Fool Me Twice is easily my favorite Duran book of the last few years. After having loved a few of hers in the past, I struggled with the last three as they had themes that didn’t really resonate with me. Happily, her newest effort really worked, and I finished the book a happy reader. The…
How does a gay agoraphobic fine artist find love? In the pantheon of opposites attract romances, how artist Miles Caldwell and rock sensation Adam Craig (of Black Varen, the band of the moment) meet and fall in love might be one of the most stirring. After his parents die in a car crash from which…
It would be easy label Alexis Hall’s debut novel Glitterland as literary fiction masquerading as romance. The language he uses – his metaphors are often show stoppingly gorgeous – and his narrator, a bipolar depressive – beg to be read by those who dismiss genre fiction as lowly. The next time someone sniffs derisively at…
Sweet Madness is the third book in Heather Snow’s Veiled Seduction series, and while I haven’t yet read the other two, I certainly intend to on the strength of this one. Lady Penelope Bridgeman, the heroine of this story, had already appeared as a secondary character in one of the other books, but unlike her…
This début book from Victoria Morgan is easily one of the best historical romances I’ve ever read. In fact, I don’t think I’ve felt this excited about a new author in the genre since I read Cecilia Grant’s A Lady Awakened. The storyline is fairly simple, but this allows the author the time to fully…
Anne Stuart’s Banish Misfortune is a classic. Winner of the Golden Medallion (now known as the RITA) for Best Single Title Romance of 1985, it remains impressive nearly two decades later. I first read it in 2000, and while it was dated, with certain elements that make it more of an historical than a contemporary…
The hero of The Portrait is Jonas Whitaker, the leading artist of his day in New York City, 1855. Jonas is forced by his patron to take on as his student Imogen, “Genie,” Carter, his patron’s godchild. Genie’s out-of-state father, who wants to make her into an artist like her late sister, is behind this…
Eddie Berlin is a tortured hero with a difference. Haunted by the past, he drinks too much, he meets with prostitutes in a neglected farmhouse, and he is agoraphobic (agoraphobia is literally fear of the marketplace). Yet he is also sensitive and quietly heroic. Maddie Smith, the product of a dysfunctional upbringing, is the perfect…