Well Played – the second in Jen De Luca’s series of renaissance faire-centered romances – is a bit of a step down from the excellent Well Met. While the story itself is charming, and the heroine is wonderful, there are several rather frankly icky plot points that keep this one from a higher grade. Renaissance…
The new Carina Adores line from Carina Press promises highly romantic, feel-good stories with a strong central trope featuring LGBTQ+ protagonists getting their Happily Ever Afters. Carina has a pretty strong track record when it comes to queer romance and I’m really looking forward to trying the new-to-me authors in the line as well as…
Nina Crespo kicks off the Tillbridge Stables series with The Cowboy’s Claim, a Hallmark Movie-esque low-conflict, enemies-to-lovers, country boy-meets-city gal romance. Crespo introduces readers to the Tillbridges, an African American family of horse stable owners based in Maryland who have achieved renown as rodeo performers. Tillbridge Horse Stable & Guesthouse manager Tristan Tillbridge has dedicated…
Emily Parker is in a transition period. She’s fresh out of a dream-drowning relationship and is filling her time by living with and caring for her sister and niece in Willow Creek, Maryland, while her sister recovers from a car accident. Her niece wants to spend her summer doing the Renaissance Faire, and soon Emily…
In Lady in the Lake, Laura Lippman sweeps readers back in time to 1960s Baltimore, where the body of a young, African-American woman is found floating in a lake. No one seems to know who she is, nor do they seem all that interested in finding out, so housewife-turned-reporter Maddie Schwartz decides to solve the…
Well Met, indeed, Jen DeLuca! Helping out while her sister recovers from a broken leg means that Emily does the driving, the shopping – and the volunteering, serving as a pub wench at the local Renaissance Faire run by the high school English teacher, Simon. But there’s more to this Faire than just turkey legs,…
It’s been over forty years since Marlon Brando uttered the words, “I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse” but Number One Chinese Restaurant proves that not everyone took that warning to heart. When our story begins, Uncle Pang is eating at The Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland with its owner Jimmy…
Ms. Stewart returns to the fictional town of St. Denis, Maryland, for the seventh entry in her Chesapeake Diaries series. As a fan of the series, I enjoyed the story overall, and I loved Xe Sands’ narration. However, the story has problems that may irritate readers who haven’t read the earlier entries. Prosecuting attorney Sophie…
The first of the Hard Ink series finds the adult daughter of a Special Forces colonel who led his men into an ambush pairing up with the men who survived the set-up in order to find her abducted brother in this repetitious thriller. Baltimore nurse Becca Merritt is alarmed when her brother Charlie goes missing,…
When a book is the length that many of Karen Rose’s novels are, the writing has to be spectacular to keep the work from getting bogged down by sheer longitude. It works better in some novels than in others and I am happy to report that this is one of the ones where it really…