Dr. Virginia Waters was sure she was marrying the wrong brother! She wanted quiet, safe Andrew, but he had jilted her after a 6 year engagement. Andrew’s brother, Inspector Zack Bullock, was a Mountie looking for a wife. A wife who would be busy with her own life and leave him alone to pursue his…
Normally, I love big, gritty historical sagas since they are just the sort of stories that make me want to suspend disbelief and fall into the twists and turns of a larger-than-life epic plot. Crosswinds opens with the promise of just such a story, but, unfortunately, it failed to hold up. As Crosswinds opens it…
A Kiss to Die For is something of a rarity: it’s a historical romantic suspense novel set in post-Civil War Abilene, Kansas. It’s an intriguing combination, and the book had some aspects I really enjoyed. Unfortunately it was also quite a slow read, and I had trouble warming up to the heroine. Anne Ross has…
If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then writing about Carla Kelly’s writing is like trying to describe a breathtaking rainbow to a colorblind person: It can be done, but it definitely loses a lot in the translation. There is no one who does poignant as well as Kelly, no one who can…
When this book started out, I liked it so much I planned to grant it Desert Isle Keeper status. It had everything I like: a moderately tortured hero and a heroine who appears to have some intelligence; an interesting and unique storyline; and good secondary characters. That makes it all the more disheartening that the…
I’d heard positive things about this author, so when I received A Chance at Love to review, I was looking forward to reading it. Many aspects of the book impressed me, while others left me a little confused. There were several qualities here that I liked a lot, among them a very strong heroine. In…
Reunion by Kathryn Fox is an unusual and powerful historical romance. Unfortunately, the question on the cover – Would their future be filled with love..or heartbreak? – isn’t really satisfactorily answered. The question that still bothered me at the end of this book was, “Is love going to be enough to save this marriage?” Adam…
I always try to have high hopes for each new book I pick up, even one with a cover as awful as this one has: a clinch, he’s stripped to the waist, her dress is literally falling off, his buns are crooked, she appears to be giving a chiropractic adjustment to his painfully twisted neck,…
Desert Rain is an “Indian Romance,” but it’s quite different from a run of the mill Indian Romance. For one thing, the author is Native American, for another, he is male. The hero and heroine of the book are both Indians and the romance takes a backseat to an exploration of the lives of the…
Velda Sherrod’s Lord Of The Plains contains a little bit of originality in plot, but hardly enough to overcome its problems of unsympathic characters, clichéd and condescending attitudes toward American Indians, and painfully poor dialogue. Kate Hartland is a saloon singer whose only goal is to earn money to send back to her sister Maureen…