In this lovely, Sweden-set short story, Jolie Flynn returns to the island of Öland for her aunt’s funeral and to take care of her estate. In the airport, she encounters her first love, Mattias, now a father of five, who remembers her aunt and comes to Öland to stay next door to Jolie. Their second-chance…
M.A. Grant’s The Iron Crown is The Sixth Sense meets Vikings plus magic. Grant takes an outlandish mash-up and handles it with intelligent writing, but doesn’t treat the central love story as central, which means the book – though marketed as one – ultimately doesn’t feel like a romance. Lugh is the third of three…
Ambitious Aevir, Viking warrior and freed son of an enslaved mother, lacks only an elite, wealthy bride to complete his rise in the world. Unfortunately, Saxon Ellan would come with nothing, and would even cost Aevir, since he’d have to buy off the man her father has pledged her to. Amidst Danish and Saxon political…
He was my stepbrother. My Prince Charming. My fairytale gone totally wrong… My mother marrying the king was supposed to give my mom and me our happily ever after. But my life has never been a bedtime story and no prince with a fancy shoe is turning me into a Cinderella. I had big plans…
Hockey romance authors will generally create a fictional NHL team as the backdrop for their series, so it’s rare to find an author who digs down into the farm teams that build up the players for their chance in the spotlight. That’s what Melanie Ting has done with her Vancouver Vice series. The Vice are…
In Ms. Crews’ first book in Harlequin’s new Dare line, American professor Margot Cavendish is a skeptical sex researcher exploring Icelandic attitudes towards sex. Her final point of data collection is at Hotel Viking (a little on the nose there, but I’ll allow it), which is essentially tourist destination for sexual fantasies. Its owner is…
I’d like to show you what I looked like as I read this book. No joke. Y’all, this thing is something else. Set between 2018 and 1986, Pieces of Her is a tale of a mother who would go to any lengths to protect her daughter, a daughter who chafes under her father’s authoritarian rule,…
I have fond memories of watching the Disney adaptation of The Little Mermaid as a child, and so I was over the moon when I saw that Sea Witch, Sarah Henning’s retelling of this classic tale, was coming out at the end of July. It was billed as dark young adult fantasy with a bit…
Off the Grid is book two in Monica McCarty’s series, The Lost Platoon, and although I haven’t read the previous book (Going Dark) I was able to follow the plot in this one without any trouble, so it worked perfectly well as a standalone. What didn’t work so well, however, were the hackneyed storyline, stereotypical…
The Girl in a Swing is part psychological thriller, part paranormal horror and part twisted love story. I picked it up because it’s by Richard Adams, the author of my favorite fantasy novel, Watership Down, but anyone looking for characters as likeable as Hazel and Bigwig should look elsewhere. That’s not what this book is…