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

Dear Author received a copy of your latest book, “Scarlett Fever” for review and since I’m slightly anal about reading a series in order, I backtracked to read the prequel book, “Suite Scarlett” first. And wow am I glad I did. YA isn’t my usual forte here but with books like this one, I could see myself changing my mind.

Scarlett Martin and her family live in a small hotel in NYC. Oh, not just any hotel but a once beautiful, though now slightly frayed around the edges, example of Art Deco which the family has owned since it opened in the 1920s. All the family, parents, older brother Spencer, older sister Lola, Scarlett and baby sister Marlene pitch in to keep it going but, frankly, with the guest load they have, or rather don’t have, something needs to happen.

And that something is Amy Amberson. Vibrant, outgoing, sweeping Scarlett and everyone else along with her, Amy arrives and immediately begins to manage Scarlett, who becomes “O’Hara,” girl Friday, and Spencer who is desperately trying to achieve his dream of acting with garage staging of “Hamlet.” Then there’s Lola and her wealthy, though not too bright, boyfriend Chip and Marlene, who gets away with murder all because she’s a cancer survivor. It might be summer vacation but Scarlett’s running flat out to try and keep up with and on top of it all before everything risks spinning out of control.

I love a book with subtle humor which arises out of the characters and events in it and which doesn’t rely on pratfalls or making fun of anyone. Even the chapter titles amuse me here. But, despite the set up of living in a boutique hotel, the whole thing seems realistic and believable too. The plot never ventures into “okay, now this is going too far” territory.

And speaking of the setting, it all reminds me slightly of Never Land with Amy as an irrepressible Peter Pan figure leading Scarlett/Wendy deeper into chaos as the story unfolds. Here the children are mainly in charge of events while the parents are secondary and rarely involved in the action except to be people who must be kept from knowing most of what’s going on. Amy is an adult with money and so has more independence than the Martin children but she’s still not quite grown up, or doesn’t act it, and makes mistakes that even Scarlett sees coming. And then it’s usually up to Scarlett to fix and straighten things out.

The relationship of the children makes the book. Marlene has been coddled yet kept from everything the others do and take for granted. I enjoyed watching her finally enter into the circle of her older siblings. Lola and Spencer are there to be PITAs, sometimes, but also back Scarlett up and present a solid front to the world. Spencer is willing to risk discord with Scarlett’s “maybe boyfriend” during the show to support his little sister. And the two of them have to deal with the fact that Scarlett is venturing into the world of dating.

Speaking of which, I doubt there are many people who haven’t, at one time or the other, been in her shoes. Though she’s watched Spencer’s many, week-long romances and Lola’s relationship with someone the others feel is not worthy of her, Scarlett’s never dated before so the whole thing is new to her. She’s not sure what’s going on or even if she’s really dating. The problems she runs into with Eric and his slippery ways are realistic – he’s older and already into game/role playing while she’s running just to catch up.

New York City is almost a character in the book. You add countless, every day, touches that indicate the story is taking place there and no where else as well as making use of the well known theater setting. Scarlett sees her hometown slightly anew through Eric’s eyes which also serves to show it to us. I doubt there are many other American cities where this book could be set and I enjoyed my “trip” there while the action lasted.

“Suite Scarlett” is a direct prequel to “Scarlett Fever” so I’m glad to took the time to read it first. As I finished the book, I was left with several questions I hope will be answered in book two. Wither Lola and Chip? How will Amy’s venture into agenting play out? Will Spencer’s dream come true? Is Marlene fully a part of the action now? And what’s in store for Scarlett once school starts again? I can’t wait to find out.

~Jayne
| Link to Book Website | Kindle | Amazon | nook | BN | Borders |
Fictionwise (not present) | Books on Board (audio format only?)

Dear Ms. Balogh,

Your books have been an acquired taste for me. My early experiences of them were like my first taste of sushi. They too, seemed like something unusual, intense and raw, to which my palate was unaccustomed. At first I wasn’t sure they would appeal to me, since the protagonists are so often emotional or filled with trepidation, and since it’s not uncommon for the heroes to have names like Rex, Edgar, Archie or Freddy — names that don’t call to my mind much glamour. There’s also the tendency your characters have to think in circles, repeating certain sentences over and over.

But after several tries, I got the hang of reading your books. It takes a certain degree of patience and tolerance for human vulnerabilities and even weaknesses, yet that is also what I find most rewarding about the best of your novels. They can be stories of heartfelt redemption and moving forgiveness.

I’ve now come to appreciate the insight you have into your characters, and the freshness of many of your plots. I still have much of your backlist to catch up on, and not all of your oeuvre has worked for me, but I have kept a dozen or so of your books, and very few authors have come close to matching that.

Among those dozen or so books is Dark Angel, originally published in 1994 as a traditional regency, and now reissued in a 2-in-1 volume with Lord Carew’s Bride. It probably sounds fanciful to say so, but if good books are gems, I like to think Dark Angel is a ruby — a hard, cool stone of a color we associate with both hearts and wounds, with gleaming facets and warm depths.

As a friend of mine once pointed out, the plot of Dark Angel is a bit reminiscent of Les Liaisons Dangereuses (the French epistolary novel which has been adapted for the big screen at least three times, as “Dangerous Liaisons,” “Valmont,” and “Cruel Intentions.”). Here, too, women become pawns in a dangerous game of one-upmanship, although the motives of the game players differ.

The novel begins with two young ladies conversing in a carriage as they enter London. Jennifer Winwood and Samantha Newman are cousins, about to make their debuts in society, but in different circumstances. Eighteen-year-old Samantha is nervous about whether she will have any beaux. Twenty-year-old Jennifer is relieved to have no worries on that score. Jennifer is betrothed–albeit unofficially–to Lionel, Viscount Kersey, and has been since she was fifteen.

Jennifer’s debut has been delayed due first to the death of Lionel’s uncle two years earlier, and later to her own grandmother’s passing, but now, after five years of waiting, she is thrilled at the prospect of coming to London, where her betrothal will be officially announced. She could not dream of a handsomer and more wonderful husband than Lionel, and has no interest whatsoever in any other man.

What Jennifer doesn’t know is that two years before, when Lionel was attending his ailing uncle in Northern England, he toyed with the affections of a young countess married to a much older man. When Catherine turned up pregnant, Lionel abandoned her to face the fury of her husband. But Catherine’s grown stepson, Gabriel, came to her aid and accompanied her to Europe, to offer his support until after the birth of Lionel’s daughter.

Now that Catherine no longer needs him, Gabriel has returned to England. Gabriel’s father passed away during Gabriel’s absence, and the young man is now Earl of Thornhill. But Gabriel’s reputation has been all but destroyed. His stepmother never named her seducer, and when Gabriel left England with her, it was widely assumed he himself impregnated his stepmother, and that his actions brought about his father’s death.

Thus, Gabriel is paying for Lionel’s sins. And since to duel with Lionel would only bring further scandal to Catherine’s name, Gabriel has ruled out slapping his glove in Lionel’s face. Nevertheless, he loathes Lionel with the heat of a hundred thousand suns, and would like nothing more than some kind of vengeance.

On their second day in London, Jennifer and Samantha go for a stroll in Hyde Park, and come into Gabriel and his friend Bertie’s view. Gabriel and Bertie admire the beauty of the two young ladies, while Samantha and Jennifer also notice the men. Jennifer compares Gabriel’s attractive darkness to Lionel’s angelic, golden beauty:

“Yes,” she said, “he did look like the devil, did he not? As Lord Kersey looks like an angel. You were quite right to say they are handsome in quite opposite ways, Sam. That gentleman looks like Lucifer. Lord Kersey looks like an angel.”

That Lionel is not an angel of light and Gabriel not a prince of darkness is only the first irony, and also the first of many mistaken impressions Jennifer and Samantha have. But soon enough Gabriel proves he is no angel, either. When he sets eyes on Jennifer again at her come-out and learns she is affianced to Lionel, he decides that she will be the perfect means to revenge.

Gabriel, who like many of your characters, is so lifelike and believable, tells himself he will be doing Jennifer a great favor by enticing her to some indiscretion or scandal that will humiliate Lionel publicly. After all, Lionel already has two mistresses, one of whom had borne him children, and Gabriel knows firsthand how unfeeling Lionel is. Though his conscience protests at the thought of manipulating and deceiving an innocent young woman, Gabriel drowns it in both alcohol and anger at the man who debauched his stepmother.

Jennifer is perhaps not the most powerful piece on this chess board, but she her painful vulnerability renders her very sympathetic. In her eagerness to get to know Lionel, whom she has loved for five years, she is disappointed when her betrothed does not steal a kiss or profess true love, and angry with Gabriel for depriving Lionel of a couple of opportunities to show her affection. Yet despite that anger, she is also susceptible to Gabriel’s overtures of friendship. People keep warning her that Gabriel has a terrible reputation, but she can sense he is not cad enough to have earned it.

Meanwhile, Lionel, a delicious villain if ever there was one, realizes what Gabriel is up to and has a play or two left to make. His pawn is Samantha, who is torn between loyalty to Jennifer and an unwelcome attraction to the golden, beautiful Lionel.

Who will win the “game” between the two men, as Lionel calls it? And what will happen when Jennifer realizes she has been played by them both? Can love emerge from these underhanded maneuvers?

Dark Angel is a rewarding book on many levels. The complex plot is deftly handled, and the themes of revenge vs. moral justice, deceit vs. conscience, naivete vs. cynicism, and immorality vs. redemption, are beautifully realized.

The characters feel so real, and the tension that comes from the reader’s knowledge of all that Jennifer is unaware of mounts and mounts until the story reaches its pinnacle in which one twist comes on the heel of another, and revelation follows revelation.

The second half of the book is so tightly packed with dramatic payoffs that I defy anyone to put the book down for very long during this section. I certainly couldn’t, even though I was rereading it this time and knew how things would turn out.

No book is perfect — Dark Angel did not make me fall in love with any of its characters, and I felt a bit of impatience in the first half — but I find it hard to care about that, since for me, this is surely one of the most original and satisfying books in the traditional regency subgenre. A-.

Sincerely,

Janine

| Mary Balogh’s Website | Kindle | Amazon | nook | BN | Borders |
Fictionwise | Books on Board (epub)

How do I like this book? Let me count the ways. I do like contemporaries and even the occasional romantic suspense but rarely do they combine as well as you’ve done with “Something About You.” And wow, even the cover model kinda looks like she’s wearing the dress you described. And how often does that happen?!

I’m going to be mega lazy after a hard day at work and just borrow your blurb.

FATE HAS THROWN TWO SWORN ENEMIES. . .

Of all the hotel rooms rented by all the adulterous politicians in Chicago, female Assistant U.S. Attorney Cameron Lynde had to choose the one next to 1308, where some hot-and-heavy lovemaking ends in bloodshed. And of all the FBI agents in Illinois, it had to be Special Agent Jack Pallas who gets assigned to this high-profile homicide. The same Jack Pallas who still blames Cameron for a botched crackdown three years ago—and nearly ruining his career…

. . .INTO EACH OTHER’S ARMS

Work with Cameron Lynde? Are they kidding? Maybe, Jack thinks, this is some kind of welcome-back prank after his stint away from Chicago. But it’s no joke: the pair is going to have to put their rocky past behind them and focus on the case at hand. That is, if they can cut back on the razor-sharp jibes—and smother the flame of their sizzling-hot sexual tension…

Jane said the book was good but she didn’t say how good. It’s great. Lessee, a heroine who is smart, acts smart and when she’s told she needs to be under protective custody, she doesn’t fight it with the same old stupid plotting I’ve seen with this kind of novel. She doesn’t think it’s fun to escape her police escort, she agrees to have them come along for a bridal party at a nightclub and ends up telling them all about her friends and the wedding she’s going to be in. They like her and she likes them. She’s good at her job and follows her professional principles even when she has to come to Jack’s rescue. And even after he loses control and tells the world she had her head up her ass during a previous case. Bliss.

And then there’s the hero who is portrayed as being as sinfully delicious as a double fudge chocolate cake with chocolate chips on top. And whipped cream. Jack’s initially not thrilled to have Cameron back in his life – just as she’s not too thrilled with him, but he takes her protection and her involvement in the case seriously and treats her with professionalism. He explains why she needs to be under protective custody instead of just strong arming her then he’s willing to protect her at any cost. Bliss, bliss.

The dialogue is fantastic. Smart, snappy, funny yet realistic. I can’t count the number of times I laughed while reading the book. The scene of the two CPD officers and the two FBI men talking about Cameron’s dating life is a sceam.

“So… for some reason we thought you were the guys assigned to Ms. Lynde’s surveillance. Guess we were mistaken?”

“Nope, you got it right,” Kamin said. “We do the night shift. Nice girl. We talk a lot on the way to the gym.”

“Oh. Then I guess Agent Wilkins and I are just curious why you two are here instead of with her.”

Kamin waved this off. “It’s cool. We did a switcheroo with another cop, see?”

“A switcheroo… right. Remind me again how that works?” Jack asked.

“It’s because she’s got this big date tonight,” Kamin explained.

Jack cocked his head. “A date?”

Phelps chimed in. “Yeah, you know—with Max-the-investment-banker-she-met-on-the-Bloomingdales-escalator.”

“I must’ve missed that one.”

“Oh, it’s a great story,” Kamin assured him. “She crashed into him coming off the escalator and when her shopping bag spilled open, he told her he liked her shoes.”

“Ah… the Meet Cute,” Wilkins said with a grin.

Jack threw him a sharp look. “What did you just say?”

“You know, the Meet Cute.” Wilkins explained. “In romantic comedies, that’s what they call the moment when the man and woman first meet.” He rubbed his chin, thinking this over. “I don’t know, Jack… if she’s had her Meet Cute with another man that does not bode well for you.”

