Susan Lazarus trusts very few people, and that has served her well in life as first an abandoned street rat, then as a con artist and now as a private enquiry agent. Templeton was once in her trusted inner circle, her teenage misfit confidant and then first love, but when it mattered most he seemingly failed her. Susan rebuilt her defenses, found love again and when they finally crossed paths all she wanted was to thwart his criminal ways. But when he is framed for murder, she is the only one capable of unraveling the truth and clearing his name.
I have a lot of complicated feelings about Twice in a Blue Moon. A couple of them involve spoilers, so I'll stick that at the end. This is a second-chance romance that begins when Sam and Tate meet in London while on vacations with their grandparents. She's with her cafe-owning, over-protective grandmother, and he's with his step-grandfather who turns out to be terminally ill. This last bit is revealed early in the book, so don't be mad at me. Anyway, they're staying at the same hotel and end up eating breakfast together every day. The vacation is two weeks long and Sam and Tate, ages 21 and 18, fall into a whirlwind romance. Vacation is cut short, however, when Sam presumably tells the press that Tate is the long-hidden daughter of a mega-famous movie star, a secret she, her mother and her grandmother have worked to hide for over a decade. Then she doesn't see him again and doesn't have any way of contacting him. Fourteen years later, the two are reunited when she's cast as the lead in a movie adaptation of his novel, Milkweed.
You know how sometimes you’re in the mood for a historical romance, but you’d like a touch of spooky and a hint of lightness? This could just be me who wants that sort of book all the time, but if you are like me, that book is The Widow of Rose House.
In the American Dreamer series, Herrera has crafted three strong romances that engage deeply with political and social issues without losing their sexiness and humor. In American Love Story the failure of white LGBTQ allies to stand up for Black and marginalized people is front and center. Herrera sets Easton and Patrice’s reunion against the high-conflict backdrop of a spree of racially motivated traffic stops by local cops which only intensifies and highlights the poor communication behind the hot/cold dynamics of their tentative relationship.
The Beautiful was the perfect October read for me. A murder mystery, a forbidden romance, unexpected twists, and immersive world-building. The book is set in an alternate history New Orleans, shortly after the Civil War. The protagonist of the story, Celine, grew up in Paris, where her white father raised her to hide her Asian heritage. After killing the young man who was attempting to rape her at the dressmaker's shop where she worked, she flees to a convent in New Orleans. Arriving in the city is a revelatory experience for her.
Just for clarity: Frankly in Love is not a romance. Frankly in Love might contain a love story or two, but it is not a romance by the standards we, the genre romance reading populace, live by. However, it is sort of a relief that this was not a romance. This review contains unavoidable spoilers.
Sometimes, a book just really has too much plot - this tends to go with a lack of characterization - which is true of His Rebellious Lass. When this happens, the book tends to be a series of events and it never grabs hold of my attention.
Aurora Rising has everything I want to read in an SF book and a Romance book - action, adventure, girls with guns, so much hacking, and of course kissing in space. Though the romance in Aurora Rising not the driving force behind the plot, it’s hard not to get engaged in Bianca and Ian’s drama.
If you were obsessed with Greek mythology as a kid, Lifestyles of Gods & Monsters will have you riveted even as you want to look away. The myth of Adriadne, Theseus and the Minotaur is a common enough story that you may go into this book with a vague idea of the narrative. The twist, however, is that this is a retelling set in a vaguely modern Crete, complete with both Gods and Monsters and cell phones and social media. And reality TV. Ariadne's family has been organizing and hosting a yearly competition in which fourteen young competitors from Athens try to kill the Minotaur one at a time. This has gone on for ten years and no one has been successful. They air it like any good reality TV show, complete with parties and dramatic pyrotechnics, and an arena of blood-thirsty fans.
Between the stress of her job, her emotionally distant fiance, his overbearingly bougie parents, and her disapproving mother, Antonia Harper is struggling to muster up even the tiniest bit of her Black Girl Magic. Antonia’s never met a personal conflict she wanted to deal with head on, so she does her best ostrich impression until everything, and I mean everything, in her life implodes.
