Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

The lads at Gearlog and Teleblog are great believers of multi function devices. Multi function devices do it all: it’s a cell phone, camera, calendar, contact, ebook reader all in one. Gearlog opines that the reason that women tend to buy a cell phone separate from a PDA is the ubiquitous purse. Of course, the only purse that Gearlog could find was a laptop bag (not a real purse guys). Teleblog did a llittle better but not by much. No self respecting chick lit heroine would carry either bag.

I chose to go the two device route when buying an ebook reader for a variety of reasons. I didn’t want my phone to be with me in the bedroom while I read. The Smartphones were either way to big to hold up to my ear or the smaller, sleeker Smartphones had too small of a viewscreen for reading books. I went PDA over a dedicated device (like the Ebookwise) because I wanted to use the PDA for ebook reading but I still wanted to be able to surf the internet. …

Dear Mrs. Stuart,

Boy howdy some of your earlier regencies, gothics and contemporaries sell for a mint. Are they worth it? Well, in this case, yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause and this one is worth the money. It’s a light hearted romp with the proverbial regency characters of a spinster and a rake. Now really, what else should readers expect from the title?

The Spinster, Gillian Redford, is not a bluestocking but rather a woman who’s played nursemaid and housekeeper to her two older sisters and sister-in-law and is fast approaching thirty. Old-maidhood. While traveling back to the London home of her stiff-rumped brother, her carriage runs off the road and she ends up being rescued by The Rake, Ronan Patrick Blakley, the new Marquis of Herrington along with his drunk friend Vivien Peacock. After dropping Gilly off, the two make a wager that Ronan can get Gilly to fall for him within two months. He does but winds
up falling for her at the same time. After a flurry of plot twists, all’s well that ends well between the two plus we get a nice secondary romance for Gilly’s niece and …

Someone needs some attention. Let’s, as Sybil would say, give her some. You see, Rosina Lippi, in an attempt to keep things on the downlow, posts on her blog an explanation of an online kerfluffle that happened at the Gabaldon yahoo group. Thanks to my reader tip, I moseyed over to see what the drama was about that Ms. Lippi was trying to keep from blowing all out of proportion.

There’s another (yet again) clash in one very small, limited corner of the internet, but as it happens to be the corner I inhabit, and as I would prefer this not blow out of all proportion, I am going public right here and now.

Lippi tries to be careful not to reveal the parties involved by using their initials. Very sneaky, I will never figure out who those people are. Someone at the DG group didn’t like Lippi’s latest book. A fan of Diana Gabaldon posted her opinions that Sara Donati was a DG wannabe who “tapped into a HUGE fan-base by dangling ‘an appearance of Jamie and Claire’ into her story.” The DG fan was specific in her complaints and cited passages and characters that she felt were …

Dear Ms. St. Claire,

So I am on my way to a small town for a business trip and I have a Pocket PC full of books to read. This one made my four hour trip seem like 1 hour. And I gleefully reminded myself that I only paid $3.89 at SimonSays.com.

Thrill Me to Death is an action packed book that reunites two old lovers. Cori Paker nee Cooper is the widowed wife of billionaire mall developer William Parker. Theirs was a May to December romance that lasted five years. William died of a heart attack in his bed but Beckwith International, the insurance company, questions whether this is really a homicide. Cori is concerned for her safety and contacts Beckwith who refers her to Bullet Catchers. Now, it bothered me a lot that BC was hired both by the insurance company and by Cori. It was a huge confict AND BC took on the case with no real loyalty to Cori.

Lucy, the enigmatic head of BC, taps Max Roper to be the muscle. She does so intentionally because Max …

Dear Ms. Anderson,

This was my first book by you and I bought you because I read some of your comments on Bam’s website and because Bam gave you a positive review for The Assignment. I bought that one too, but started with this book. You may not know this but I like police procedure books. :)

None of the plot related below is a spoiler as the information is included on the blurb page at Loose ID.

