all three men in an unfavorable light, there is actually a decent historical romance going on.   Rebecca Leland,   cousin of the Duke of Madingley, grew up under the specter of possible death.   She was a sickly child, cosseted, protected but highly constrained.   As an adult, out from under the worry of illness, she is determined to live life to the fullest.   She acts with a certain sense of physical and emotional invincibility, unafraid to show her feelings and act on them.

Julian Delane, Earl of Parkhurst, spotted Rebecca wearing a jewel called the Scandalous Lady.   The nude in the painting also wore the jewel.   Julian believes that Rebecca is the model and wants the jewel for it went missing 10 years ago under a scandal that resulted in Julian’s father’s death.   But a mystery surrounds Rebecca’s possession of the jewel as she was in the schoolroom ten years ago.   Rebecca and Julian find themselves forced to work together to solve the mystery.   Most of the book is essentially a road romance.

Rebecca is a delight.   She was mischievous and full of zest for life.   Everything is an adventure for her, an opportunity.   Rebecca teases Julian throughout the book:

“Lord Parkhurst, you’d best be careful.   You may not be interested in marrying me, but we’ve both been seen takling to each other’s mother.   To the ton, we’re practically engaged.

He only gave another grunt, and took her through a particularly tight turn.   To her surprise, his thigh dipped between hers, so gracefully she thought she’d imagined it…Then he did it again, deliberately, provocatively.

…   He knew what he did to her.   It was unfair that gentlemen were allowed so much more experience than the ladies.   It put her at a distinct disadvantage.   All she had to counter him were her wits.”

And when Julian balks at taking the relationship to the next level, Rebecca is fearless in her determination to change his mind.   Sexual tension is employed well throughout the book.   Julian and Rebecca are forced to share a bed and they employ the bundling method.   This intimacy leads to them sharing secrets with one another and their divulging of their past illuminated their motives in a very natural way.

While I totally thought Rebecca was a joy to read, Julian was so stiff as a character. I understand that this was intentional but his internal monologue was so wooden that it made him plastic at times.

The setting is mid Victorian and there was good use of the time period with reference to trains, factories and other cities outside of London. Most of the story takes place outside the insulated London society and whether these characters acted with historical accuracy, I can’t say. I know my eyebrows were raised from time to time, but I let it slide.

There were questions I had in the book such as when the two were out of money why they didn’t go to a bank; why other men in society didn’t make the same connection between the painting and the jewel; and why, why, why the ridiculous beginning?   But, Rebecca was   such a joy that I was able to put aside the setup and enjoy the story.   B-

Best regards,

Jane

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Sony | Kobo |

This is a mass market published by Avon, one of the agency 5. The official release date is April 27, 2010.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Never Trust a Scoundrel by Gayle Callen
2. REVIEW: Never Dare a Duke by Gayle Callen
3. REVIEW: The Viscount in Her Bedroom by Gayle Callen

Ann Somerville, knowing my predilections, recommended your book to me and I’m SO glad she did. I have to commend Dreamspinner Press for finding some of the best m/m romance authors out there. I’m certainly adding you to that list.

Sam is 21, orphaned, living with and working for his awful aunt and uncle, trying to work his way through school part-time to become a nurse. But he also has sexual desires, needs even, that shame him:

IN THE deserted men's restroom at the back of Middleton Community College, Sam Keller knelt on the tile, braced his hands against Keith Jameson's thighs, and broke his mother's heart.

It didn't matter that Sharyle Keller had passed away four years ago. Sam knew his mother would feel that what Sam was doing in the handicapped stall was a complete and total mockery of everything she'd ever taught him. It wasn't that she would have been upset that Sam was gay, or even that he was about to give a blow job at school and risk expulsion for "sexual congress on campus." What would have upset his mother was that Sam wasn't at all attracted to his partner. To be perfectly honest, Sam hated him.

"Sex is beautiful," Sam's mother had told him. ""Sex is a union between two people. Sex is a merging of souls, a holy connection. Sex is sacred, and it should only be given to those you love." [ . . . ] [ . . . ] But even before he'd realized what an incredible dearth of loving male partners there were to be had in Middleton, Iowa, Sam had struggled with his vow. His mother had found him gay support groups and sex tip sites online, but Sam had found the porn. He'd lost days in the images of beautiful, slender men bent in submission and sometimes degradation, and to his quiet horror, he realized that this was his fantasy: he, like those boys on the Internet, wanted to be used. He wanted to be loved and cherished, yes. But he also wanted to be fucked. Sometimes he didn't want it to be about love. He wanted it to be about sex, and about semen, and about not quite exactly being in control. He didn't want to get hurt, no. But he admitted to himself that he wanted to come really, really close.

