Wow, right out of the blue and just when you least it expect it, a knock-out novel of romantic suspense. From the first page to the last, author Erin Grady deftly juggles two intertwining stories, one taking place in the present day and another more than 150 years earlier, delivering nothing less than a fascinating…
Since I often find the plots to be long and terribly slow-moving and the characterization to be both flat and unrealistically glamorous, the family saga is usually one of my least favorite forms of fiction. Sheltering Rain, a debut novel from the United Kingdom, is blessedly different. Joy, her daughter Kate, and her 16-year-old granddaughter…
The Blessing Stone makes those sprawling intergenerational sagas and inscrutable epics seem like rank amateurs with the sheer scope of its coverage spanning over 100,000 years. Barbara Wood is an engaging writer, but her themes, played out in the history of a precious stone, are not. Her research is superb, some of her stories are…
Although most authors are advised to write what you know, it might be more appropriate to suggest they write what they feel. Bebe Moore Campbell’s writing is proof that an African-American woman can write believably from any perspective. Her first book, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine read like a lighter Toni Morrison, and her next…
I spent a year and a half staring at the four installments of this story, sitting neatly on one of my shelves. Diana Gabaldon’s books are filled with plot devices I had always shied away from in romance novels. “They’re written in the first person, the heroine’s older than the hero, they’re huge,” I whined,…
When I read Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog two years ago, I knew I’d have to read all her other books as well. It’s taken some time, but I finally read the fascinating Doomsday Book, which is every bit as good as TSNOTD, although it is completely different in tone. Doomsday Book…
For years I’ve been searching for the perfect romance novel. The one I can give to my husband and say, “Here, read this and then tell me romance novels are fluff.” What I’m searching for could well be the Holy Grail of all romance novels, because if the first one I give him fails, he…
After a slow start Beautiful Lies picks up speed and draws the reader into a complex and engrossing tale involving two families and the Pearl of Great Price that has haunted and cursed them for generations. Most of the book takes place in contemporary San Francisco and the Australian Outback. Liana Robeson and Cullen Llewellyn…
When I first saw the title Nell, I pictured the wild-child title character from the Jodie Foster movie, and I was sure I would never get that mental picture out of my head. About fifty pages into the book, I had lost that mental picture entirely. I was so engrossed in the storyline that I…
Lately, I’ve begun to think that there’s nothing new under the romance sun; it seems that every time I pick up a romance, I find myself thinking, “Been there, done that, ho-hum.” Then I come across a book like Nell, and my faith is restored, replenished, renewed. I cannot say enough good things about this…