Then, there’s when they’re standing outside Cameron’s house and exchanging information, and awe, at the bachelorette party game going on inside.

“What do you think the pink bags are for?” Wilkins asked. His voice was filled with wonder.

Phelps stood next to him, similarly wide-eyed and awestruck. “It’s a game. Each girl buys a pair of underwear, something she would normally wear herself. The bride has to guess who brought which pair. If the bride guesses wrong, she has to do a shot. If she guesses right, the other girl drinks.”

“Cameron was afraid Amy would think the game was tacky, but the cousins insisted, see?” Kamin said.

Jack glanced over. “You guys sure are getting into all this.”

Phelps grinned. “When a girl like Cameron talks about underwear, you listen.”

“How about you, Jack? Could you do it?” Wilkins asked.

“Do what?”

“Twenty pairs of underwear. Think you could figure out which pair belongs to Cameron?”

Jack had been interrogated at knife-point, gun-point, pretty much at all-points a man could think of, but hell if a question had ever made him squirm as much as that one.

Because now he was thinking about her underwear.

“I don’t see why I’d have any particular insight into that,” he answered gruffly. “Think you could figure it out?”

“No, but I didn’t try to kiss her three nights ago,” Wilkins said.

Jack glared at Kamin and Phelps. “You two tell all sorts of tales, don’t you?” He nodded to Wilkins. “We should get going.”

Wilkins shook his head. “No way. We came to show Cameron those photographs, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Jack pointed to the house. “You can’t seriously be thinking about going in there.”

Wilkins’s eyes sparkled with excitement. “Oh, I’m going in all right. And you are, too, partner.”

“You thought that going into a purse was sacrosanct? Infiltrating a bachelorette party is way beyond that.”

Wilkins rubbed his hands together eagerly. “I know. And I’ll never have an excuse like this again.”

“You’re an FBI agent, Sam,” Jack reminded him.

“I’m also a single man, Jack. And inside that house are twenty gorgeous women who are drinking and showing off their panties. It’s a no-brainer.” He pushed off the car and headed toward the house.

The heroine’s Gay best friend isn’t a stereotypical Gay Best Friend. Thank you for no mention of “Project Runway,” interior decorating (at least in relation to Collin), or squeally moments. The plot just seemed to flow and I didn’t notice your authorial hand jerking the characters’ strings to get them to move as you want them to. Bliss, bliss, bliss.

The villain isn’t a serial killer! So his POV of course doesn’t lovingly detail how much he likes to kill people. Sure, he did commit murder and does need to go down, but I can almost understand the situation in which he found himself and what made him kill. What’s the saying? Everyone could kill under the right circumstances. Then he stays a professional and methodically tries to cover his tracks. It was almost fun to watch him delve into why the crime didn’t have the outcome he’d expected. Still blissful.

Let me mention again how much I enjoy watching Cameron and Jack work this case. Despite a rocky start…

Before he could call her bluff, Cameron grabbed her purse and headed for the door. The hell with her stuff, she’d get it later. “It was nice catching up with you, Agent Pallas. I’m glad to see those three years in Nebraska didn’t make you any less of an asshole.”

She threw open the door and nearly ran into a man standing in the doorway. He wore a well-cut gray suit and tie, appeared younger than Jack, and was African American.

He flashed Cameron a knock-out smile while precariously balancing three Starbucks cups in his hands. “Thanks for getting the door. What’d I miss?”

“I’m storming out. And I just called Agent Pallas an asshole.”

“Sounds like good times. Coffee?” He held the Starbucks out to her. “I’m Agent Wilkins.”

…they quickly start meshing together. They listen to each other, respect each other professionally – now, mull over the other person’s ideas and suggestions and when someone higher on the food chain than the killer is contemplated, there’s no immediate dismissal that “this couldn’t possibly be right.” Cameron does do one slightly silly thing which no one would think might bring a killer to her house one day and because she didn’t go out once and try and track down and bring in the killer, I’ll forgive it. She also ends up doing something Jack calls “fucking brilliant” to aid in capturing the killer. I’m almost in a haze of bliss.

I did end up marking the book down slightly because I just felt the ending kept on going and going. The last chapter felt tacked on and was somewhat of an anticlimax but other than that, this is one book I can totally recommend. A-

~Jayne

This book is the subject of a new Save the Contemporary campaign. Come back tomorrow to hear about the details to win a new iTouch and a bottle of Stags’ Leap Petit Syrah which is a wine featured in the book.

| Julie James’ Website | Kindle | Amazon | Nook | BN | Borders | Fictionwise (eReader/epub) | Books on Board (epub/PDF)

I hope that is your real name. I love it.  Miss Bliss.  Has a very naughty sound to it.  In any event, it wasn’t your name that prompted me to pick up this title. Instead it was a combination of things.  First, an excerpt of your book, Mr. Imperfect appeared at the end of one of the other Superromances I had read, maybe by Molly O’Keefe, maybe by Helen Brenna. I can’t recall as I type up this review.  I enjoyed the excerpt and bought the book and had fun reading the book but you had only a few digital backlist titles and I read them and promptly forgot your name.  Until I saw a blog post at Wendy’s about this librarian book.  I recalled your  name and decided I had to read this librarian story.

I knew right away I was going to enjoy it.  It opened with the heroine and librarian, Rachel Robinson, tending the university library.  If she’s a stereotypical librarian, I wouldn’t know.  I’m not even sure what the librarian stereotypes are.  But if funny, smart mouthed, kind, with a love for vintage clothes are typical librarians, I need to hang out with them more.

A student, dressed in purple boots and looking big, masculine and a little wild shows up in her library. Rachel has no idea who the latest student is.  She knows that he is older and appears arrogant and looks at her as “as if she were part of a female buffet. She got the impression he was already very full but might possibly squeeze in dessert—if it was handed to him on a plate.”   She soon finds out that he is someone famous, a guitarist in a band that “did well”.

Devin Freedman had been lead guitarist and song writer for one of the most popular rock bands of the last couple of decades.  Almost two years ago, Devin collapsed on stage due to drug usage.  His doctor has told Devin that his current lifestyle was going to kill him.  Devin had had enough. Enough of his brother, the lead singer of the band, enough of the band lifestyle, enough of trying to hold the band together when his brother was doing everything to tear it apart and nothing to help Devin stay alive. So Devin walked away and the band dissolved.

Devin is arrogant. He has, as Beyonce would sing, a big ego and he has good reason for it.  He has lived as if he were at the center of a small universe where everyone and everything existed to revolve around him.  It would be hard not to have a big ego, but at the point in his life, he is a curious and fascinating mix of self assuredness and bravado.

“Your mouth doesn’t fit your profession,” he explained. “It’s like seeing something X-rated on the cartoon network.”

He didn’t think to censor himself because he’d been a rock star for seventeen years and never had to. And got a sharp reminder he was no longer in that world when she shut the door in his face.

“Lucky the librarian fantasy never made my top ten,” he told the door.

Rachel has not been living a pale shadow of a life, sleeping in a cold virginal bed awaiting her prince charming. She has a successful and rewarding career, friendships and, yes, even boyfriends. But her life isn’t perfect. Rachel made a hard decision early in her life to give up her baby for adoption when she was a pregnant teen.  It was the one decision that Rachel is sure was right despite the lasting emotional scarring that it has had on her psyche.  The rightness of this decision comes into question when Rachel discovers that her baby is now a teen and enrolled at her college.

This is no coincidence. Mark came to this college with the express intent of looking for his birth mother.  He knows that she is 34 years of age and is a faculty member.  He never once considers Rachel because she doesn’t look thirty four.  Most people mistake her for someone much younger.  This gives Rachel an opportunity to get to know Mark and have him get to know her without mucking it up with the adoption issue.  It’s not the best decision Rachel makes.  In fact, the situation readily spirals out of her control.

Rachel is all about control. In fact, her position as a librarian makes perfect sense. She likes things orderly. She likes to be the one to put them in order, control their outcome and arrangement. She doesn’t have that control with Devin, nor does she have that control with her son. And giving up control, losing herself in someone else, might just be beyond her capability.

She chooses men who she cannot possibly love to have relationships with, knowing that they will inevitably end.  Devin, after a run in with Rachel’s latest ex-boyfriend, calls Rachel “Heartbreaker” and it becomes his nickname for her throughout the book.  But the nickname is more than just an affectionate term.  The term becomes almost a gauge of the health of their relationship. At first, Rachel wants nothing to do with Devin. He’s too arrogant, too full of himself. Devin finds Rachel and her x-rated mouth a well needed distraction in his life. And she’s the one person that seems to look at Devin “without deference or sympathy.”

Rachel and Devin’s relationship is so authentic. Devin’s past is part of the conflict in a real way but does not overshadow the story. He feels like he is not a good risk, not strong enough to be relied upon. But when met with the most important challenge of his life, he rises up to meet it. While it might be a slight spoiler, I had to share a quote from the book that I found incredibly romantic.

All his trials had been preparation, strengthening him to become a man capable of loving a woman who so deserved to be loved—and who might always hold something back.

This is a nuanced romance and Rachel and Devin are vibrant characters. It is easy to see how the two of them fit together as puzzle pieces; both quirky and individual, both with their weaknesses and fears; both with the strong capacity for love. It’s a bit of a tear jerker toward the end, but the emotional aspects of it are well balanced with humor and strong dialogue. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. A-

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased at Amazon
(affiliate link), Kindle (non affiliate), eHarlequin in print (non affiliate link), and eHarlequin in ebook (non affiliate link) or other retailers.

I reviewed a short story of yours in my review of Sindusty I from Dreamspinner Press. It was one of my two favorites of the anthology. I had this to say about it: “I adored this sweet little story. Patrick is a video game designer, working the final kinks out of a game weeks before release. He’s not perfectly sculpted and toned—he’s a dork and kind of soft around the edges. His friends buy him a prostitute for his birthday, just so he’ll get laid. But Jack keeps coming back, “the gift that keeps on giving.” The connection between the characters, the fun they have and the affection between them makes this a gem of a story. Grade: A-”

But I didn’t realize I’d already read a story of yours when I dove into the short (70 pages) “Rules Were Meant to be Broken” from Dreamspinner. I chose it because it’s labeled a BDSM romance and while I think that’s a gross mislabeling (one-time use of handcuffs does NOT make a BDSM romance), I certainly don’t hold that against you because the story was just wonderfully fresh. Aaron has lusted after his best friend for 15 years and has an elaborate set of rules he follows so that Dale doesn’t find out:

“In fact, he’d devised a “Big List of Rules For Hiding That You’re In Love With Your Best Friend” just for this purpose. Rule #4 was: seeing the guy really shouldn’t make your heart beat faster, so just pretend it doesn’t.”

Rule #9 said: you’re not supposed to be jealous of the girls who sleep with your best friend. It was always the hardest rule to follow.

It was hard for me to warm up to Dale. He’s a no-good layabout with no job, no ambition, and indiscriminate taste in women…and apparently in men, too, as Aaron finds out later. It’s that indiscriminate taste that is the cause of him calling Aaron at 3am one morning so Aaron can help him out of the handcuffs one of his bar pickups left him in attached to the bed before she stole his wallet. And Aaron’s reaction to being that close to Dale while he’s freeing him makes Dale realize how much Aaron wants him and Dale acts on that realization. However, by the end of the book I loved Dale and I adored Aaron the whole way through. I loved the quirky secondary characters and the obvious deep friendship between the men, even before the grow biblically closer. But most of all, I loved your voice. The “in love with my best friend for year and YEARS” storyline is trite and can be awful, but you pwned it so beautifully, with such a freshness, I loved the story. Grade: Another A-

Then I moved to “Ganymede,” a short story in the I Do Too anthology by MLR Press (review of the whole anthology forthcoming). This story is incredibly different from the other two of yours I’ve read. If asked, I would have said they had different authors. But again, your voice shines through, even though it’s so different in the other two stories. An American vinter goes to Italy to drop in unannounced on a legendary but retired Italian wine-maker who is experimenting with non-technological ways of making wine, in order to become the Italian’s student — acolyte, even. The story is told in present tense, which threw me, but the language is evocative and exciting, and the characters are brilliantly detailed snapshots of two deeply imagined, beautifully written men. I think the relationship happens a little too quickly, but the lushness of your language and the richly layered characterization and motivation mostly make up for that. I also loved that these men were both (?) older. Certainly the Italian was over 60 probably. The story is just…different, but in such a good way that it makes me excited about your future stories as long as you keep writing. Grade: B+

The question becomes at this point: you’re brilliant with short stories, but what are your longer stories like? Can you sustain that brilliance? All’s Fair in Love and Advertising allowed me to figure this out. Quick answer: Oh, hellz YES!

The book is about 150 pages and Max is a character I should have hated. He’s an advertising genius, a complete workaholic, but not in the grim alpha-hero way. He’s neurotic and melodramatic and completely over-the-top. One of those people who’s impossible to work with but absolutely brilliant. He’s not over his wife leaving him two years previously (and breaking their partnership) and he hides his hurt by “turning gay.” Which should be insulting and obnoxious and awful, but just isn’t, somehow, because it’s just…Max.

He’s competing for an account for Avionics, a flight technology company that needs to up its visibility and therefore its stock value in order to avoid a take-over bid by Omnion, the Evil Corporate Empire. Of course, Max meets Joe, the founder and owner of Avionics and falls for him, hard. But in a completely neurotic, manic, Max-like way.