There are many many things I love about this book. The first is that it’s not a “typical” BDSM book in which the characters meet at a super-speshul BDSM club where one or both of them is Ultima-Dom (or Amazing-Sub), where there are Rulez that everyone KNOWS to be the One True Way to do things. This is just two men with compatible desires meeting, having hot kinky sex, and muddling through their muddy, confused feelings about it and each other.

Sam knows what he likes, but he’s ashamed of it and he thinks he shouldn’t like it. And then he meets Mitch who also knows what he likes and is also ashamed of it and terrified of messing things up with Sam, who he recognizes as special, the way he’s messed things up with previous relationships because of the kink. So they both desperately want the hot, dirty sex, and are both ashamed of it, but can’t stay away from it. Perfect conflict.

And that’s another thing I love. The conflict has nothing to do with the fact that they’re gay. The conflict is the *other* type of “wrong” sex they like. Our society is fucked up about sex and I love how this book shows that and also shows how good and right it is to do whatever you want so long as there’s consent and enjoyment all around.

Mitch is a truck driver delivering supplies to the store next to Sam’s uncle’s pharmacy. They have sex in Mitch’s truck, have some phone conversations, meet up again, and then a few weeks later, Sam has a terrible falling out with his aunt and calls Mitch, asking him to take him away. The rest of the story is a road romance as Mitch and Sam drive all over the West on Mitch’s deliveries. They eventually get to Las Vegas and confront Mitch’s past, in the person of Randy, an…ex-fuck-buddy? (They both explicitly reject “lover” and “boyfriend” as descriptors of their relationship.) Sam knows that he and Mitch need to deal with Randy in order to have any future, even if Sam doesn’t see how they CAN have a future anyway.

I mostly love how the relationship is front and center in this book. It’s very much like a category romance in that respect. (That comparison was heightened for me because the story’s told in deep 3rd-person POV solely from Sam’s perspective.) I love how things aren’t perfect between them because of their own emotional hang-ups and their failure to communicate. But then they do talk and work that problem out — so it’s not a teacup storm — but then another one crops up, in a completely realistic way. For example, they have hot kinky sex one night, Mitch freaks out and thinks he’s gone too far, so tries to be “normal” which just freaks Sam out, because he’s all about the kinky sex. Sam’s freak-out makes Mitch think he’s right about having gone too far and he freaks out more. They talk it out pretty quickly, but it’s all part of the steps of tentative progress to self-understanding and strong relationship. At the end, I’m completely convinced they’re totally in love and that they’ll make it, but I also know that they’ll have to work hard and keep talking and that just feels so RIGHT to me because that’s exactly what real life is like.

This is a fabulous little story. I pretty much can’t recommend it highly enough. If you like K.A. Mitchell, I think you’ll love this book. Same type of character-driven romance. Same hot hot sex. And the ending is, I think, the first full-on proposal scene I’ve seen in a m/m romance. :)

And Randy’s book is out too and I’m very much looking forward to reading it (although it looks more suspenseful, so I’m hoping I still like it).

Grade: A

Best regards,
-Joan/Sarah F.

| Book excerpt | Kindle | Amazon | Dreamspinner Press | Fictionwise

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All right. Here we go with “The Secret Duke” the third book in this series set in mid eighteenth century England. As with the first two books, it involves hidden and/or secret identities and takes place partly on the road which allows the characters to let their hair down – so to speak – and get to know each other outside of rigid constraints of 18th century and aristocratic society. Parts of the book worked very well for me while others…hmm, maybe not so much.

The Duke of Ithorne is a man of power and consequence. Born after his father’s death, being a Duke is what he was raised to be. But occasionally, he assumes an alter ego as Captain Rose, sailing out of Dover. And it’s after one of these voyages that he first meets a young woman who will rock his world. Who is she? Well, he doesn’t know – then – as she slips away after he’s saved her virtue and possibly her life. But four years later, the two meet again, and again, cloaked in disguises and attempting to keep their identities hidden as they tack through the swirling events of London court and country life.

