Do you remember the Satanist scare of the 1980s? I was just a little kid then, but I remember the vague rumors of eeeeeevil doings in remote fields. By the time these tales filtered down to elementary school playgrounds, they had grown into frightening gory epics indeed. When I saw that The Skull Ring seemed…
When I read the cover blurb of Brenda Jackson’s Intimate Seduction, by the third play on the hero’s name, my hopes sank. “Maybe it was written by a un-punny editorial assistant,” I tried to assure myself. Maybe the book is better. I was wrong. The story is just as bad as the back cover copy….
Set a large chunk of time aside if you are planning to read A Breath of Snow and Ashes. Make that several large chunks of time, unless you are blessed with the ability to read at super speed, and have a cast iron behind. This book is 979 pages of small print and narrow margins….
While here at AAR we all do our utmost to approach each book we review with an open mind, I must admit that based on Jude Deveraux’s last few reviews here, I didn’t have a lot of hope when I opened her newest release. Thirty-six hours later, I closed the book with a sigh. Wild…
“Her isolation, the result of being honest with no one, was beginning to be unbearable… She had never been very good at keeping things to herself, and although she had become a master at it recently, she hated the way it shut her off from other people.” The heroine of Kiss River thinks those words…
Take a little trip to a coastal Carolina town and meet a couple of engaging characters whose struggle against each other – and themselves – provides for a few hours of entertaining reading. A solid sense of time and place, and a good dose of humor, add to the enjoyment of reading Tides of Passion,…
When The Fiery Cross arrived in the mail, I knew it already had a leg up on the competition. I can’t remember another time when I have been so excited just to open a package and hold a book. I had another book to finish the day it came, so I kept giving it fond,…
If there’s a novelist whose hand with plot, character, dialogue, prose, sensuality, historical detail, humor, and emotion is very near perfect, I’d say without a qualm that it’s Diana Gabaldon. Several books after the incomparable Outlander – the one that started it all – she can still produce a 1,000-page tome without losing the sheer…
Ain’t No River is a combination of sub-genres that normally would have me striding rapidly in the opposite direction: it’s an African-American inspirational romance. Yet reading this book reinforced my belief that sometimes it can be a rewarding experience to read something outside of my normal boundaries. It’s an engaging story of what happens when…
If you’re tired of the same old westerns and regency-set historicals, you might find a respite in Tracy Sumner’s Tides of Love. Set in turn of the century North Carolina, this book has a strong sense of place, and it’s a place and time we don’t often see. Adding to the originality is the hero’s…