Again, voice is what carried this story. It was told in deep third person perspective from Max’s perspective. I haven’t laughed out loud at a book so much in a long long time. I was giggling through most of it. Max was maddening and adorable at the same time. In trying to find a quote, I just want to cut and paste the whole thing. But try this. Joe just told Max that he liked his work, and Max, who is a typical New Yorker who can’t get beyond the fact that Joe is from Montana, challenged him to name his favorite:

“You know, I liked the gum thing. That was catchy. And the beer stuff. Everyone likes that. But I think my favorites are the commercials you did for that financial services company, the serious ones with the black-and-white footage and the literary quotes. Gotta admire someone who can work e.e. cummings into a commercial about asset protection.”

Max blinked. That campaign dated from at least ten years ago. It wasn’t one he was generally remembered for, but it happened to be his own personal favorite. He lifted his chin stubbornly. Just because Bennett appreciated his work didn’t make him any less of a yokel; it just made him a yokel with good taste. Any moment now, Max knew, the charm would rub off, and Bennett would show his true, narrow-minded colors.

Max did his best to hurry along the process. “I read your company is headquartered in Montana.”

“We have a small office here in New York. But, yeah, most of the operation is back in Wilcox,” Bennett said. “A small town, but we like it. Great views of the mountains. And we’re one of the biggest employers in the state. So that has its perks.”

“Is that what drew you there? Tax breaks?” Max lifted an eyebrow inquiringly. “Or was it the handy proximity to the local militias?”

Bennett laughed again, but it didn’t have quite the same humor as before. “Naw, no playing at war out in the woods for me. Wilcox is where I grew up. After I retired from the Air Force—” His voice got tighter. “Medical retirement. My jet got shot down in Bosnia. It just made sense to come home. Be near family while I was laid up. I ended up staying put.”

“Oh,” Max said weakly. “I didn’t realize—”

Bennett shrugged. “Hey, all in the past now, right?”

Happily, the sommelier chose that moment to descend upon them. Bennett turned his attention back to the wine list, and Max fidgeted in his seat. There was an uncomfortable feeling in his chest, something he wasn’t used to, something that left him off-kilter. Possibly it was a sense of shame. That would explain why he didn’t recognize it right off the bat.

And that makes Max sound like an asshole — and he IS — but I loved him all the way through and I loved that Joe liked his abrasiveness. And Joe was delicious — I could totally see how he fell for Max and it was obvious what he was feeling and why, even though we never get into his head. And again, the secondary characters were wonderful. For such a short story and the large cast of characters, the characterization was pitch perfect. And I totally did NOT see the twist at the end of the story, which was refreshing. Altogether, I adored this book, devoured it, and will come back to it again and again. Grade: A

And finally, there’s the unfortunately-covered “SPAM! It’s what’s for Christmas”. Ben is a washed-up, unemployed baseball pro with a bum knee. His boyfriend just threw him out and he’s desperate to get him back. Desperate enough to answer an ad for nude male models. Where he meets the delicious photographer, Gavin. Hijinks ensue, but Ben really wants his boyfriend back…he thinks. We don’t see much of Gavin, to be honest, even though what we do see *is* delicious. This is Ben’s book and Ben is…adorable. Trying to make it work, trying to readjust his life after his dreams are destroyed, trying to figure out what he really wants. Again, the tone of the story, Ben’s voice and his characterization, make it something I just couldn’t stop reading. Grade: B+

You’ve got free fiction on your website (bittersweet) and on your Livejournal (a fairy tale retelling with beautiful writing that stretches my disbelief a little bit too much on the plot, but still gets a B grade because the characters are so good). (Oh. Also: a short story in a Ravenous Romance anthology that I refuse to buy or even request. Not even for you. Sorry.)

And sadly, that’s it. You need to write more. And longer. And OMG, if you keep it up, I think K.A. Mitchell’s got a rival in the m/m world (although the beautiful thing is, of course, you’re not rivals. If you both just keep writing, then the world will be a better place and we can all be friends with sunshine and rainbows and iPadsunicorns!).

Best regards,
-Joan/Sarah F.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up this book; humorous romances and regency romances aren’t my two favorite sub-genres. That’s not to say I dislike them; I just tend to favor dark and angsty full-length historicals if given my druthers. I did read your erotic historical Forbidden Shores (written as Jane Lockwood) and gave it a B-, though in retrospect I think I remember it more fondly, closer to a B grade (well, it was hot). I also graded your 2005 straight regency Dedication a B-, though I remember appreciating that it had some unusual elements.

Improper Relations is told in the first person, alternately by the hero and heroine (an aspect of the story I loved). Charlotte Hayden is attending the wedding of her distant cousin (and best friend) Ann Welling to the Earl of Beresford. Charlotte’s voice is sardonic and perhaps a hint bitter; she is distressed to be losing Ann and honestly a bit jealous. She accepts a handkerchief to dry her tears from a handsome gentleman who turns out to be Viscount Shadderly (thereafter referred to as “Shad”), who is himself cousin and friend to the groom. Shad flirts with Charlotte in a rather offhand manner, as befitting his rake status, before announcing that he’s to be wed – to who, he doesn’t know, but his family has decided it’s time he marry. This puts him on level ground with Charlotte, whose family is eager to marry her off.

Their first meeting is unremarkable, as hero-heroine first meetings go, and I liked that about it. Charlotte is attracted to Shad, because he’s handsome. Shad doesn’t seem to be that impressed by Charlotte, but he’s interested enough to pay a call upon her several days later. Charlotte, who could be generally said to be lacking in the social graces department, is less than welcoming, and Shad finds himself intrigued by her “astringent’ personality.

Later that night, at a soiree, Charlotte gets rather drunk (something she does rather shockingly often for a romance heroine), and she and Shad are caught in a compromising position in the garden. Just like that, the two are betrothed.

Shad is more or less okay with the forced betrothal, even if Charlotte’s family is shockingly vulgar and he believes her to be infatuated with his cousin Beresford. Charlotte is less happy at the prospect of being a “brood mare” for a husband whose future fidelity she doubts (as well she should; he pretty much tells her that after she produces an heir they can each go their own way, discreetly, of course).

The plot of Improper Relations is nothing new – the dowdy heroine, the handsome, wicked hero, and the forced marriage have been historical romance novel staples for as long as I can remember. The prose is where this book really shines. I bookmarked numerous pages as I read, passages that featured sparkling, funny dialogue and observations from the characters.

Charlotte’s mother frequently speaks in italics and capitals that emphasize her penchant for melodrama:

“Charlotte, you may leave to reflect upon your Most Miserable Lack of Filial Affection.”

Then there is the mortifying conversation that Shad has to conduct with Beresford, who is finding Ann less than eager to perform her marital duties:

I consider my next words carefully. ‘ Possibly you should consider her pleasure.’

‘Oh, I don’t think…a gentlewoman, you know.’

Keeping a careful eye on the walking stick, I ask a few discreet questions and discover that Beresford is blissfully ignorant of the female anatomy. I take it upon myself to share what I know. He is startled and upset by my revelation, in much the same way, I imagine, that our forebears discovered that the earth revolved around the sun.

‘Every woman?’ he says with great suspicion. I wonder if he conducts a mental inventory of all the females he has ever known. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, every woman.’

‘And who told you this?’

‘A woman in Italy. She was my first mistress. She married a sausage-maker after we sailed.’

‘A sausage-maker!’ Beresford echoes. His universe is in chaos. ‘An Italian.’

‘Yes.’

He turns to me in triumph. ‘Well, of course, that explains it. She was a foreigner. So it can’t possibly be something Englishwomen have.’

‘They do. Every one of them.’

He looks troubled and pokes at the ground with his walking stick. ‘Even – even my mother?’

Mostly I love the interplay between Shad and Charlotte themselves:

“Is she your mistress?”

“That’s a very indiscreet question to ask on our wedding day.”

I shrug. “Very well. I’ll ask you tomorrow.”

Shad and Charlotte’s early marriage has its moments of success – they are compatible in bed – but is marred by some problems as well. There is a discarded mistress of Beresford’s that Charlotte suspects belongs to Shad, and Shad has two wards who are commonly assumed to be his by-blows. Charlotte actually takes both of these situations with a fair amount of equanimity, to her credit. Shad has more of a problem controlling his jealousy, the vast majority of which is quite irrational and baseless. This got to be a bit of an issue for me, actually – Shad’s continual suspicion, even after being proven wrong numerous times, began to make him seem like a jerk who was also possibly a bit dim. Charlotte doesn’t help, by keeping secrets from Shad, but in her defense they are not her secrets, and she has good reason for not being forthright with him.

In addition to their own self-sabotaging, Shad and Charlotte’s marriage is threatened by the discord between Ann and Beresford. Ann turns out to be rather interesting, a more fully-realized type of secondary character than typically found in romance novels. There are early signals from Charlotte’s perspective that however much Charlotte adores her, Ann is kind of self-absorbed and possibly not the best friend she could be. But she never turns into a full-fledged villain; on the contrary, she manages to be fairly sympathetic even when she’s being selfish and immature. I kind of liked her. (Beresford, on the other hand, is pretty much just a boor, though his friendship with Shad seems to be sincere enough, at least.)

I liked Charlotte a lot; she’s not always wise but her actions follow a certain internal logic. Plus, I like a girl who enjoys her alcohol. I liked Shad, too, in spite of his jealousy issues; he turns out to be a bit of a nurturer and a collector of oddball souls.

I really enjoyed Improper Relations and am looking forward to trying your other humorous regencies, The Rules of Gentility and A Most Lamentable Comedy. My grade for this one is an A-.

Best regards,

Jennie

This book can be purchased at Amazon beginning February 18, 2010 (affiliate link). No ebook links yet.

I was given the opportunity to read The Naked Edge several months ago. I was initially reluctant because I have been all over the map with the series. The heroines, in particular, often struck me as foolish. I had some problems with the realism of the stories despite the fact that I know you are an investigative journalist and the stories are based on personal experience and detailed research. Compounding this was the fact that the book featured a virgin heroine, a rake hero, and treatment of a minority culture, Native Americans.

Katherine “Kat” James is an environmental reporter with Denver’s Independent Investigation Team, a prestigious team of investigative journalists.  Kat is half Navajo. Her ties to the Native American community aren’t solely by blood. In fact, her mother and blood family see only the white part of Kat’s ancestry. But because of the influence of Kat’s grandmother, Kat’s belief system is intricately tied to the spirituality of the Lakotas and the Navajos. She is unapologetic about her life choices, including her desire to wait to share her body with someone who also shares her heart.

She willed herself to meet his gaze straight on. “I decided a long time ago that I would never be any man’s conquest, so I don’t date. I’ve never been . . . with a man, and I won’t be until I fi nd the one who wants to be a part of my life and isn’t just looking for a one-night stand. So unless you want lots of children, love mutton stew, and enjoy spending your summer vacations in one-hundred-fourteen-degree heat in a two-room hogaan without electricity or running water, we shouldn’t even start down that road.”

Gabriel Rossiter is Kat’s opposite. He has no belief system. Something in his past shattered his belief in himself and in others. Like Kat, he’s strongly attached to the environment, having been an outdoor enthusiast all of his life and a Boulder Mountain Parks Ranger for the last eight years. About the only thing that Gabriel lives for right now is the adrenaline fix– climbing the impossible mountains, rafting the rapids, and screwing women. His sexual interactions are emotionless. Gabe, it appears, is interested in only Gabe. But this is a front because Gabe barely likes himself; doesn’t respect himself.

When he first meets Kat, he’s attracted to her and begins his pursuit. After acquiescing to have lunch with him, Kat straightforwardly tells Gabe that she isn’t into casual sex and that she is looking for a partner in her life to have a family with. Gabe responds to this by telling her that she is being presumptuous though she is correct in her assessment that he wants to sleep with her and taking her on dates is merely a prelude to that.

Kat has a strong attraction for Gabe and circumstances bring them together as Kat and Gabe begin to investigate the death of her grandfather and the possible looting of artifacts in the Mesa Butte territory. Kat begins to see Gabe’s love for nature, his respect for the tribal traditions, his deference for the elders. Gabe treats Kat like a precious jewel, not by trying to protect her but rather by not pushing her or mocking her beliefs.

I found the story to be very hot, much more so than previous books. I wondered whether this was due in part to the way in which Gabe was depicted and the fact that many of the sex scenes were written from his point of view.

One thing that I really liked was the portrayal of Kat’s Native American heritage. It was not just an issue of ethnicity for Kat, but the traditions and beliefs of the Lakota and Navajo were deeply embedded into her way of life. Both Kat and Gabe treat this is normal. It is not Other to either of them. The culture is presented matter of fact, without foreignness.

As the relationship with Gabe progresses, you see Kat accept that she could be hurt by this man, but there is something she wants and is willing to take the risk. And through Kat’s eyes, Gabe began to see himself as a man of worth, better than he thought himself to be.

The suspense plot is woven throughout the story. As Gabe and Kat begin to uncover more clues, they become targets. This danger to their lives pushes the two closer together in proximity, but I never felt that the danger became the substitute for the two learning the hearts of the other.

The ending is incredibly romantic, filled with an unsuspected villian, true jeopardy, and a big sacrificial gesture. By the end, I was ready for the baby filled epilogue.

There was a lot that could go wrong in this book. Yet, from the very beginning I was drawn in. The characters were rich. The quiet dignity of Kat juxtaposed against the reckless vulnerability of Gabe was refreshing and moving. The portrayal of the Native American culture as something beyond ethnicity into a belief system was tenderly drawn. When I was done with the book, I bemoaned that there was no one to talk about it with.

The story will be out soon (March 2) and I hope that it is received well because it’s a book I’d love to talk about with a group of people. Berkley has volunteered to give away five of these books so that others can read and enjoy before the official release date. This contest will run until Wednesday at 5:00 pm CST so that we can get the books out in the mail right away. Drop a comment to enter.

