After over a decade putting in the work, Xeno Cooper, queen of the Houston rap scene, becomes an ‘overnight’ success when a major rapper highlights her work in an interview. She’d have it all – if she could just find the right woman to share it with. A chance backstage meeting with masseuse Trisha Martin,…
The Secret of You and Me is an unexpected treat of a heartfelt but very dark novel, a warm and queer retelling of Persuasion by Jane Austen. But it fashions a whole new world, a whole new set of feelings created from broken hearts and heavy religious guilt in small-town Texas. Captain Nora Noakes has…
Olivia Waite creates another winner in The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows, the story of an engraver who enters into a late-in-life romance with the town beekeeper. London-based Agatha Griffin is an engraver and printer whose business is her life and whose public depends on her for accurate representations of current events. It’s a…
I used to think love was all about losing yourself in another person. But you make me feel seen, loved, as a whole person, exactly as I am. #awww This snippet of dialogue is one of several touching lines that Aurora Rey crafts in her queer romance, The Last Place You Look. Reading Rey’s eloquent,…
Inked with a Kiss is a wonderful, sweet and chemistry-laden tale about two ordinary women falling in love under the ordinary pressures of real life. Thirty-seven-year-old Jamie Winston is a tattoo artist and shop manager with a dysfunctional family – a twelve-year-old-daughter, Riley, whom she adores but clashes with occasionally, her ex-wife, and two helpless,…
We Unleash the Merciless Storm is the sequel to 2019’s We Set the Dark On Fire, a Mexican-inspired young adult fantasy novel with a fabulous female/female relationship at its core. The first installment did end on a rather sizable cliffhanger, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of book two. This is a duology that…
A bingo hall brought Mari McCray and Hazel Johnson together as young women in 1963. Prejudice and family ultimatums pushed the two apart, but forty years later, a bingo hall brings them back together. In the meantime, however, both Hazel and Mari have married and had families. Is it too late for a second chance?…
Those of you who follow my reviews are probably aware that I don’t frequently assign ‘A’ ratings. (In fact, Tessa Bailey’s Fix Her Up was the last romance that I deemed deserving of DIK status, and that review was published six months ago.) Jaded by past disappointments, my most fervent hope was to quietly end…
Iron & Velvet is the first and highly disappointing book in a series of silly-gritty whodunits featuring Kate Kane, a mortal, hard-drinking investigator of paranormal mysteries. Physically, she’s eternally beautiful and emotionally she’s in constant trouble. Mourning the death of her partner, Archer, Kane is a derelict detective with a succubus secretary named Ashriel and…
In the Carla Kelly tradition of holiday shorts that make you smile, these three sweet short stories (set in the Edwardian Caribbean across Christmas, New Year, and Reyes Magos) are a lovely addition to any holiday romance fan’s library. These are gentle, realistic stories about the holidays of ordinary or even poor historical people; it’s…