Those who haven’t already finished the first two books might be slightly at sea when characters from them pop up in this one. I still think that people could start here but only if they don’t mind spoilers, especially from “The Secret Marriage,” since many of the events at the end of that book overlap with the early action of this one. I found a lot of that to be slightly awkward, since I already knew about it, and very dragging as there’s a whole lot to be recapped. And while the cat-rabbit of Hesse was interesting enough for one book, I didn’t care to see her again, and for so many scenes, in this one. I think she’s got more dialogue in the book than Rothgar does.

Of more interest to me is the portrayal of the position of women at this time. The heroine, Bella Barstowe, finds out exactly how easy it was for a woman to lose her reputation and how that would blight her life. She makes a small mistake which gets compounded by the actions of the men “in charge” of her then has to face a future that pretty much sucks. If not for the legacy left to her by another woman, she would never have escaped being house bound. Then you show us, through the coterie around Lady Fowler, the other ways women could slip through the cracks and be left destitute. With no money or family, being a woman alone then would have been truly terrifying. Even a young woman such as Bella has to learn how to deal with the world of commerce outside of her home.

Yet, as precarious as you show a woman’s position to be, I’m glad that not all men are portrayed as ogres and tyrants. Women from all ranks of society could find love or at least good men to be in their lives. Otherwise, Bella’s sudden change of heart about marriage would have seemed to quick. Thank you that the Christmas at Rothgar Abbey serves a purpose other than as a sickly sweet Hallmark Card moment in showing Bella that she could live this kind of life with Thorne.

Again, and I know I’ve mentioned this before, I love that we see the power that these aristocratic people, men and women, had in society. Ithorne is well aware of his responsibilities – both day to day and over the holiday – to his people and his duties. He also knows he needs to put in an appearance when George III becomes King. Perhaps not quite the “hell for leather” charge of the court towards a new monarch as in Tudor days but still one Must Be Seen. I wasn’t aware that King had shown signs of his illness so early in his reign. And behind all the great men were the secretaries and valets. I loved the little bit about Ithorne asking his valet about the correct dress for a nobleman to wear when intervening in the affairs of distressed gentlewomen.

This is not a democratic society, heavens no, and I think you make the distinction very nicely. I would never have thought of the fact that a working class person with a silver cross and chain might be thought to have stolen it. Bella worries that the family servants who help her might be made to suffer for it. Rothgar and Ithorne show noblesse oblige toward those they feel responsible for. Ithorne worries about how Bella would fit into upper echelons of society since even being a lower level aristocrat might not be enough to make her transition to Duchess a smooth one.

In Bella’s initial appearance in the story, she’s still young and impetuous. As the book progresses, and she’s had four years to think on things, she’s grown and shows restraint in her actions. She still has her “March hare” moments but they’re tempered with experience and she thinks things through. When she has the chance to take revenge on those who did her wrong, she’s got intelligence enough to know when she needs some assistance. Ithorne, though he doesn’t change as much as Bella over the course of the story, will hopefully have learned something about the place of women in this world.

But the revenge section, as much as I was glad to see Bella get a bit of her own back, dragged for me. As I mentioned, too much cat – and this is from a person who loves cats – and too much time spent with Ithorne as a common man. Perhaps this is due to the fact that you used this plot device in all three books and maybe it’s partly because you show the aristocratic power behind the pomp so well that I want to see more of that. In any event, I wasn’t sorry to see this section end.

I am sorry that this mini-series is now over as I adore Georgian era books and am always delighted to peek into the world of the Mallorens. Poor Bryght and Portia will have to sweat out another pregnancy before their offspring are “off the hook.” And poor Rothgar, along with Robin, will have to pace through another delivery. Will we see more Mallorens? I do hope so.

~Jayne

| Book Excerpt | Kindle | The Secret Duke | Nook | BN | Borders |
| Sony EBookstore published by one of the “Agency 5″ |

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Dear Ms. Seville.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grade: A-

Best regards,
-Joan/Sarah F.

