a Retro Review originally published on October 31, 2003 Patricia Potter’s first Silhouette Intimate Moments release, Home for Christmas, didn’t receive the attention it deserved when it first came out. Maybe because it was released the same month as Ruth Wind’s For Christmas, Forever and Suzanne Brockmann’s It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, both excellent…
Mary Connealy is known for books filled with cowboys and humor. The synopsis for A Man With a Past promised the story of a man who had lost his memory, and I’m all about a good amnesia story. However, the beginning lags because the memory loss happens much later in the story than readers might…
Elyse Springer’s Whiteout is very much a book of two halves, one of which I enjoyed a bit more than the other. The first half revolves around an amnesia plot, and the second around the resulting fallout; the first half is tense and terrific, but the second loses momentum and the principals are separated for most…
Vanessa Riley’s Rogues and Remarkable Women series continues apace with An Earl, a Girl and a Toddler, the heartbreaking but ultimately exhilarating story of lady’s maid Jemima St. Maur. While readers definitely remember Jemina from the first book in the series (A Duke, the Lady, and a Baby), she does not remember much about her…
Caught in a Cornish Scandal is a standalone Regency era historical love story set in Cornwall and London, and is a mixture of action, romance, and mystery. It features Millicent Lansdowne, a young woman forced to turn to smuggling to save her family, and Sam Garrett, a man unable to remember how he came to…
Behind Every Lie is the second novel by Christina McDonald, and since I absolutely loved her 2019 release,The Night Olivia Fell, I was eager to give this one a try. It didn’t end up hooking me in quite as much as her first book did, but it’s a solid thriller in its own right. Eva…
It’s been a while since I read a good cowboy romance, and I was starting to miss them. When I saw A Cowboy to Remember getting buzz on Twitter, it caught my fancy. Friends-to-lovers and second chance at love are my two favorite tropes, and this book has some of both going on in it…
Uncovering the Merchant’s Secret is a lot more tough-minded than the last two Hobbes novels I’ve read – and a lot darker. It’s also very entertaining, with the most fascinating heroine I’ve read about recently, and is set in a period I’ve not often come across in historical romance. While I didn’t quite feel the…
Ruth Anne Nordin’s Her Counterfeit Husband is what you’d get if you put Sommersby and While You Were Sleeping in a blender and set the dial to ‘farce’. It never for one moment rings true in terms of plausibility, nor is it in the least romantic, but it has a fairly original setup. And if…
Kimberley Troutte begins the Plunder Cove trilogy, a collection of stories about the children of oil baron-slash-pirate R. W. Harper, with Forbidden Lovers, a story about high school sweethearts torn apart, amnesia and mistaken death. Wealthy Matt Harper and working-class Julia Espinoza fell in love as teenagers, but Matt’s miserable and abusive oil baron father…