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…
Window Shopping is a sexy holiday romance that will most definitely put the jingle in your bells. While it’s not the best example of Bailey’s spicy style, it’s a welcome addition to the generally low-sensuality Christmas subgenre, and it’s nice to see a heroine in need of redemption instead of the hero. Stella Schmidt finds…
Warning: I am a sucker for Louise Erdrich’s work, and I have been ever since I read The Antelope Wife. Ergo, I am not an impartial audience for this book, and you might not enjoy the sprawling, character-driven, magical realism-filled portrait she paints as much as I did. The Sentence is a damn good, beautifully…
Science Fiction romances tend to battle sequences and spaceships, but Homebound by Lydia Hope is set on a dystopian Earth. In The City, an urban ruin that reads like a Dickensian slum, Gemma works for a pittance scrubbing prison cells. A surprise reassignment to the third floor, where the alien prisoners are housed, leads to…
Sara Creasy’s Song of Scarabaeus matches an intricately-built world with engaging characters and a fascinating plot. In the future, humanity terraforms planets by seeding them with biocyph (biology technology) pods called BRATs. This tech absorbs data from the existing ecosystem, then engineers and releases viruses which mutate the original life forms at the DNA level,…
It’s 1896, and in San Francisco, successful, hard-working attorney Margaret Huntington Smith has been urged by her father, a judge, to take a well-deserved vacation. Knowing she won’t go unless given a push (in the best way) he’s brought her a first class ticket for a cruise to “French Oceania – Tahiti, the Cook Islands…
I love realistic looks at low-income characters, heroes who win you over by who they are and not what they have. So how have I never read Mia Hopkins before? Eddie “Trouble” Rosas has just completed a five year prison term when he encounters a stunning but sobbing woman in the east LA community herb…
When I reviewed Serena Bell’s So Close (Tierney Bay #1) earlier in 2020, I remarked that it was set in the same locale as a 2015 book that I had read and loved by this author called Turn Up the Heat. At the time, it was no longer available in stores but I’m happy to…
It’s hard for me to write a review that is as enthusiastic and upbeat as this book deserves, because things are so tough everywhere right now. But that means when I tell you it transported me out of my home and made me extremely happy for a few hours of coronavirus social distancing, you should…
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…