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

| Fictionwise | BooksonBoard

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I admit that the one and only book I read by you was one about football and I had a fairly negative reaction to it given that so little of the football aspect was portrayed with accuracy.   I was   hoping that this would be different.   While Hot as Sin is readable, it suffers from the same problem as the football book.   The story is paramount and little details don’t matter so long as the story proceeds in the fashion that you want.   Accuracy, authenticity take second fiddle to the emotional arcs of the characters.

Sam and Dianna were the epitome of young love (or at least that is the set up that you want us to buy initially).     Sam was 20 and I think Dianna was 18.   Dianna, for reasons revealed later, leaves Sam at the tender age of 20 and Sam has never, ever gotten over it.   He’s so connected to her that when he is told she was in a car accident in Colorado, he immediately flies (from the Lake Tahoe area) to be by her side.   Sam is a forest firefighter, a “hotshot”.

The story that you tell about them – young, hormonal and immature was well conveyed to me. Their emotional arc was in overcoming this. I found it rather frustrating that, despite time and distance, they weren’t perceptive enough to come to the realization separately.   It was easier for them to progress forward by pretending the other was responsible for their failed relationship. Of course for either character to admit their own role in a failed teenage relationship would have lessened the tension in the story (given that I didn’t buy into the myopia, there was no tension for me either, only frustration). As an add on sort of conflict, Sam is distressed that he is a firefighter and Dianna is a big cable news star (not of a major news network but of some regional show).

The external conflict is represented in the form of Dianna’s search for her sister.   Her sister called to report she had joined a commune.   Dianna rushes to meet her sister. After a frustrating meeting, Dianna leaves, upset.   She gets into a car accident which results in fatality of another driver and lands in the hospital.   The twin brother of the dead driver finds out that Dianna has a sister and kidnaps her.   The sister is able to escape and report she is in danger but her captor cuts the message short.

For some reason, Sam decides for Dianna that if she reports this to the police they will not listen to her and the only way to save Dianna’s sister is to go after her. Even if the sister is a flake, if she calls you and reports she is in physical danger and then you can’t return her phone calls, it seems reasonable to report this and not go running into the mountains with some firefighter.

Sam, who cut his teeth on “class five rapids on the American River in California” takes Dianna on similar level white waters in a tipsy inflatable raft.   “Was he out of his fucking mind?” he asks himself at one point.   That is my question exactly.   Also, given that Sam is from the Sierra Nevadas and Dianna is from San Francisco, what the hell are the two doing hiking by themselves? Doesn’t it make sense to get someone to guide them or is one mountain range just the same as any other?   Of course, having a guide along would ruin the possibility for sexy hijinks between the two.

Dianna, however, turns out to be “instinctively better at rafting than most of the guys he went rafting with during his off months.” Dianna and Sam also engage in cliff climbing (something Dianna also has never done before) and hiking long distances (again, something Dianna is engaging in just one day after a traumatic car wreck).   The boon for the story is that because Dianna is so inept, Sam gets to save her  again and again and again.

There were editing problems:

Pulling out a credit card, he got them each a room, knowing it wasn’t exactly what they’d prefer, but deciding to take what they could get at this point.

He didn’t beat around the bush when he emerged from the lobby. “They only had one room left.”

How could he get them each a room when there was only one room left?   He could have “tried” to get them each a room but he couldn’t actually succeed.

“But he couldn’t ignore the dichotomy between her salary and his.”

Dichotomy? I think you meant discrepancy?

Also

“She was gravity and he was falling.”

Gravity doesn’t make things fall.   Gravity is the pull between two particulate masses.    Gravity = the force on two masses.   If she is the force that pulls two masses together, then he would be one mass and …. what would be the other?   There were others, but the point is that once I spotted a couple, I began to question all the metaphors and similes.

The implausibility of the story continues to the very end where the hero rises miracuously from a fall that should have killed most mortal men and he just gets a CT scan and is released.   Like that would EVER HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE.   Also? They give him clothes from a doctor because he is just too big for the hospital gowns (he is, by the way, 6’2″ which is not so enormous that they don’t have gowns for peeps his size.)

The writing style was frustrating.   The characters constantly talk to themselves in the form of rhetorical questions. Sometimes it seemed like it was pages and pages of rhetorical questions:

But hadn’t he done the same thing she was doing now, immediately assumign that she had to be looking down on him and his salary?

How much of the blue-collar, white-collar dichotomy was in his own head?

…

Only a handful of people knew he played.   How could he have forgotten Dianna was one of them?