Best regards,

Jane
This book can be purchased at Amazon (affiliate link), Kindle (non affiliate), Barnes and Noble (non affiliate link), nook (non affiliate link), or other etailers.

This anthology is composed of three erotic contemporary stories and one erotic paranormal, similar to the previous anthology, Unlaced. Once again, the stories are loosely joined by the use of a corset in each of them, but the device is tangential to what’s happening in the individual stories, not unlike many of the other anthologies out there.

No Strings Attached by Jaci Burton.

Ella Hicks is the CEO of Hicks Construction, a company she built with her husband James, and took the helm when he died five years ago. She’s made a success of her company, and leaned on a particular friend and sometimes rival, Clay Mansfield, for business advice. Ella has spent so much time making Hicks Construction a powerhouse that her sex life went to the grave with her husband. Huh…too morbid? This story definitely isn’t. Ella realizes that she needs to do something to get herself out of this anti-social and anti-sex rut, especially since she’s been spending more time eyeing Clay’s ass than worrying about building codes. She schedules a vacation in an exotic locale, hoping to find rest, relaxation, and an anonymous partner for some meaningless, yet satisfying sex. Not exactly the smartest thing for a woman to be alone and on the prowl, and this is where Clay comes in.

Clay Mansfield has realized that Ella is more than his good friend’s widow. Sure, Clay deludes himself into thinking he’s going on vacation in the same spot as Ella just to make sure she doesn’t get herself into trouble, but that thought lasts half a second, or at least until he sees Ella at the pool:

Clay finally exhaled. It was Ella. Holy shit. She sure looked a lot different in a bikini than she did in boots, jeans and a work shirt.

He almost felt guilty over the tightening of his cock.

Almost.

Clay and Ella give each other what they need: a guiltless fling that goes deeper than just a zipless fuck (apologies to Erica Jong), providing them with a level of satisfaction that wouldn’t otherwise be reached. One of the caveats of this relationship is that it won’t go beyond the vacation; once they’re back in Oklahoma, it’s back to business as usual. Delightfully, it’s Clay that realizes there’s no “usual” much faster than Ella. The depth of characters and relationships was impressive for such a short story. I never felt that Ella and Clay’s interaction was forced, or that there was some sort of strange hook to make everything work. This was an enjoyable read. A-

La Petite Mort by Jasmine Haynes

I hate making a comparison, but in an anthology, I think it’s inevitable, especially when two straight erotic contemporaries are put one after the other. This story struck me as strange, with a dash of sad and dark thrown into the mix. Sophia, a former model currently working as a VP at Caprice, a high end cosmetics company, has a polyp on her uterus that needs to be removed and biopsied. Sophia has no close friends, no relatives and no one to turn to to discuss her fear that the polyp might be cancerous. Ford Connelly, the CEO of Caprice, knows that Sophia is off her game when she barely makes it through a presentation, and brings her into his office to confront her.

While I might be able to overlook a dark and slightly sad beginning, I couldn’t ignore that the characters crossed a major line when Ford essentially forced Sophia into telling him why she needed a day off. Ford and Sophia’s prior interactions had been purely on a business level, and I know it was important to have Sophia open up, but the way it was done stuck in my craw. From here, the story continues into uncomfortable territory. Ford asks Sophia if she could do anything at all, what would it be…and yep, it’s a MMF threesome. Ford has the hots for Sophia (it’s mutual) and wants to make this happen for her, so he sets it up for her the night before her surgery. Yeah, she’s gonna do two men before uterine surgery. In addition, guy number two was such an oddball; more of an acquaintance of Ford’s than a friend. This story was out of my comfort zone due to the awkward and contrived set up. D

Honor Bound by Joey W. Hill

I am, without a doubt, a huge Joey W. Hill fan. That said, I felt that Controlled Response, the contribution to the prior anthology, was tough to swallow for a variety of reasons. Honor Bound was the complete opposite, both a strong and erotic love story combined with a woman regaining her sense of self through finding love. We’re back with the Kensington & Associates gang, and this time it’s Peter’s story, the soldier who loves breasts for those of you that read the last anthology (I really need to get my hands on Matt Kensington’s story…). But in truth, this story is just as much about Dana as it is about Peter. Dana is a Sargent, about to be shipped out to Iraq, when she decides to spend her last night at The Zone, and upscale BDSM club that has appeared in many of Ms. Hill’s other stories. Peter is able to touch Dana on a deeper level than any other Dom before. And Dana is the submissive Peter has been searching for. Peter catches her in the airport as Dana is about to ship out, and she extracts a promise that Peter will write to her, but she isn’t going to write back.

Dana is injured in combat, and when Peter returns from Afghanistan he makes it his mission to get her to realize that she can’t give up on life, or on him, as a result of her injuries. Dana’s healing odyssey is great to read. Peter is her taskmaster, her rock and her friend – whatever she needs, while still being true to his Dom self. One of the things that I had a tough time with was the introduction of a secondary character dying of AIDS. I feel that Ms. Hill uses a desperate secondary character to highlight something special about either the hero or heroine in many of her stories, and this was a totally unnecessary detour in Honor Bound. The growth of Dana and Peter’s relationship was strong enough to hold it’s own. B+

Rhio’s Dancer by Denise Rossetti

I gotta be honest here: it’s very strange to read three contemporaries and have a paranormal thrown in there at the end. It actually took me about 15 pages to get into the story, but once I managed to get past my initial hesitation, this story was delightful. Captain Rhiomard made a brief appearance in the prior anthology, and I’m happy to see him get his own story, because after reading it, he really deserved it. Rhio is the Queen’s captain of the guard, and has been a warrior for a long time. Caracole’s Queen Sikhara is in negotiations with the Trinitarian Republic and their ambassador. The Trinitarians are slavemasters that take what they want by force, and Rhio is on the lookout for a trap, which he suspects is in the form of Dancer, the woman and warrior that is the evenings entertainment. Rhio is taken with her immediately, and realizes that he will have to win her trust.

“Where were you born?”

“What has that—?” Catching his eye, she broke off. “In the southern desert beyond the Trinitarian border.”

“How long have you been a slave?”

“Fifteen years, four months and twenty days.”

“How old are you now?”

“Thirty.”

Rhio glanced up from his notes in time to catch the shiver she couldn’t prevent. “I ask you again, Dancer. Are you cold?”

She hesitated. “A little.”

Without a word, he rose and went to light the fire. Hell, she’d walked all the way from the royal chambers barefoot without a word of complaint. He should have done it the moment they entered the building.

Rhio is patient, honest, and recognizes Amae for the warrior and strong soul she is. Amae respects and is attracted at the most visceral level to the warrior in Rhio. I freely admit that the initial scenes of this story weren’t a huge hook for me, but once I got into it, the story was a quick and very enjoyable read. B+

~Shuzluva
This book can be purchased at Amazon
(affiliate link), Kindle (non affiliate), BN (non affiliate link due to laziness), and nook (non affiliate link).

Dear Ms. Singh:

I’m not certain that I’ll be able to adequately articulate why I enjoyed this book so much but I did. Since the time that I received the book up in its pre-published form I have read it five times. I was forced (ha ha) to read it one more time to polish up this review.

This story is a continuation of Angel’s Blood where Raphael and Elena first meet. Elena is a Guild Hunter who ordinarily tracks and hunts vampires for the Guild.  Elena has scent discrimination skills and tracks vampires by their unique and individual scent.  Raphael hired Elena to track an archangel who had gone mad and was killing a number women across the city of New York. During their time together, Raphael and Elena fell in love and when Elena was mortally wounded, Raphael’s body produced ambrosia, a once in a lifetime event, that turned Elena from human to angel.

Archangel’s Kiss starts up a little after Angel’s Blood. A full year plus has passed.  Elena had been in a healing coma and she is newly angelic. In this story, we see Elena struggle in her transition from human to angel.  She doesn’t know the first thing about being an angel and I do mean the first thing, such as extending her wings from her body.  Raphael takes her to the Refuge, a place that only angels can reach (although vampire servants are brought there by angels).  At the Refuge, Elena at 10 school with all the angel children to learn about the history of Angels and how to hold her wings off the ground and eventually she’ll learn how to fly.

Elena  must learn quickly however because Raphael has received an invitation for the two of them to attend a ball in Elena’s honor by Lijuan, the oldest of the archangels.   This is no social event but rather a measure of Raphael’s power and a display of Lijuan’s.  Rumors abound that Lijuan is making the dead walk as the living.

So while Elena must learn to execute the most rudimentary angelic tasks such as flying she must also learn how to fight in her new body. Raphael asks members of his protective cadre, the Seven, to train her in combat.

The Refuge becomes tainted when one of Raphael’s angels is taken and tortured. Another angelic family is targeted when their child is kidnapped. Other angelic factions are being set against one another.  Initially the events seem random, or at worst, pointed toward implicating Elena.  As events escalate, Raphael sees this as a power play.   There is a power void left when Raphael killed the mad archangel in Angel’s Blood, and someone is positioning to fill that void.  Angels recognize nothing but power.

Amongst this interesting mystery plot is the continuation of the romance of Raphael and Elena. Both are learning to navigate the parameters of their new relationship. Elena is struggling to find her new identity and not be overwhelmed by Raphael.  Raphael is afraid of Elena’s fragility and contemplates his own mortality because Elena’s humanity has weakened him in some ways and strengthened him in others.

We learn more about both Raphael and Elena’s past.  What fears Raphael has for his own sanity and what demons have haunted Elena.  The worldbuilding is detailed.  Angelic houses are built to accommodate angels with wide doorways and complete drop offs.  The Refuge is a place that is only accessible to those with wings.  When you take us to China, I can almost smell the scent of the cherry blossoms.  And the book is full of beautiful people of all shades and ethnicities.

There’s some interesting and almost chilling foreshadowing when it comes to Ilium, one of Raphael’s Seven.  Elena and Ilium get along quite well and one of the other Seven suggests that Elena and Ilium’s friendship might end in Ilium’s death if he falls in love with her.  There’s a very sexy exchange between Raphael and Elena when Raphael refuses to allow Ilium to gift Elena with knives:

Teeth grazed over her lips. “Know this Elena—you’ll never wear another man’s knife.”

She blinked. “He wanted to give me a blade? What’s wrong with that?”

“Blades,” he whispered, “and sheaths go together. And your sheath will only ever hold my blade.”

There is a hum of sexual tension that glides just under the text.  Raphael is waiting for Elena to fly because then she will be truly strong enough for them to mate as equals.  Before, when Elena was human, Raphael had to hold back or he would have killed her with his strength, but now that she is angel like him, he can let go.  And so Raphael waits.  The non consummation is sometimes exponentially more sexy than the act itself.

This is a full book.  I was surprised that we were given a resolution to the Lijuan issue.  It almost seemed like the story had a bonus with by tackling the issue of Lijuan and her fetish with the dead.  I’m so intrigued by this world, so captivated by Raphael and Elena, and Raphael’s Seven, that I simply cannot wait until the next Angel book.  I think your series may do for Angels what Feehan did for vampires.  A-

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased at Amazon (affiliate link), Kindle (non affiliate link), BooksonBoard (non affiliate link), or other etailers.

Though the classification of your first book, Outlander, as a romance has apparently been a bone of contention for you, I have to say that it was Outlander that started me on romance reading 15 years ago. I had joined a mail-order book club, one of those where you get nine books for a penny and then have to commit to buying a certain number of books over a certain period of time. Leafing through their catalog one day, I came upon an offer for the first three books in your Outlander series: Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber and Voyager at a special price. I don’t remember what hooked me – the description of the plot or the possibility of knocking three books off of my commitment at once. In any case, I ordered them, and my life as a reader changed.

I was hooked on Outlander from page 1; I cried buckets at the end of Dragonfly in Amber when Jamie and Claire parted, and was incredibly grateful that I had Voyager at the ready to start immediately after finishing the second book. In fact, I had to flip to Jamie and Claire’s reunion in Voyager, and then go back and read the first 300 or so pages; yes, I knew I was “ruining” it for myself but I would not have been able to function otherwise.

These books got me started on romance; I began to try to recreate the incredible reading experience I had with them. Easier said than done, I soon found, but I did end up, through much trial and error (The Flame and the Flower…shudder) finding other books in the genre that I loved. So even if Outlander is not a romance, I have it to thank for that.

Meanwhile, after finishing Voyager, I had three long years to wait for Drums of Autumn to come out (and I remember the day I bought that book; strange, when I can’t remember what happened last week!), and another four years for each successive book in the series. Which brings me to 2009, and the release of An Echo in the Bone.

My experience of this series has changed as the series itself has evolved – I no longer devour each book the minute it comes out. The books have gotten longer, and the storylines more complex. I bought An Echo in the Bone within a week of its release, but it took me until January 1 to finish (it’s a bit over 800 pages). This wasn’t a reflection on the quality of the book; some of it was merely logistical (the book was too heavy to tote everywhere, especially after I broke my wrist at the end of November). I think there’s also often a psychological factor related to how long it takes me to finish long, complex books; when I want to read in bed for 10 minutes before turning the light out, picking up a tome like An Echo in the Bone and trying to get back into the complicated story and (seeming) cast of thousands just feels like too much work.

A word about that complicated story and huge cast of characters: I have very little memory retention for what I read any more. I used to have an excellent memory, but that all changed around age 30, and I’m 10 years past that now. I have trouble remembering the plots of books I read and loved in 2009. So it goes without saying that there are huge holes in my memory where important plot points of previous books in this series should be. Since it took me so long to read, I actually forgot plot points from earlier in An Echo in the Bone by the time I was halfway through reading it. It’s sad, I know. I would actually love to find decent synopses of the entire series somewhere. I should check out The Outlandish Companion to see which books it synopsizes. It’s actually the later books I have more of a problem with; I remember the first two pretty well.

