Get your holiday season off to a strong start with the fabulous debut novel, The Matzah Ball. For the last decade, Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt, daughter of one of the world’s most prominent rabbis, has made a living as Christmas romance novelist Margot Cross. The job has been ideal for her – it allows her to work…
The Dating Playbook is the delightfully funny second tale in Farrah Rochon’s The Boyfriend Project series. You can read this without reading the first book. Taylor Powell experienced her proverbial fifteen minutes plus of fame when her acerbic tweets about a date from hell turned into a viral video takedown of a catfisher in a…
Jackie Ashenden is great at writing hot sex scenes, and you’ll find those aplenty in With the Lights On. Unfortunately even a sexy romance needs a plot, and with too much narration and too little momentum, With the Lights On is a low-watt bulb. Under the name Honey, Maggie makes a living working as an…
The First Snow of Winter is a prequel to the other novellas in the Winterbourne series. After five years on the Continent, Captain Samuel Alderton returns to Alderton Hall a changed man. Weary from fighting, struggling with the loss of his left arm in Toulouse, and a bit depressed and uncertain about his future, the…
I didn’t realise until I took a close look that Annabelle Costa’s The Boy Next Door was first published in 2012. But then again, I have not read much contemporary romance until the last year or so, and started picking it up because so much historical romance (my first love) has not made me very…
I loved Float Plan! This is my first book by Trish Doller and I’m looking forward to reading through her past releases. Anna Beck needs to run away from her life. Less than a year earlier, her fiancé committed suicide and left Anna alone and spinning from the fallout. For the past ten months, she’s…
What made me pick up Mimi Matthews’ The Work of Art was the simple fact that the rich, powerful duke with the dark past was the villain rather than the hero. What kept me reading, though, was a well-crafted story with a compelling hero and heroine. It has a couple of issues which I’ll mention…
Jay Hogan returns to her Auckland Med. series with Against the Grain, which features a romance between sassy spitfire pathologist’s assistant Sandy Williams (who appeared as a key secondary character in the last book, Up Close and Personal) and Miller Harrison, a member of the Wheel Blacks elite wheelchair rubgy team as well as a…
Hench is an unstinting delight from start to finish. Focusing on the life of a temp worker living in a world filled with supervillains and superheroes who becomes an impassioned villainess of her own making, the story reminded me of the recently-cancelled and greatly lamented Venture Brothers, in which doing evil deeds is nothing more…
In Off Balance, the first book in her new series of contemporary romances, author Jay Hogan takes a big geographical leap from one end of New Zealand to the other, from the lakes and mountains of the Southland (the setting for her recent Southern Lights books) to the coastal region of subtropical Northland at the…