N.R. Walker’s Tallowwood is a darkly atmospheric and expertly crafted police procedural/romantic suspense novel in which a Sydney-based detective who specialises in cold cases is suddenly confronted with startling new evidence which may enable him to at long last bring to justice the person responsible for a string of murders of young gay men –…
As someone who has enjoyed both Christian fiction and sex-not-included romantic comedies, I consider myself to have been fairly well-prepared to enjoy a Christian romance that combined both genres. Having reached the end of A Girl’s Guide to the Outback, I have to say that I found it neither excessively Christian nor excessively romantic. Ultimately,…
Sarah Mayberry is an author well known to those who read contemporary romance. It’s been a while since she’s released anything new so when I saw that she had a romantic comedy novella coming out, I made sure to pick it up. She’s good at evoking a lot of emotions in both her characters and…
Set in New South Wales, Australia in 1885, The Landowner’s Secret provides a slow-moving but captivating tale of a marriage of convenience between classes. Alice Ryan is awakened in the night by intruders lurking outside her modest cabin. Her parents are dead and her brother, currently absent, has a history of involvement with criminals. Alice…
I was genuinely excited by the prospect of this book. Australia is not a hard sell for me – I associate it with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman in the movie Australia, and Colleen McCullough’s exasperating and excellent book The Thorn Birds. In The Bushranger’s Wife, it is 1861 and Prudence ‘Pru’ Stanforth is on…
Circa 1810, Sydney society is in transition. The new governor Lachlan Macquarie is raising the status of freed convicts (‘emancipists’), much to the wrath of exclusives who arrived from the United Kingdom freely and, often, temporarily. Sarah Langley, wealthy gentlewoman newly arrived in the city is clearly an exclusive. So how could she possibly be…
You know what you’re getting into when you bite into a Jackie Ashenden novel. Lots of internal monologuing from possessive, alpha male heroes and sweet, sassy-mouthed girls who wanna fuck as much as the heroes want to fuck them. Sometimes she’ll be funny, but she’ll always be sexy. King’s Ransom is Ashenden at her peak,…
Call Me Evie is the début novel by author J.P. Pomare. It’s the story of seventeen-year-old Kate Bennet, and her struggle to piece together her fragmented memories of one tragic night that changed her life irrevocably. It’s fast-paced and extremely twisty, a book I’m glad I picked up. When we first meet Kate, she’s been…
Amy Andrews writes fun, sexy contemporary romances and I’ve enjoyed several of her offerings in the past, including her Sydney Smoke Rugby series. In her latest steamy novella titled The D.I.L.F (Doctor I’d Like to… um… fornicate with), she tackles both workplace romance and sibling’s best friend tropes in a story that is more about…
Bawling my eyes out doesn’t usually go with “holiday romance” for me as I tend to prefer my Christmas stories a bit more on the fairytale side. However, this year I picked up something a bit different with Christmas Where They Belong by Marion Lennox (from 2014). Though at times a very difficult read, this ultimately hopeful…