Okay, to end this digression and get back to An Echo in the Bone – I liked it a lot. I wasn’t sure I would, because honestly, the previous two books in the series, The Fiery Cross and A Breath of Snow and Ashes were uneven for me. I particularly recall A Breath of Snow and Ashes as feeling like it was comprised of bits of thrilling action interspersed with hundreds of pages of boring minutiae about colonial rural life. I still gave the book a B+, but it’s my least favorite of the series, so I did approach An Echo in the Bone with some apprehension.

I needn’t have worried – the quotient of thrilling action in this book is quite high. I’m very impressed with that; it seems like quite a feat to write 800 pages and not have, in my opinion, any notable stretches where the story lags. I think it helps enormously that the story follows quite a few different characters. Outlander was told in the first person from Claire’s point of view; I want to say that all the subsequent books have added other perspectives, but my sense (I’d have to look back at the books themselves to be sure) is that each book has had a wider scope in terms of the number of characters that are given voice and the time spent in their POVs (although only Claire’s is first-person; the others are third-person). In An Echo in the Bone, in addition to Claire, we get inside the heads of Jamie, Brianna, Roger, Jamie’s nephew Ian, Lord John Grey, his stepson (and Jamie’s secret illegitimate son) William, a young Quaker named Rachel Hunter, and perhaps a few others I’m forgetting.

I appreciate this for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that after seven books, I have a bit of Claire-fatigue. I don’t dislike Claire, exactly…but I don’t like her a lot either, at this point. She’s hard for me to warm up to as a reader, because she doesn’t show very much vulnerability and at times she seems a little too pleased with herself. I feel bad saying this, in part because it feels vaguely anti-feminist (I think to some degree I am indicting her for not being feminine enough, for being so darn capable and in charge) and in part because it just feels wrong to say that I don’t really like the heroine of what is one of my favorite series of all time. But there you have it.

(For what it’s worth, Brianna has the same effect on me; she’s definitely her mother’s daughter.)

So, the plot. The modern part of An Echo in the Bone takes place Scotland in 1980; Roger and Brianna have returned from the past, a return necessitated by their daughter’s heart condition. Amanda is fine now, having had surgery in Boston, and the family settles into Lallybroch, the ancient family homestead that was Jamie Fraser’s childhood home. The children, Mandy and Jem, adjust to modern life well, but Brianna misses her parents, and Roger feels at loose ends back in the 20th century. Their lives are eventually disrupted by a very unexpected visitor, and their family is threatened by an enemy whose motives remain unclear even by the end of the book.

The 18th century part (which cover from about 1776 to 1778) chiefly follows Jamie and Claire as they leave their home at Fraser’s Ridge, preparing to travel back to Scotland to deal with unfinished business, both personal and professional (Jamie wants to retrieve a printing press he has in Edinburgh; he intends to use it to print seditious pamphlets back in America). The trip is delayed and beset by so many of the usual sorts of calamities that Jamie and Claire regularly seem to confront in these books (their ship is fired upon and then commandeered, for one), I began to think they wouldn’t reach Scotland at all in this book (eventually, they do).

Lord John Grey’s stepson William, who is of course Jamie’s secret illegitimate son, is featured extensively for the first time, and he’s a very appealing character. He’s young and raw, but he has the strong sense of honor that both Jamie and John share, and a strong desire to acquit himself well in the British military as the conflict in America deepens. He’s attracted to Rachel Hunter, a young Quaker whom he encounters when injured. He reminded me of a younger (English) Jamie crossed with a younger (straight) John, and that’s a good thing.

Ian, Jamie’s nephew, continues to mature in this book; he’s involved in an unavoidable tragedy early in the book that haunts him for the rest of the story. He also becomes enamored of Rachel (as is typical in this series, Rachel, Ian and William’s paths cross so often you’d swear they were confined to small village they shared with only a couple of dozen other people, rather than roaming all over the colonies peopled by a couple of million). But Ian also has to reconcile his feelings for his first wife, an Mohawk Indian whom he encounters along with her new husband. I’ve had a soft spot for young Ian since he first appeared in Voyager, and really want to see him happy – he’s been put through the wringer over the past few books.

We also get to visit familiar and well-loved characters such as Jamie’s adopted son Fergus and his wife Marsali (who herself is Jamie’s stepdaughter from his marriage to Laoghaire); a subplot involving a medical emergency for Fergus and Marsali’s son Henri-Christian, who suffers from a form of dwarfism, is pretty engrossing. (I do like the medical facts you include in these books; they are generally described in layman’s terms so I feel like I’m learning something while being just lurid enough to entertain.)

As I mentioned above, I had trouble keeping track of some of events in the book simply because the story is so long and byzantine. There were some characters whose purpose in the story was unclear to me, even at book’s end. These characters were chiefly related to an espionage (I guess?) subplot which I assume will play out in future books. But their appearances were so few and far between and the scenes involving them were so murky, the existence of the subplot felt pointless, at least for me. I won’t remember any of this in the next book because I hardly understood it in this one. (This is causing me to muse that you aren’t much given to the sort of awkward info-dump exposition that some other authors who write series indulge in. I’m mostly quite glad about that, because awkward info-dumps are well, awkward and break up the flow of the narrative. On the other hand, a few more reminders in the text refreshing my memory about characters and events long forgotten wouldn’t be amiss.)

I mentioned the characters running into each other; that and other improbable coincidences are hallmarks of your books, and I can see why some readers might roll their eyes occasionally at them. On the other hand, there is, of course, a pretty strong paranormal element that forms the bedrock of this series; somehow that makes story elements that aren’t exactly realistic more palatable to me as a reader. I rather enjoy all the opportunities various characters have to exclaim, “You!” in surprise when encountering each other unexpectedly in the course of the story.

My chief criticism of An Echo in the Bone has to do with a development late in the book that I thoroughly disapproved of. I don’t want to spoil it, but I will say that it did not feel true to the characters, and instead felt as if it were a cheap manipulation of those characters for the purpose of creating conflict. Though it did not change my opinion of the book that much over all, I kind of dread having to deal with the consequences of this development in the next book.

Still and all, An Echo in the Bone is an excellent addition to the series. My grade is an A-.

Best regards,

Jennie

This book can be purchased at Amazon (affiliate link), Kindle (non affiliate link), Books on Board (non affiliate link) or other etailers.

I read Playing With Fire when it came out in 2006 and enjoyed it, enough to hope that there would be a sequel. I realize that the book was subtitled Tales of an Extraordinary Girl, and wasn’t sure how much mileage you’d get out of a single character romance. I also didn’t think that it would take FOUR YEARS for a sequel to show up. Please note: it was worth the wait.

Belle Jamison’s power over the four elements wasn’t a welcome gift; rather it was a surprise slipped into her latte by a scientist determined to see if his formula would work. It did, and now that Belle has her powers, she’s working with the good guys (PSI, or Paranormal Studies and Investigations) to catch scrims (supernatural criminals, of course) with her gorgeous hunk of a man, Rome Masters. Belle is planning her wedding, working as an agent, and trying to figure out what’s going on with her friends when her already crazy world is nearly blown to bits: While out on a mission, Rome has all of his memories of his life with Belle stolen. It’s up to Belle to make Rome remember her, keep Rome’s ex-wife from winning him back, catch the bad guys, plan her wedding and save the day.

This book is written like a graphic novel, without the graphics. It’s a superhero cartoon on the written page, with hilarious, even borderline ridiculous, references like the “nighty-night cocktail” (knockout drug), OASS (Observation and Application of Supernatural Studies – the bad guys, hah), and nicknames like Pretty Boy and Memory Man. It’s written in first person, from Belle’s point of view, but it works because of the verve, sarcasm and winning demeanor that is Belle herself. She may have superpowers, but Belle is in no way a Mary Sue. All of her thoughts, feelings and emotions are on display since the reader is in her head. Nothing feels disjointed, clunky or like an info dump; the first person works here as streamlined storytelling, and Belle’s voice clearly comes through in every description, scene and dialogue exchange. I was pleasantly surprised that I could really feel emotions (both sexual and non-sexual) and experience the chemistry between Belle and Rome. The book is fast-paced and the dialogue is a lot of fun, like this exchange between Belle and Cody, another agent:

“All right. Hop a flight, but stay in contact with me. I want to know what you know, when you know it. I’ll expect daily updates,” I added so that he couldn’t feign ignorance later.

He saluted me, the smart-ass. “Aye-aye, Captain. That was my plan, anyway. John and I already talked.”

Of course they had. John might have told me I was in charge of this case – to keep me from threatening to quit, again, I’m sure – but I knew the truth. Even though I held the title of Special Agent in Charge, Cody and Rome were the ones calling the shots. In John’s eyes, at least. Still, I planned to do things my way.

Belle wants to take charge of something, and prove herself to pretty much everyone around her; partly because she doesn’t really believe in herself. While this may be a fun, light story, Belle experiences plenty of growth and really takes the time to question and examine her friends, her lover and herself.

Because there is such a cartoonish quality to the worldbuilding, the book could have easily veered into the ridiculous. But every time there was a superhero fight or any sort of action it felt real, people were hurt (both mentally and physically), there were repercussions and fallout. This line from Pixar’s The Incredibles kept coming to mind (in Holly Hunter’s voice, please):

Remember the bad guys on the shows you used to watch on Saturday mornings? Well, these guys aren’t like those guys. They won’t exercise restraint because you are children. They will kill you if they get the chance. Do not give them that chance.

Playing with Fire was fun, but Twice as Hot was so much more in terms of character growth, emotion and intensity. I’m pleased that Belle and Rome came back for a second round. A-.

~Shuzluva

This book can be purchased at Amazon, Kindle, or other retailers although I can’t seem to find any buy links at Harlequin, Fictionwise, etc. ??.

This book was provided to the reviewer by either the author or publisher. The reviewer did not pay for this book but received it free.

Dear readers,

A few months ago, I read the first volume in this wonderful series by Fumi Yoshinaga. The premise is deceptively simple: What would happen if a plague wiped out the majority of the male population in Tokugawa era Japan? How would that affect Japanese society and culture? The answer proved to be thoroughly engrossing and fascinating.

At the end of the previous volume, we were introduced to the newest shogun to ascend the title, Yoshimune. Unlike her predecessors, Yoshimune has very strong opinions about how the country should be run, particularly with regards to its financial sector. She’s strict and frugal, and I thought she was an absolutely awesome interpretation of one of the Japan’s most beloved historical figures. Volume 1 ended with Yoshimune delving into the history of the Redface Pox and how it changed the course of Japan forever.

Volume 2 opens several decades before, when the Redface Pox was beginning to spread through Japan and before Yoshimune assumed the title of shogun. In this early pages, we witness the death of Iemitsu, the third Tokugawa shogun, at the hands of the plague. For a bit of historical context, such an event would have catastrophic had it happened in reality. As being only the third shogun, it was his task to continue solidifying Tokugawa rule. His death in such a precarious time would have been disastrous.

In the pages of Ōoku, this is a fact that hangs over everyone. You see, Iemitsu had no interest in women much to the dismay of his nursemaid-turned-attendant, Lady Kasuga, and left no heir. With the death of the last male shogun and no claimant to the title, the country was left without a ruler. Considering the chaos that consumed Japan while the Tokugawa clan fought to gain control of the country, everyone dreads what would happen if the general populace were to find out what had happened.

Several years after Iemitsu’s death, the monk Arikoto travels to Edo castle to present himself to the shogun before assuming his new role as an abbot. Unfortunately, he soon finds himself held hostage in the castle, barred from leaving. And it is here that he learns the truth: Iemitsu died six years ago, a fact that was kept secret from everyone and the person who sits in his place now is his illegitimate daughter. It is a masquerade carried out for one purpose alone — for Iemitsu’s daughter to live long enough to conceive and give birth to a male heir, who will then be a legitimate bearer of the shogun title. The reason why Arikoto has been barred from leaving the castle is because Lady Kasuga intends for him to enter the Ooku and become a member of the meager harem to encourage Iemitsu’s daughter to carry out her duty.

If I thought the first volume was amazing, the second volume matches that and goes beyond. Desperate times lead to desperate actions and while I have no doubts that Lady Kasuga’s motives for taking Iemitsu’s daughter and having her assume the identity of her father were less than stellar, it doesn’t change the fact that it was one way to keep the country under orderly rule. Japan was already in chaos due to the Redface Pox. Society was already facing upheaval because of the large numbers of men dying; to add the destruction of shogunate rule after such a short period of time would have been more than the country could have beared.

At the same time, we also see how such measures completely destroyed the people involved in its schemes. Despite being of noble birth, Arikoto wanted nothing more than to be a monk so he could bring succor and peace to the general populace. But even more so, my heart wrenches for Iemitsu’s daughter — in order to fulfill Lady Kasuga’s plan, she’s had to throw away her femininity and be forced to assume that of a man. She doesn’t even have her own name anymore; people call her Iemitsu, which is sure to be damaging. No one cares for her as a person either. They only care for the fact that one day she will hopefully bear them a son who can bring back the order they’re used to having.

Much of the plot in this volume delves into the ways people cope. Arikoto bears it as best he can, with the gentle strength that is his trademark. But there is doubt that deep inside, he is bitter and angry at what has happened to him, particularly when it becomes apparent that his noble family has abandoned him to this fate. Along those lines, Iemitsu is angry and bad-tempered, unleashing it upon everyone around her. But deep inside, she is deeply hurt and wounded and terribly sad. It is a love story that may not fit the traditional definition as such, but it is one nonetheless.

