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

Dear Ms. Giffin,

Exactly one hundred days to her marriage to her husband Andy, Ellen Graham literally crosses paths with her ex-boyfriend Leo. Ellen describes their encounter this way:
From the outside, say if you were a cabdriver watching frantic jaywalkers scramble to cross the street in the final seconds before the light changed, it was only a mundane, urban snapshot: two seeming strangers, with little in common but their flimsy black umbrellas, passing in an intersection, making fleeting eye contact, and exchanging stiff but not unfriendly hellos before moving on their way.

But inside was a very different story. Inside, I was reeling, churning, breathless as I made it onto the safety of the curb and into a virtually empty diner near Union Square. Like seeing a ghost, I thought, one of those expressions I’ve heard a thousand times but never fully registered until that moment. I closed my umbrella and unzipped my coat, my heart still pounding. As I watched the waitress wiped down a table with hard, expert strokes, I wondered why I was so startled by the encounter when there was something that seemed utterly inevitable about the …

Dear Mrs Sorenson,

Way back in the mists of time when I was a college student, I was part of the Honors Program at UNC-Chapel Hill and one thing we had to do was take one Honors course a semester. My sophomore year, I picked one about Istanbul. Now that was a great class: Interesting, not too much work and an easy A. Not at all like my organic chemistry classes. So, in a roundabout fashion, that’s why when I saw where your book was set, I knew I had to give it a try.

Travel photographer Connor Stark captures the inanimate beauty of Istanbul from behind the safe distance of a camera lens. But it’s the lively tour guide Natasha Plakouris that captures his imagination. He is destined to work alone while she’s tethered to her group of tourists, until a twist of fate changes their itineraries.

Connor has what many would consider a dream job. He can go anywhere he pleases, gets paid to take beautiful pictures of fabulous places and no one is riding him to be here a certain day or go …

Dear Ms. Tarr:

Tara Marie’s brief post is what got me to buy this book. She said “It was dark and erotic.” Those are two compelling adjectives for a romance book these days. She was right, it was both dark and erotic. I’ll add one more adjective: brave.

Hadrian St. Claire was the son of a prostitute who begged and stole on the streets of London until he was saved and put in an orphanage. There, a patron took interest in him and St. Claire remade himself into a successful portrait photographer. He specializes in capturing women, in immortalizing their deep desires and thoughts in pictures. He doesn’t hesistate to bed the women either. Unfortunately, St. Claire has another vice which is more dangerous: gambling. After a deep night at the tables, St. Clare finds himself owing 400 pounds to Bull Boyle who liked to extract a pound of flesh for every 100 pounds a debtor owed him.

St. Claire arrives home one day to be offered a proposition. Ruin Calendonia Rivers, the leader of the London suffragette movement. St. Claire, …