In The Golden Hour, author Beatriz Williams tells the interconnected stories of two women, decades apart, whose lives are irrevocably changed by their deep and abiding love for the men of the Winthrop family. For Lulu, a journalist desperate to uncover the truth about the apparent death of the man she loves, and Elfriede, a…
It’s 1911, and while Emilia Cruz and Ruben Torres are both authors, he’s a literary darling and newspaper publisher, while she uses a pseudonym to write The True Accounts of a Former Courtesan, an explicit and swashbuckling adventure serial. When their paths cross and Ruben learns Emilia’s secret, he faces multiple dilemmas. Revealing her identity…
The Caribbean island of Tobago is hosting its annual jazz festival, and music journalist Dakota Merrick is there to cover it – except her assistant failed to book her a hotel room. Producer Trent Walker takes pity on the damsel in distress and lets her take a room in his suite at a couples resort….
Welcome to Trinidad – but the hard-working Trinidad of the oil and gas industry, not the sandy beaches and starlight of the world of resorts. Sean Scott is in Public Relations for the Orion methanol company, when her ex, Christian Devane, turns up to work in operations. While helping him open a local bank account,…
This island will break your heart if you let it. Home, exile, family and above all, hope. These themes all figure prominently in Next Year in Havana, Chanel Cleeton’s beautiful novel of love and Cuba. We see the love stories of a grandmother and her granddaughter playing out in Havana, but we also see these…
Many years ago, Abi Bishop was a fellow AAR reviewer whose voice I particularly liked. Turns out, she has since become a novelist whose voice I like even more. Soft Barracuda, her début novel, is a contemporary romance that mixes the exotic – a Trinidad setting – with a likeable hero and heroine and some…
Seven Years to Sin commences (and concludes) with coitus. At its start, Lady Jessica Sheffield, on the eve of her wedding, is walking her dog on her fiancé’s estate. The pug runs away and, as she chases it down, she stumbles across a gazebo in which Alistair Caulfield, a friend of her fiancé’s younger brother…
Memory does play funny tricks on you. I bought Across a Moonlit Sea at a UBS because I remembered loving it a few years ago. After reading it, I realised that, although it was still really good, something had changed and it sure as hell wasn’t the book. Mind you, it’s still a wonderful Elizabethan…
The popularity of the historical novel has waxed and waned since Sir Walter Scott invented it when he published Waverly. In 1922, Rafael Sabatini published Captain Blood, the tale of a physician sold into slavery who becomes a pirate. The book was so popular, it spawned several sequels and cemented Sabatini’s reputation as a master…
As a long time reviewer, I’m used to knowing exactly what I think about a book, and how to communicate my impressions to others. But I had to wait a few days after finishing Forbidden Shores to write the review, because I couldn’t quite decide what I thought. There were parts I loved, parts that…