In this volume, we also learn the origins of the customs we were introduced in the previous one, such as why the Ōoku exists and why the secret swain meets the fate he does. It was interesting to see how such things get altered from their actual origin to the ritualized practice we saw demonstrated in volume 1. The origin of the secret swain, for example, was horrifying and yet all too believable for me and to see how its roots led to the practice subverted by Yoshimune was a sad one.

I still recommend this series to fans of historical and political manga as well as to readers interested in stories that comment on gender dynamics. The first volume set a high bar and it pleases me to say that this one meets that standard and exceeds it. A-

My regards,
Jia

This book can be purchased at Amazon.

When I told some friends I was reading your YA novel, Flygirl, and what it was about, one of them directed me to this article at The New York Times. It’s about the awarding of Congressional Gold Medals to the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), who provided the United States Army with their valuable flying skills during World War II, in order to free up male pilots to serve in the war.

To quote from your Author’s Note, “Flygirl is a fictionalized account based on the true story of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots and their heroic feats.” It is also the story of Ida Mae Jones, a brave and determined young woman who is not willing to let anything, even her skin color, stand in the way of her dream of flying.

Flygirl begins in December of 1941, in Slidell, Lousiana, when Ida Mae, the narrator of the story, is eighteen. She and her friend Jolene clean for the Wilsons, a white family, and as they clean, they daydream. Jolene dreams of being a singer, though she doesn’t have the voice for it. Ida Mae’s heart’s desire is to become a pilot, something she already is in every regard but one.

When Ida Mae was a young girl, her father taught her to fly in his “Jenny” cropduster. Ida Mae later prepared hard for her pilot’s test, and performed beautifully when she took it. But her instructor, a white man who’d passed other black pilots at Tuskegee, told Ida Mae, “You can fly, no doubt about it. But no woman’s gonna get a license out of me. Go home, Miss Jones. You’ve failed.”

Now Ida Mae dreams of going to Chicago’s Coffey School of Aeronautics to obtain her license, and she is saving up to finance the trip. But when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, her dream is shelved. Ida’s brother, who is studying to become a doctor, enlists in the army. Before shipping out, Thomas asks Ida Mae to look after her widowed mother, her young brother Abel, and her grandfather, and Ida promises that she will.

A year and a half pass. Thomas is stationed in the South Pacific, where the war is going badly. Black families like the Joneses and white ones like the Wilsons ration sugar, coffee, and other staples. Jolene donates her silk stockings to the army parachute program. “Jenny,” the Joneses’ cropduster, remains in the barn collecting dust, since fuel is also rationed.

One day, Abel brings home a newspaper clipping from school. It is an article about the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots program, which will train women to fly military planes within America’s borders, freeing more male pilots to fight in combat. The instant Ida Mae reads about the WASP program, she desperately wants to be a part of it. Here is a way to realize her dream of flying, and to make a real difference in the war effort, to help Thomas in a more meaningful way than rationing sugar and stockings.

Jolene punctures Ida Mae’s ballooning hopes by telling her the program is almost certainly for white women only. For a brief moment, Ida Mae, whose skin is light enough that she could pass for white, considers pretending to be white in order to be able to fly for the military. It doesn’t take her long to realize that such an action is fraught with danger, though, and she tries to give up her dream.

But then Abel points out a picture of a Chinese American pilot who is a member of the WASP, and Ida begins to hope again. With Jolene’s help, Ida Mae forges a pilot’s license, applies to the program and is granted an interview. Just before that interview begins, she sees a black woman being refused entry to the program due her skin color alone. When the interviewer assumes that Ida Mae is white, Ida nearly backs out, but her dream of flying overcomes her fears, and she decides that she if she is accepted, she will join the training program for the WASP.

And so begins Ida Mae’s life as a military trainee pilot in Sweetwater, Texas, a life that is both thrilling and frightening. Even as Ida makes friends with fellow WASP aspirants Patsy Kake, who was part of a barnstorming show, and Lily Lowenstein, a sheltered and wealthy Jewish girl, she wonders whether these women would remain her friends if they knew that she is not white.

The training program is arduous — two out of every three girls wash out — but even more than the long hours of training, it is her deception that takes a toll on Ida, and her worry for her brother Thomas’s safety. Lily and Patsy’s friendship is a godsend, but in becoming part of their world, is Ida creating a gulf between herself and her childhood friend Jolene?

There is also a civilian instructor in the program, Walt Jenkins, who is clearly attracted to Ida and interested in her. Ida’s heart flutters whenever Walt is near. But Walt is white, and he does not know that Ida is black. How can she allow her attraction for him to show without misleading him? And even if she told him the truth, would a future with him mean leaving her family behind?

Flygirl is beautifully written and resonant. Ida Mae remains a sympathetic and believable character throughout the story. She is both courageous and unsure of herself, and I liked the way we see her mature over the course of the story. I also liked that I never felt the book was making a judgment about her choice to “pass.” Instead, we readers are invited to decide for ourselves what we think of her decision.

Ida Mae’s family members are vividly depicted, from her brothers, who respect and admire her, to her mother, who disapproves of her desire to fly, to her supportive grandfather, “Grandy.” Her friends, first Jolene and later Patsy and Lily, are a kind of second family to Ida. I especially liked Patsy, an independent free spirit who worked as a wing-walker in a barnstorming act before joining the WASP.

The romantic elements play a minor role in the novel — it is much more a coming of age story, and a story about how Ida deals with the discrimination she faces both as an African American and as a woman. It is also a book about friendships and family relationships, and their challenges and rewards. And, of course, it is the story of the brave, patriotic women who served their country for little recognition or compensation.

I have just a couple of complaints about this story. One is that Lily, who is Jewish, is depicted as having led a privileged life and is said to have “never known what it was like to be hobbled by somebody else’s rules.” As a Jewish woman, I have a problem with this depiction, because it doesn’t do justice to the prejudices Jews faced in this country in the 1940s. Sometime in the past couple or so years, I watched “The Jewish Americans” documentary on PBS, and I remember seeing that Jews, too, were turned away from many establishments during the 1940s. I find it hard to believe that even after two years of serving in the WASP in several parts of the country, Lily would not have encountered much prejudice.

My other problem was more minor: a moment of annoyance at something Ida did that constituted cheating on one of her tests in my eyes. But since she felt bad about it and did her best to make up for it, I got over that.

One of the things I loved best about this book was the way the 1940s came alive. I truly felt I had been transported there, and was reminded of films from this time period when I read the book. It’s not an era that I often see in novels, so it was a treat to be immersed in it here.

I also enjoyed your writing style very much. Ida Mae’s first person present tense narration was confiding and immediate. There are memorable turns of phrase like this description of a female pilot who gets some bad news: “Melanie looks at me and her face crumples like a newspaper, only all the headlines are sad.”

As I was reading, I felt I was in the sure hands of a capable author. I experienced both sadness and happiness with Ida Mae, and would recommend Flygirl not just to young adults but also to adults who want to learn more about the first women to fly for the U.S. army, or to experience this young woman’s journey. B+/A-.

Sincerely,

Janine

This book can be purchased at Amazon (affiliate link), Kindle (non affiliate link), Books on Board (non affiliate link), or other etailers.

Arm Candy was one of the first Harlequin Blaze novels I ever read; in fact, it was a book I read early on in my Romance reading (what can I say: I started late). Right away, though, I knew there was something especially fun about the book, from the amusing zingers about men and women that begin each chapter, to the pairing of the protagonists, a focused, logic-driven marketing genius and an eclectic, romantic, creative free spirit. Because in Arm Candy it’s the heroine who is the career-minded control freak and the hero who follows his heart from research quest to research quest. And that modest reversal makes for a canny, entertaining, and engaging romance between two interesting, independent people.

Jessica Howell graduated at the top of her class from Harvard, and she now works in marketing at a cosmetics company. It’s not clear whether she has any innate passion for cosmetics, but she definitely has a passion for spreadsheets, logic, and being taken seriously as an unqualified success. And at the moment, there seems to be only one thing standing in her way to the top of the corporate ladder: her horny, married boss, Owen, who is using an upcoming week-long corporate event to maneuver Jessica rights where he wants her, namely into bed. He doesn’t seem to care – or even believe – that Jessica doesn’t feel the same attraction, and Jessica would rather simply maneuver around Owen than blow the whistle on his shenanigans. She envisions her success in planning and overseeing a successful event will speed her departure from her current job. If only she can get through a week at a hotel, in one of two adjoining suites, without being harassed or attacked by Owen.

Dan Crawford is trying to make up his mind between consulting in Botswana and preparing for the Baja 1000 car race when Jessica’s college friend Glen shows up unannounced at his apartment building. What Glen proposes to his sometime racquetball opponent distracts him long enough from his other options to pique his ever-wandering interest: spend the week as a paid (romantic in appearance, platonic in fact) companion  to Jessica to keep her inappropriately amorous boss at bay. Glen has to be out of town, but he told Jessica he had an idea, and Dan is it. A handsome, wealthy, somewhat eccentric guy, Dan would make an interesting match for the beautiful, no-nonsense Jessica, and Glen’s intuition is spot on. When Jessica and Dan meet for the first time, they both feel the pull. Jessica is even willing – warily so — to go along with Dan’s one condition for the week; in lieu of money, he wants Jessica to serve as a research subject on that age-old mystery of what women really want, both in bed and out.

That the reader knows immediately how untenable this situation is going to be as a platonic partnership only adds to the fun of what follows. Jessica is so focused on her career success that she is convinced that any involvement with Dan will derail her, while Dan understands that giving in to his attraction to Jessica will spoil any hope of intellectual objectivity in his research. And despite the peripatetic nature of Dan’s work-life, he approaches each endeavor with total absorption, much like Jessica approaches her own work, despite their markedly different personalities. So he respects Jessica’s ambition, and wants sincerely to assist her in reaching her goals. Likewise, Jessica likes Dan and appreciates his worldliness, his attentiveness, and his competence in playing his role, which is does with surprising conviction.

So where’s the fun? It’s in watching the dance between them, entertaining the question of who will give in first to the attraction, and the tension around how any personal involvement will affect their individual goals. Adding to these pleasures are the witticisms posted at the beginning of each chapter, jokes related to the misunderstandings between men and women culled from the Internet (with accompanying web addresses that I did not try to confirm as real).  For example, at the beginning of a chapter in which Jessica and Dan struggle to cope with something significant that happens between them, we find an anecdote entitled POINT OF VIEW:

An English professor wrote the words “A woman without her man is nothing” on the blackboard and directed the students to punctuate it correctly.

The men wrote: “A woman, without her man, is nothing.”

The women wrote: “A woman: without her, man is nothing

Source: Meissner, Dirk “Punctuation and Phenomenal Women” http://www.dirkmeissner.com/chauvi0001.htm

Further, it’s not just that Jessica and Dan struggle to understand one another; they also struggle to understand themselves, especially in the way the strength of their draw to each other challenges long-held beliefs about who they are and what they want in life. Jessica has long believed that career success and personal happiness were synonymous. That Dan begins to occupy a disproportionate amount of her thinking time disturbs her and makes her want to shut down and pull away. Dan seems more open to the growing attraction (he wants a happy marriage like his parents had) but worries that his romantic nature makes him a “lousy” judge of a woman’s compatibility with him. As his NYU professor mother reminds him, “Oh, honey. Lousy is being kind. But that’s mostly because you let your little head do your thinking for you.” Yes, she’s an unconventional mother –a recently widowed half of a very happy marriage between two independent people who let their child chart his own educational course from a very early age. But that unexpectedness in “role” is part of what makes Arm Candy so delicious. Like how Dan exemplifies what we often see more in heroines (unabashed romanticism), while Jessica embodies what we so often see in heroes (single-minded ambition and strong intellectual focus). That Dan is not a stereotypical hippie-type, and Jessica is no clueless nerd makes them even more interesting and appealing.

Jessica’s dilemma hinges in part on the different way men and women view sex:

She wasn’t sure why, but sex always seemed to be more than sex for women. Men usually had the right idea, but women wanted more. Romance, security, love, commitment, a future. Why? Why wasn’t it okay to want sex for its own sake?

It would be enough for her, but only if there were no expectations of anything else. No hoping, no plotting, no daydreaming. All her thoughts needed to be on work, and her creativity, too. She wanted to rise to the top of a very competitive market, and to do that she needed to focus, focus, focus.

In other words, her emotional involvement in Dan begins to complicate the sexual attraction, and that presents a serious dilemma for Jessica.

But Dan has his own problem, which may appear less serious, but given Jessica’s monocular focus on her own career, has some real weight for him:

He liked so much about Jessica, but was it love? Was his mother right about him? He’d always been a romantic and it had gotten him into trouble time and time again. Maybe this was just the same old, same old. Maybe he wasn’t really seeing Jessica for who she was, but as some amalgam of who he wanted her to be.

The reality is that Jessica could hurt Dan, because even in the short time they know each other, she can be warm or somewhat distant depending on her sense of vulnerability. And her intentions for the relationship are more tentative than his – understandably so, given her own goals. Because if Jessica simply throws away her own long-held ambitions for a relationship with Dan, she will be compromising herself and losing a crucial part of herself.

How it all works out depends in part on how much the obstacles are internal v. external, and on how Dan and Jessica each work toward their own resolution. And while I felt that the outcome was a bit rushed, I found it satisfactory. One element I do wish had been given a bit more time to develop was the question around why there are all these expectations for women when they do not seem to exist for so many men, even in the genre. It is never really questioned that men can have successful careers and a fulfilling relationship (although I give Leigh credit, because she has written at least one book I recall where the hero gave up his high profile career for love), but for a woman this creates an incredible dilemma. Why is that? In part this goes back to the question of how much gender-specific behavior is socialized and how much is natural, but it also relates, I think, to how the Romance genre can privilege love without compromising other aspects of its protagonists lives and identities.