Detective Cole Berkley and Detective Alex Reed are homicide investigators in Tampa. They are tapped to question a survivor of one of an attack that may be related to a previous homicide. There is a serial killer who is starting to kill off erotic romance writers. He has their pen names and through his research locates the person behind the name and proceeds to torture and kill them according to a scene in one of their books, usually involving some BDSM. (note to erotic romance authors, you should a) lock your doors at night and b) do a better job of hiding your identity online). Oh, right, this is just a …

Dear Mrs. Balogh,

Most of us have been eagerly awaiting Sydnam Butler’s HEA for years. I know I have. I just wish that I could have gotten it without dragging the whole Bedwyn and Butler clans into the story as well. Having read, or in the case of Lady Morgan, attempted to read each of the individual Bedwyn books, I can assure you I have read a gracious plenty about the Bedwyns. I neither need nor wish to have each and every one, plus spouses and children — both natural and adopted — along with all the members of the Ravensburg Butler family, trotted out in every book to convince me of their felicity and fecundity. But it did make reading the book much easier when I could skip whole scenes of sugary sweetness, Bedwyn style.

“Simply Love” involves two characters familiar to long time readers of Mary Balogh’s single title “Slighty” series. Anne Jewell is the unwed mother introduced in “Slighty Scandalous” who became a teacher at a school for young ladies in Bath. Sydnam Butler is the younger brother in “A Summer to Remember.” He had wanted to be a painter but headed off …

Dear Ms. St. Claire,

Alex Romero has a bad habit of allowing his libido interfere with his jobs. He signed on to Bullet catchers, not just for its super rich salary, but for the opportunity to guard “presidents, princes, and the head of Scotland Yard.” His boss, Lucy Sharpe, assigns him to guard the body of a tv news anchor in Miami. Alex recognizes this is both punishment and probation. He resolves to be on his best behavior despite the fact that his principal (the body to be guarded) is well, let me just quote you:

she added, “Don't let me down, Alex. You know the rules.”
“Jeez, Luce. It's insulting that you think I'm such a dog that I can't resist one measly news—”
She heard the folder flip open, then his long, slow whistle.
“Those are real,” she said without taking her attention from her handheld device. When he didn't answer, she finally looked at him, seeing a glint in his eyes that was both threatening and amused.
“You're evil, Lucy. Truly black-hearted and evil.”

The principal is supposed to be Jessica Adams, but Jessica has asked her twin sister, Jazz, to impersonate her …

Dear Ms. Merrick,

My newsletter from PaperbackDigital.com came and one of the featured books is your anthology titled “It’s Not Chick Lit.” I know that this topic has been debated to death. I am simply late to the party. My excuse is that I am running this blogging experiment about a book that *gasp* ends happily ever after and that I was spending time doing some virtual shopping with my BFF at Anthropologies’ website. We can’t decide which sweater coat we like the best.

I just had to write you this letter, in between debating over whether the high heeled boots or the flats are more trendy, because I think you are really struggling to articulate what you really mean. Let me see if I can help you speak to the illiterate masses that read the vile pink covered objects. In an interview you gave, you said:

The publishing industry is an industry that people are involved with because they’re passionate about literature, and they’re generally pretty overworked and working with very tight budgets and a diminishing audience so I think it just will take a little more time …

Dear Mrs. Rosenberg,

I adore a good chick lit book but it’s got to have more than just a series of funny events linked together. It also needs to make me laugh and not cringe at the heroine making a prat of herself, some depth to the characters, enough grounding in reality that I can believe the plot and I prefer a hero who isn’t a mystery up until the end of the book. “Fate and Ms. Fortune” satisfies all my requirements. Robyn Fortune is only looking to polish her stand up act when she agrees to perform at a younger cousin’s Bar Mitzvah. What she doesn’t expect is that her life will be turned even more upside down than it already is or that she’ll be hooked up with the love of her life. But before she gets her HEA, she and her family will discover some truths about themselves, uncover some family secrets, meet up with old friends and find out just how much of a role fate plays in their lives.

Robyn’s got a quintessential Chick Lit job, good enough but she still gets flack from her boss. As a make …

This letter contains a spoiler for Working for the Devil

Dear Ms. Saintcrow,

Your first book in the series, Working for the Devil, received a lot of online acclaim. I picked it up but was disappointed. The first book and the second is full of weird, made up names that alternately confused me and made me giggle. North New York Jersey? Giggle. Some of the terms were defined in a circular manner ie. “Republic of Gilead” was defined by terms “Old Merican” “Novo Christer” and “Seventy Days War”. “Seventy Days War” was defined by “the end of the Republic of Gilead”. Oh, and Korea must have fell into the ocean because it was not included in either one of the two superpowers? Confused. There are also a number of terms that are used that are not defined. Once you used a proper noun, Faraday cage, and just assumed the reader would understand that reference. I am not sure what Faraday is or what it means. There were a number of terms that you used that had no precise meaning.

Even though I had read …