Most sports related romances tend to feature players on top tier professional teams, playing for the NFL (football), or NHL (hockey) or FIFA (soccer) for example. Melanie Ting took a step back from that with her Vancouver Vice series, about hockey players in the junior leagues trying to make it to the NHL. Now she’s…
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…
I love gargoyles. I spent quite a bit of time babysitting in the mid- to late-nineties, and was introduced to the Gargoyles cartoon by a 4-year-old boy. I promptly fell in love with the show, the characters, and the romance of it all (and there is definitely romance in there, whether or not that 4-year-old…
The first couple of chapters gave me the impression that this book was going to be lively and playful in a sassy sort of way. But that quality dissipated as I got further into the book. The change in tone, a meddlesome character, and a big misunderstanding derailed a good bit of my enjoyment in…
With the market for erotic romance exploding, Kensington is looking to expand its share with its new Aphrodisia imprint. I have to admit, many of the recent Bravas I’ve read have struck me as tepid and mechanical, so I was interested to see what Aphrodisia had to offer. If Susan Lyons’s Champagne Rules is any…
This book, the third in a series of romantic James Bond ripoffs, is Very Silly. Its characters are shallow, and its plot (not unexpectedly) is ridiculous. But it did make me giggle. Canadian accountant Abel Andretti (hee – that’s giggle number one) comes to visit his sister Edie in Vancouver, only to discover she’s missing….
Sex and drugs and – Tristan und Isolde? That’s what Nancy Warren offers in Breathless, her October release from Blaze about a woman who wanders into danger and the cop who’s there to save her. Cursed with no sense of direction, bank employee Sophie Morton takes a wrong turn on her way to work and…
Shotgun Nanny by Nancy Warren was my favorite of the two stories. It’s set in Vancouver, British Colombia (how refreshing!) and involves a former RCMP (Mountie) and the woman he hires to take care of his orphaned niece. This story has a lot of well-written humor in it, making it a very fun read. Annie…