There is also a moment where Jessica has the obligatory ‘now that I know love I realize how alone I’ve made myself,’ and it slightly undermined the authentic passion for her work she was clearly intended to reflect in contradiction to so many gender stereotypes. But on the other hand there is a lovely secondary Romance in the novel that reinforces the overall theme that appearances are often deceiving, and stereotypes can be extremely limiting. So in the end, I found my re-read of Arm Candy just as entertaining and satisfying as my initial read more than five years ago. A-

~ Janet

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On the Edge was the first of your books that I’ve read, but it will not be the last.

Rose Drayton and her two young brothers, Jack and Georgie, live in the Edge, an area where two dimensions known as the Weird and the Broken overlap. In the Weird, people have magical abilities and magical creatures exist there as well. The Broken is our world, where no one possesses magic.

Rose and her brothers do have special abilities, and in Rose’s case, hers are powerful enough that men from both the Edge and the Weird want to marry her in order to make use of her gene pool. Rose has refused all these offers in no uncertain terms.

Since her mother died and her father abandoned her family, Rose has been raising Jack and Georgie. To support the boys, Rose works as a cleaning lady in the Broken. She has to save every penny just to buy Jack shoes, and between his shifting and Georgie’s raising creatures from the dead at the expense of his own health, she has her hands full.

One day an earl from the Weird turns up on the Draytons’ doorstep. The man, who goes by the name of Declan, wants Rose to come away with him to the Weird. Declan possesses powerful magical abilities and can therefore do Rose a great deal of harm, so Rose cuts a deal with him. She will issue Declan three challenges and if he completes all of them successfully, she will go with him. If not, Declan will go away and leave Rose and her brothers in peace.

Shortly thereafter, Rose loses her cleaning job through no fault of her own. Because the household is in desperate need of money and because Declan rescues Jack from two menacing magical creatures which he calls hounds, Rose agrees to let Declan stay under her roof in exchange for a gold coin a day.

Rose soon finds herself attracted to the handsome and clever Declan but she mistrusts his motives. The boys, who have no male figure in their lives, begin to look up to him. As the four of them join forces to fight the dangerous hounds, the connection between Declan and the Draytons deepens.

While I liked them both, at first I felt that Rose and Declan were a little too good to be true. As I kept reading, though, I began to see that they had a few limits and flaws. Rose is stubborn and mistrusting where men are concerned, though she has good reasons to be that way. Declan isn’t always as upfront as he could be, though he too has his reasons.

It takes a little while for the story to get rolling and for Declan to appear, but the wait is worth it. The romance between Rose and Declan echoes fairy tales and folk tales, while at the same time being refreshingly grounded in the reality of Rose’s daily struggles to make ends meet and cope with all the trouble her brothers get into. The secondary characters, especially the shape-shifting Jack and the necromancing Georgie, are also delightfully real.

The villain of the story is really over the top, and that was one of the very few problems I had. I felt that the book lost some of its grounding in the real every time this villain or his minions made an appearance.

The romantic in me would also have liked for Rose and Declan to have more time alone together than they did, but I was pleasantly surprised at how satisfying their courtship was even with two children around most of the time.

I really enjoyed On the Edge, and I especially loved the way reality intermingled with fantasy in the world of the book. The characters might have magical powers needed to save their world, but they also shopped at Wal-Mart and had to stretch their pennies to pay for gas and groceries.

I would recommend this book to fans of Charlaine Harris and Patricia Briggs, and to anyone who enjoys a romantic fairy tale now and again. I had great fun reading it and I feel that its spot on my top ten list of 2009 favorites was well-deserved. My grade: B+/A-.

Sincerely,

Janine

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Fault Line was the first book of yours that I’d read. I’ve since read more, by the way. In the past, I have worked at Intellectual Property law firms as well as in the legal department of a Bio-Tech firm, so I am intimate with the portion of Fault Line that deals with patent prosecution and the highly educated and degreed men and women who do this kind of work. I am also currently employed in the technology sector and while I do not work directly in the security end of IT, my job daily involves many of the issues involved with the security software that is at the heart of the plot of Fault Line. Lastly, I live in the Bay Area and have been to most of the Northern California areas where Fault Line takes place. I found Fault Line to be quite accurate in those respects and I say this with the painful experience of having read books in which authors did not do any research worthy of the noun into the technology they decided to write about. So thank you, Mr. Eisler, for getting it right.

Alex Treven is an intellectual property attorney who’s brought on a client of his own to the firm where he hopes to make partner. The client’s product, a computer security software application, has the potential for immense profits. His hopes unravel when his client is murdered. When the murders continue, it’s clear someone is eliminating everyone assoiciated with the software. Alex and Sarah Hossieni, a beautiful junior associate of Iranian heritage assigned to work with him on the patent application, are the obvious next targets. Correctly afraid he’s in over his head, Alex is left with no choice but to ask his estranged military-operative brother for help.

I confess I was a bit put off by the opening of Fault Lines. A great deal of backstory gets laid down in the first twenty to thirty pages (an estimate, since I was reading on my iPhone) and I started feeling anxious for things to get started.

Two main backstory lines are important to Fault Line; the security software program for which people are being killed on page one and throughout the book, and the family history between the two male protagonists, brothers Alex and Ben Treven.

Initially I was puzzled by Alex who I mistook for the protagonist and found to be oddly beta for the hero of a political thriller. Alex is quickly in physical peril, and for a bit I wasn’t at all sure how this guy was going to survive his story. Patent attorneys do not typically learn the skills required to survive attempted assassinations.

To an experienced reader of Romance (which I am) Alex’s brother Ben is immediately identifiable as Hero Material. In fact, Ben was so precisely the kind of man who is the protagonist of a military Romance that I briefly floundered a bit as I tried to figure out what kind of book I was reading. A traditional political military thriller or a Romance? Or was Fault Line going to be a book that attempted a fusion? Oh, how I have been dying for someone to do this!

Ben Treven is a shooter for US government-sponsored Black Ops, and we meet him as he is carrying out the assassination of two Iranian nuclear scientists. He’s emotionally isolated and (to a romance reader) desperately in need of the love of a good woman. But wait! Isn’t Alex in love with Sarah, the only possible Heroine of any romance that might take place? Why, yes, he is! Very interesting, Mr. Eisler. Gotta keep turning pages to find out how that works out.

Fortunately, I got myself properly oriented to the story — that is, open minded about where Alex and Ben were headed as dual protagonists and absorbed in the many fascinating dynamics laid out on the pages. Alex and Sarah have the smarts and knowledge required to solve the mystery surrounding the security software while Ben has what it takes to keep them alive and investiate just who is behind the killings while the software mystery is being solved. The various story lines bend back around, intertwine and intersect in intriguing and chilling ways up to and including the ending.

Ben eventually takes over as the protagonist of the story, but Alex remains a strong second protagonist who is vital to the resolution. Ben thinks he’s safe in his tightly controlled world only to gradually suspect betrayal of the worst and potentially fatal sort. Alex and Ben have a truckload of childhood issues to either resolve or figure out how to keep from igniting before the past ends up getting them killed in the present. Alex wants Sarah. Ben wants Sarah and wishes he didn’t. Sarah knows her own mind but really, what woman can resist the likes of Ben after he proves there’s a softer side under that damaged exterior? It’s this portion of the book that is most strongly a Romance. With a capital R.

Most female readers of military thrillers (we are legion, just ask Lee Child) are familiar with the traditional fate of the woman unfortunate enough to fall for the hero. At best, she’s doomed to be dumped while the hero moves on with hardly a regret. Often, however, she’s doomed to die. Fault Line breaks with this tradition. Sarah has scenes in her point of view, which means readers get a direct line to her doubts about Ben and her eventual resolution of most of them. These scenes make Sarah a more fully realized female character than is usual for a thriller.

The romance element of this story is wonderfully done and done without sacrificing the unraveling mystery and resolution as the disparate plot lines come together. Unlike Alex and Ben, however, Sarah is not in a situation that requires her personal or emotional transformation in order to survive. Ultimately, the story is not about the relationship between her and Ben. For this reason, Fault Line is not a romance. That isn’t a criticism, by the way. It’s merely an observation.

I suspect that for readers of military thrillers the deeper focus on Sarah and the relationship between Sarah and Ben must seem novel. Ben is challenged and transformed (in part) by his relationship with Sarah. And yet, she’s not there just so Ben gets to have sex. In fact, I’d even say that in at least one key scene, Ben is there so Sarah gets to have sex. The focus given to the sex scenes and their unusal flip from the male-centric to the female-centric is refreshing. For readers familiar with romance, of course, this is nothing new.

Fault Line is a gripping political/military thriller that moves quickly and features one of the more fully dimensional female characters I’ve seen in the genre. I thoroughly enjoyed Fault Line for all the reasons I enjoy military thrillers and for many of the reasons I enjoy romance.

A-

~Carolyn Jewel

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

I listed this book as one or my Top Books of 2009, so I should do a review of it. I had such fun rereading it.

I love meta books: books that are enacting the very thing they’re about as they’re relating it. Books about romance authors are a favorite of mine (Jayne Ann Krentz has a Harlequin Temptation trilogy from 1990 that I love and recently re-acquired, much to my delight: The Pirate #287, The Adventurer #293, and The Cowboy #302). Your ePistols at Dawn is not only meta, it’s meta about its meta. There are so many layers, so many folds and twists, it’s like an exquisite origami mobius strip, if such a thing is possible. The literary critic in me was running around its little cage so very very happy (gotta keep them caged, those literary critics–you don’t know where they’ve been or what they’ve been or will get up to). But the thing that you managed to pull off that made all of me happy was that ePistols at Dawn was also a damn good story and a hot, exciting romance.

When he was very young, one Keiran Anders wrote Doorways, a book that has since become the seminal coming out book, the lifeline of gay youth everywhere. It is the self-proclaimed “sacred cow” of Jae-Sun Fields, a reporter for a gay tabloid devoted to outing closeted celebrities. And Jae’s pissed that one Kelly Kendall has written an e-published, erotic spoof of Doorways called Windows. He admits that Windows is fun and hot and cute, but he hates that it pokes gentle fun at Doorways, he’s convinced that the author of Windows is a woman, and he’s determined to unmask her, so he takes on an online female persona to correspond with Kelly Kendall, which of course, blows up in his face about half-way through the story.

This in itself would be a brilliant meta-m/m-romance. You’re a woman, writing about a man posing as a woman to hunt down the woman who wrote an erotic m/m spoof of a brilliant gay coming-out story. I could have fun just with that. But you don’t stop there, because of course the author of Doorways and the author of Windows are the same person, Kelly Mackay, a reclusive, OCD, agoraphobic screen-writer who lives with his fuck buddy, “houseboy, factotum, and general all-around slut” Will Lanier.

To make it all the more brilliant, Kelly (and Will) and Jae meet at the funeral of an actor, Hunter Leighton, who committed suicide a year after being outed by Jae’s newspaper when Jae was going out with him. (It’s losing a bet to Will that The Adversary would next out Hunter Leighton that made Kelly write Windows in the first place.) Jae was not the reporter who outed Hunter, didn’t know that his newspaper was writing the story, but feels guilty for leaving Hunter even though he was convinced Hunter would never want to see him again. The thing that I love about the obvious political and social commentary in this story is that it never seems heavy-handed. It’s just life (or death). It’s just people. And although there’s a definite message to be taken away (Silence is Death), it’s not unalloyed with commentary of its own (where does privacy begin and end? whose truth is the right truth?). There are too many layers to the story, to the narrative itself, for anything to be absolutely right or wrong. And that’s as it should be.

And for all that, the relationship between Jae and Kelly is completely sweet. Kelly is a mess of psychoses, that he freely admits and bravely deals with as they hit him. He’s OCD, agoraphobic, has panic attacks, and you don’t hide them. They’re there and they’re real and Jae loves him with his issues, not despite them, because they make Kelly who they are. I watched these two men fall in love with each other and believed it completely. They were perfect for each other and so individual as characters and so wonderful as a couple.

And funny, dammit! Your writing is wonderfully funny. Jae (who is 6′5″ which is an issue in the story) and his colleague get in her car:

They walked to the parking garage, and he girded his loins before folding himself into her tiny car.

“Clearly, they didn’t think of you when they designed the Beetle.”

“No, it’s like a fucking clown car. All we need now is about forty-three of our closest friends and we’d be in business.”

“May I remind you that if you take public transportation to work, you’re going to have to take what you can get?”

“I know.”

“And of course when you drive, you drive that sexiest of all street machines, the cock-rocking Honda Element. Isn’t their advertising slogan, ‘So square, it’s significant’?”

“No, it’s ‘Because outside every über cool Asian dude there’s a pencil-necked geek dying to get in.’ You just don’t like my car ’cause it’s a GeekBoy Magnet.”

Funny and poignant, though. After Kelly kicks Jae to the curb:

Jae’s eyes burned. “I broke his heart. I really, really let him down, and now he’s not going to look at me anymore at all.”

“Time to go home, Jae,” Shannon said gently, signaling the bartender. He knocked back his final drink and nodded dumbly. The man came over and handed him the receipt to sign. He left a large tip.

“I’ll cry in your car,” he warned.

“As long as you don’t puke.” Shannon caught Jae’s arm.

The crowd of people milling by the door watched as he walked past unsteadily. He tried not to lurch like a drunken giant, knowing how terrifying it was to look up at him and imagine that he was going to topple over. Somehow, that feeling of being outsized and out of control, foreign and immense and possibly frightening was the last straw. When they finally made it to Shannon’s car, he put his head in his hands and wept.

