Nothing will make you relate to the heroine of Girl, Serpent, Thorn more than months of life lived during an unceasing quarantine. Soraya, too, is forever stuck in her own palace on the pain of death – and the deaths of those around her. But the tale Bashardoust weaves for the reader is enchanting and…
Hard Target is the first book in a new series of romantic suspense novels from popular author Pamela Clare featuring the men (and maybe women?) who work for Cobra International Security, the high-end security firm owned and run by Derek Tower, who was a recurring character in the author’s earlier I-Team series. I confess that…
The City of Brass, book one in S. A. Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy, has received quite a bit of buzz over the past few months. It’s been compared to such books as The Golem and the Jinni and The Grace of Kings, and since I’m always on the lookout for new fantasy novels, I jumped at…
For me the words Holiday Temptations conjures up an image of gooey, warm treats and hot, sweet drinks. For the ladies in this anthology, however, the temptations are of a far different, more intimate variety. It made for some fun reading and the talk of sweets, twinkling lights and decorating trees had me longing for…
Location, location, location. That’s a popular mantra which discusses what is believed to be the most important selling point of any piece of property. I can’t speak to the effectiveness of it in terms of real estate sales but it‘s certainly an important selling point to me vis-à-vis book buying. That’s because I love armchair…
Between Ghosts is a standalone romantic thriller by Garrett Leigh set mainly in Iraq, during the horrors of conflict in Basra. The main characters are all English and except for Connor, members of an elite SAS squad. Connor Reagan is a journalist and in 2003, he marched with a million others through London, decrying the…
The thing that initially attracted me to this book was the fact that while it’s set in the Victorian Era, the action takes place well away from England. I have no objection to England as a setting, but it’s a refreshing change to find an historical romance set somewhere else; and the fact that I’ve…
You know how sometimes you read the opening line or two of a book, and not only does it hook you immediately, but you can just tell it’s going to be a great read? Well, Night of a Thousand Stars is one of those books. It opens with Penelope Hammond, step-daughter of a rich American…
Have you ever read that book that was completely different from what you expected? This was that book for me. It stayed pretty true to the book description, but it was still not what I thought it would be. Gallienus, former soldier and current gate guard for the grand city of Constantinople, feels stuck in…
The romance genre is a funny thing. It is the only genre that I know of whereby, of the three narrative components (plot, setting, and character), reader expectations limit and predicate two: Plot and character. The plot limitation is, of course, the Happily-Ever-After. But the character limitation is more personal – I defy any romance…