…

Damn it, was there anything they could talk about that wasn’t a minefield?”

….

Did he know that his touch made her heart race?   That even without touching an erogenous zone, she was getting hopelessly aroused?

Also, for a book called “Hot as Sin” there was little sex in the story.   Up until page 173, the only sex scene was a furtive teenage grope and penetration in a truck.   The sex occurred, of course, on their trail hike.   As the two were sexxorring their way  across  the Rockies, I kept thinking  where is the urgency to find your sister?   Needless to say, toward the end of the book, everything irritated me.   D

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased at Amazon or in ebook format from Sony or other etailers.

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I confess that I haven’t ever read you before.   I thought I had and just decided that while you were a great gun, your books were just not for me.   Then, after seeing two recent releses, Becoming Becky and No Surrender, I thought I ought to give you a try.   I tried Becoming Becky but couldn’t get into it at the time. But then I saw that Keishon, a very picky suspense reader, mentioned she was excited about your Devlin series book, No Surrender.

No Surrender is a fast paced action story that is sort of split in two. While I was reading it, I was instantly reminded of Suzanne Brockmann back in her earlier days when she was writing more romance actions stories than simply action stories.

I hadn’t read any other books in the Devlin Group series and never once felt lost.   I do, however, have the urge to read the entire series now (and plan to buy them this weekend).   The primary focus of the Devlin Group is of Gallagher and Carmen Oliveria.   Gallagher is the number two man at Devlin Group who is primarily responsible for logistics of a mission.   Carmen Oliveria (and her past was a little light on the details) appeared to be a former thief whose speciality is picking locks and being invisible.

Together Gallagher and Carmen are sent to peak through a very bad man’s house in Canada.   The house is supposed to be empty of everyone except for staff but the situation turns ugly when the bad man returns unexpectedly.   Carmen and Gallagher get out a live but are stranded in the mountains of New Hampshire.    The first part of the story is a road romance as the two struggle to survive in the mountains with very few supplies and an attraction that at least Carmen does not want to explore.

Whether it is the adrenaline, the near death experience, or the forced intimacy, Carmen can’t hold out and she and Gallagher enjoy a memorable physical encounter.

The second part of the romance takes place in Matunisia where the Devlin Group sets up camp to remove a hostage.

Carmen and Gallagher are both very competent.   I was also very convinced that these people knew what they were doing.   There is a great scene in which Carmen is stuck with only a .22 and the bad guys are out of range.   Gallagher does something with the pistol to force a greater velocity from the bullet.   It was details like these (whether it was accurate) that made me a believer of the story.    There is a great sense of realism here which rachets up the suspense.

For the most part, I kind of guessed what would happen next.   I thought that the conflicts were signalled a bit strong.   For example, when we first meet Jake Donovan, a member of the Devlin Group, he’s drinking a beer and being despondent over the loss of his best friend who he lost in a rock climbing episode three years before.

There was another tell in a setup scene when the Devlin group first gets to Mutinisia which I thought was overtly obvious as well.    The lack of surprise in the story is the one complaint I had so I was even more grateful that the penultimate moment (assuming you don’t consider the epilogue the final scene) wasn’t what I thought it would be.

The emotional exploration was a bit on the sparse side although I wouldn’t have expected either of the characters to be big mopers. The absence of long expository segments was a relief after I had tried to get through two others that were replete with them.   Gallagher is really the all American boy next door, a very capable and deadly one, but one who had little emotional baggage other than his longing to be with Carmen.

Carmen is more conflicted, having had a bad childhood and a lack of close friends or good relationships.   Her one good thing in life is the Devlin Group and she certainly doesn’t want anything to happen that would affect her position.   She worries, rightfully so, that Gallagher’s feelings for her will prevent her from being part of the group. She worries about what would happen if they would form a bond and then break up.   Her concerns were legitimate and I liked that there was no easy, concrete answer for her. To be with Gallagher would be   a risk.

While I thought that there were a few problems (and thought the two part story was a bit strange), I really liked No Surrender and think that those readers who are looking for a Suzanne Brockmann type of story with more romance, would be pleased with this book. I’m off to get the other Devlin Group books.   B

Best regards

Jane

This book can be purchased on line at various retailers on August 25, 2009. You can read excerpts at Shannon Stacey’s site.

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