The two issues I had with the story: Kelly tells his story about writing Windows–the cause of all his psychoses–to Jae’s boss, not to Jae. We do not see Jae’s response to the horror in Kelly’s background, and while it fit with the story, it seemed contrary to the characters of Kelly and Jae to avoid that confrontation. And second, the plot of Doorways is never described. We know very little about it at the end of the novel: the main character’s name is pretty much it. It must be difficult to write about a novel that is described as being so brilliant and amazing and it’s probably tempting to leave it to be all things to all readers, but I would have preferred to know at least something about it (did it end happily for the protagonist, for example).

That aside, I adored this book. I’ve been recommending it to everyone as a truly good romance, but also brilliant commentary on the issues of m/m romance, on what it means to be gay where your sexual preference automatically becomes a political statement, on what it means to write about gay people, and on what a romance novel is, who reads them, and why.

Thank you so much. I can’t wait to find the time to read your other stuff.

Grade: A-

Best regards,
-Joan/Sarah F.

This book can be purchased at Samhain in ebook format or other etailers.

I had a blast reading The Birthday Present, the third and final story in your Countess Trilogy. To readers who have not read the earlier stories, but would like to read this one, I have to suggest reading this series in order.

Like The Countess’s Client and An Impolite Seduction, The Birthday Present is a Harlequin Spice Brief set in the late eighteenth century and narrated by its heroine, Anna, Countess von Esslin, who details her sexual adventures and her encounters with the Scottish scientist James McKirnan. James is a thorn in Anna’s side, but he makes her hot as well as bothered.

It’s been fourteen years since James and Anna first met in a Paris brothel and eleven years since their encounter in Derbyshire. Both are now living in Munich, since it is where Anna prefers to live and since she had, in retaliation for James’s actions in the earlier stories, spread rumors about him that made it difficult for him to live anywhere else.

Anna’s thirty-fourth birthday has arrived, and although she is the hostess of a popular salon, she feels dissatisfied. As she explains:

Most of the regular visitors to my salon were either distinguished old men or energetic young artists and scholars. The former held no interest for me for reasons that should be obvious, and the latter, if more appealing in physical form, proved equally unsatisfying when consumed as a regular diet. The new, romantic generation was far too high-strung and sensitive for my tastes–young men bored me, though they clustered around me like gnats and, after a few years in Munich, the thought of spreading my thighs for yet another adoring and submissive young poet was enough to make me cry with frustration.

Anna’s celibacy has lasted for two years, and she is therefore morose when she is invited to King Maximillian Joseph’s first court ball. Her birthday falls on this same night. At the ball, James McKirnan insists on a dance with her, and since he has some influence with the royals despite his common birth, Anna cannot afford to snub him in public.

Therefore, Anna dances and spars with her enemy. The banter between the two is delicious:

“Will I ever get anything but frowns from you, Countess?” James had just asked me in his usual light, mocking manner. He was leading me through the first steps of a complicated rondeau.

I told him coldly that if he ever did anything to earn a smile from me, I would certainly not withhold it.

Before James can reply, the dance is interrupted by Anna’s cousin Robert, who wants to present her with a birthday gift elsewhere in the palace. Robert claims his present is what Anna wants most in the world. He leads her to a closed door in the Palace’s east wing, and insists on blindfolding her, saying that he cannot give her this gift if she refuses to wear the blindfold.

Anna’s curiosity gets the better of her and she agrees to Robert’s condition. Inside the room, she encounters a nude, well-muscled and aroused man who gives her the vigorous, satisfying sex she has been craving. But one encounter is not enough for Anna, and she asks Robert to set up another.

Will Anna uncover her secret lover’s identity? Will the man satisfy her again? And how will Anna’s contest of wills with the Scotsman who is the bane of her existence resolve itself?

Like An Impolite Seduction, The Birthday Present is both sexy and hilarious. I think the plot here was the cleverest of this trilogy yet, but I won’t give it away. The lovemaking is very erotic, but this is also the most romantic of the three stories IMO.

In my review of The Countess’s Client I said that the jury was still out on James, but between the second story and this one, he has won me over.

One of the most satisfying things in this story was the way Anna and James remained true to themselves yet had matured and softened a little with the passage of time. I liked that both remained two strong-willed people; that Anna’s snobbery did not disappear overnight and that her sexual appetite is here to stay. She is only a bit less entrenched in her views at the end of the trilogy than she was in the beginning, but that bit is enough for me to believe in the happy ending.

And speaking of the ending, although it was not a traditional HEA, I thought it was perfect for these characters. It made me hoot with laughter, and spread a silly grin across my face, too. A- for The Birthday Present.

Sincerely,

Janine

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

First off, I have a bone to pick with marketing. This anthology (featuring stories by Laurell K. Hamilton, Yasmine Galenorn, Marjorie M. Liu, and Sharon Shinn) is clearly marked on the spine as Urban Fantasy. And yet? Only one out of the four stories has an actual urban fantasy setting. All of the others are traditional fantasies. I mean like trolls, ogres, elves, and magician-type fantasies. MISLEADING.

The tagline on the cover reveals the common thread of all the stories: “All-new tales of magic revealed—and matrimony refused—from four of today’s most provocative authors”. Okay, so all the stories feature heroines who are trying to get out of unwanted betrothals. And yet this whole “four of today’s most provocative authors” thing? What do they mean by that? Are they implying these stories are super smexy and feature kink? Because they don’t. In fact, these stories would pretty much be comfortable on the shelf with inspirational romances. Barely any smooching to be found. So what’s so provocative about that? Honestly, out of these 4 authors, only Laurell K. Hamilton probably fits the provocative label, and only then if you mean “writes crazily complicated orgies in her other books”.

1. Can He Bake a Cherry Pie by Laurell K Hamilton

Anyway, on to the actual story critiques. Laurell K. Hamilton leads off the anthology with “Can He Bake a Cherry Pie?”

You guys.

This story is c-c-crazy. At it’s core, it is a pretty basic fairy tale featuring a heroine who wants to escape an unwanted betrothal. In order to do so, she announces that she is going to rescue Prince True — a sort of male Sleeping Beauty figure in their kingdom. True was captured by a sorceress 50-odd years ago after being a douche.

Seriously.

Actually, he basically announced that men were waaay more important than women and that women’s work was useless in comparison. That’s it? Why aren’t 75% of the men prisoners in her lair, then? So anyway, the sorceress, in a fit of girl power, challenged him, won, and has kept him prisoner in her lair, forever beautiful and ageless. According to legend only a girl well versed in the womanly arts can free him. All righty then.

So our guileless (and virtually brainless) heroine makes her way to the cave of the sorceress, fully anticipating her own death. But dying in the act of rescue is so much better than marrying an oaf. So whatevs. Heroine makes her way to the rope and board bridge stretching over the chasm leading the cave and is greeted by a rabid troll. She basically squeaks and closes her eyes waiting for the death blow, and BECAUSE SHE IS TOTALLY WEAK AND DOES NOT FIGHT BACK OR EVEN MAKE EYE CONTACT, she passes the first test.

The second test finds her facing an Ogre just inside the mouth of the cave. Said ogre threatens to chop her up into pieces and eat her and heroine agains squeaks in distress and closes her eyes. Because ew. Then the ogre NOTICES HER SHOES. Which are impractical party shoes. Because the heroine left in a hurry, yo. And she likes sparkly things? So the beauty and impracticality of her shoes lets her pass the second test.

The third test is the most bunk-ass sphinx you would ever hope to meet. This sphinx doesn’t even ask questions in the form of obscure riddles. WTF? This sphinx is interested in fabric dying techniques, dessert recipes, and gardening. The heroine’s housekeeping skills enable her to pass. Good thing, too, as she would have been eaten alive.

Ultimately, at the end of this gantlet, the sorceress is met, challenges are posed, and the asstacular Prince True is found. After a bit more craziness, involving — you guessed it — baking cherry pies, the heroine lives happily ever after.

I just. I mean. What is the message in this story? I know what the message is supposed to be. I.E. Womanly skills (aka cooking, gardening, and housekeeping) are important and have meaning — but that is really not what the story shows. The heroine is supremely stupid and wins the day by being cowardly, impractical, and good at trivia. GIRL POWER!

As an added bonus, this story is a mere 35 pages. I think the true miracle here is that I kept reading the anthology after I finished this story. I give this a D-.

2.  The Shadow of Mist by Yasmine Galenorn

Next up is Yasmine Galenorn’s “The Shadow of Mist”. First off, kudos for being the lone urban fantasy story in this “urban fantasy anthology”. This novella is set in her “Otherworld” universe, and I have to be honest, I haven’t read any of the other books in the series. To be perfectly frank, plot-wise, this wasn’t a great introduction to it.

Siobhan, the heroine, is a selkie who has been on the run from her fiance for over 100 years. The last few decades, she’s relaxed her guard somewhat, and has found happiness and love in the Pacific Northwest with her boyfriend Mitch. The story opens with her long lost fiance Terry calling her on the phone to helpfully inform her that he knows where she is and is coming for her. Why? Because he will not be denied, yo! This is the equivalent of villain monologueing — he has no earthly reason to warn her of his arrival, and without his helpful information she would have been a sitting duck for his kidnapping attempt. Of course, that would have completely eliminated the plot as well.

IMO, this is a lazy plot device that serves no other purpose than to allow the heroine to call in ye olde cast of characters from many previous novels to assist her in her fight against the villain. To her credit, I must say that Galenorn does a great job with said characters. The problem is, I was more intrigued with them than I was with the heroine of the story, who was totally weak and wimpy in comparison. In fact, the heroine spends the entire story having events happen to her, rather than trying to become the master of her fate.

She refuses police assistance because she’s pretty sure her family will still force her to marry Terry. Even though she’s pregnant with Mitch’s baby and knows Terry will totally force her to miscarry if he catches her on her own. Oookay. She is repeatedly almost dragged off with Terry and his henchmen, and is repeatedly rescued by characters from previous books. And then? In the big showdown? (Which is totally not big at all and really sort of anticlimactic.) Siobhan saves the day by complete and total accident. It’s honestly the equivalent of someone tossing something out a high rise window and killing a wanted criminal who just happens to be walking by below.

Deus ex sucksalot.

For all my complaints, I will say that Galenorn succeeded in making me interested in her world and the characters that occupy it. I will most likely be picking up the first book in her Otherworld series, and hoping the plotting goes better in a full length novel. My grade for this story is a C-.

3.  The Tangleroot Palace by Marjorie M. Liu

The third story in this anthology is Marjorie M. Liu’s “The Tangleroot Palace“. This was an ethereal, dreamy story with a strong fairy tale feel to it. It was also my favorite of the bunch. Sally, our intrepid heroine, is a princess who is being forced to wed a Warlord from a neighboring kingdom. Their mothers were childhood friends, and though they ended up in different countries, it was their dream that their children would meet and marry someday. But Sally ain’t havin’ it. Even though her father’s kingdom is being tormented on all sides by mercenaries and squabbling lords, Sally wants the right to choose her own destiny. This leads her to the stories titular location — the Tangleroot Forest.

A place of magic and legend, the forest draws people in, but rarely lets them out. On her journey to the forest, Sally meets a traveling circus trio whose members are more than meets the eye.

As I mentioned, this was my favorite of all the stories, and although the identity of the hero was easily guessed — heck, I wouldn’t even call it a guess, it was blatantly obvious — that wasn’t the true point of the story. The secret at the heart of Tanglewood is the true mystery to be solved here. My grade is a A-.

4.  The Wrong Bridegroom by Sharon Shinn

Lastly, was the most lengthy of the stories, “The Wrong Bridegroom” by Sharon Shinn. I really wanted to love this story from the get-go. I love 90% of Sharon Shinn’s books, and while I ultimately ended up really liking this story, I found that I had to power through a big chunk of it to get to that point.

Told from the 1st person POV of the heroine, Princess Olivia, the story starts out with a royal challenge to find the person worthy of receiving her hand in marriage. Although there has long been an understanding between her and the oh so perfectly stuffy Sir Harwin Brenley, Olivia would rather die than marry that hugemongous boor. Because she is spoiled and stubborn and young and foolish and petty. And young. Young. YOUNG. So the King, a ruthless and selfish man, has arranged a series of challenges to find the Princess a husband.

I guess it is to Shinn’s credit that she writes the heroine so well. She perfectly encapsulates the spoiled attitude of a 21 year old princess with a horrible, neglectful father, a surprisingly wise stepmother she refuses to listen to, and a lifetime of getting her own way. And because she so perfectly captures her character, I spent 75% of the story wanting to kill Olivia. Or at least bitchslap her.

After a tie occurs between two competitors for her hand, Olivia makes the tie-breaking decision and immediately sets out on a trip with her new betrothed to visit his family. As they journey along at a snail’s pace, in a not-very-princess-like horse and cart, they add unexpected members to their party along the way and start to see people, places, and things that the sheltered Olivia has never experienced before. Not much time passes before Olivia begins questioning what makes a good husband, a good ruler, and a happy life.

Although this heroine was grating and immature (which I think may have been exacerbated by the 1st person narration), when it got good, it got reeeeal good. In fact, it made me miss my stop in the morning, necessitating a 5 block hike to work. For that reason, I have to give this story a solid B+.

So overall, though this anthology was seriously mislabeled, the bulk of the book was entertaining. The Liu story and the Shinn story comprise over 2/3ds of the length, thanks to the super short Hamilton tale. If you are a fan of romantic fantasy with a fairy tale feel, you’ll enjoy this. Weighing the letter grade in terms of story length, I would give this a B-.

LOVE,

NONNIE

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