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,…
I’m quite picky when it comes to contemporary romances. The story has to contain something very special in order to catch my attention, and the loads of internet buzz surrounding the release of Kennedy Ryan’s latest novel, The Kingmaker, counts as special in my book. So with great anticipation, I dove into this politically-charged, sexy…
Going Dark opens with an elite team of Navy SEALS deep into a covert operation on foreign soil. Their mission could be construed as an act of aggression if discovered so the men are working under blackout conditions; no communication with their transport ship and radio silence while on the ground. When things go to…
A well-researched novel about conservation and tiger shifters in Sumatra, J.T. Hall’s Forest of Thorns and Claws highlights the destruction and cruelty caused by greed, poaching, stupidity and deforestation in a supposedly protected rainforest. The main character, Donovan McGinnis, is a vet with English parents who are also conservationists. As a child, he travelled around…
It’s no secret that the Marriage of Convenience is my favourite trope when it comes to historical romance. But it’s a plotline that is less easy to pull off in a contemporary, so I was keen to read Black Tie Optional – the first in Ann Marie Walker’s Wild Wedding series – to see whether it…
This second book in Jennifer McQuiston’s Seduction Diaries series re-acquaints readers with Lucy Westmore, the free-spirited, rather hoydenish younger sister of the heroine of the previous book. The Spinster’s Guide to Scandalous Behavior is a deftly written story that packs quite the emotional punch and boasts plenty of humour and sexual tension between the leads….
Fog lends a certain chilling ambience to a day and that in turns lends a delightfully chilling atmosphere to a mystery. That sense of distorted, shortened vision can lead one to expect all kinds of dangers to lie just around the corner and in this small town suspense story that proves to be true. Sophie…
I’ve been feeling some series fatigue lately, so I was surprised by how much I really wanted to see sequels to Aftershock. It was a fabulous read, and I just had to know what happened to the other earthquake survivors. Those who read Aftershock will be aware that Sam Rutherford is something of a mysterious…
I adore stories with dragons in them. I grew up with Anne MacCaffrey’s Pern books, and Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series of historical fantasies is among my favorites. So I jumped at the opportunity to review Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent, the first installment in a series of fantasy…
When I was in Junior High my parents renovated a one hundred-plus year old house in the heart of our small town. It could be inconvenient living in a home whose walls were constantly being torn down and rebuilt or whose flooring would be yanked out and replaced over the course of a grueling day’s…