The Kraken King Part 2, by Meljean Brook

TITLE: The Kraken King Part 2: The Kraken King and the Abominable Worm
AUTHOR: Meljean Brook

COPYRIGHT: 2014
PAGES: 90
PUBLISHER: InterMix

SETTING: Steampunk version of the 19th century
TYPE: Adventure romance
SERIES: Second part of 4th full length book in the Iron Seas series

As they continue their expedition across Australia, Ariq is determined to stay close to Zenobia and figure out what kind of game she’s playing—even as his admiration for the enigmatic woman starts to override his suspicion.

For Zenobia, revealing her identity to a man who once made his living outside of the law is out of the question—even though Ariq’s dashing looks and blunt manner are distractingly appealing.

But before anyone’s secrets or desires can be exposed, an unexpected attack threatens to destroy them all…

Link to my review of Part 1

Ok, so I'm assuming that if you're reading this, you've read part 1 (but not necessarily this part, so no spoilers for that here).

In The Kraken King and the Abominable Worm, Zenobia and her companions leave Krakentown with Ariq's party. Ariq and his people are trying to find information about the marauders who attacked Zenobia's airship (and have been attacking others in the area) in an effort to prevent the Empress from solving the situation in the simplest, more ruthless way: by laying waste to the entire area.

Ariq is not particularly keen on Zenobia leaving, but at least this way he gets to spend some more time with her and he can try to understand why she changed her mind so completely about him, after initially finding him attractive and looking quite tempted to give in to this attraction. We know it's all based on something Mara overheard and misinterpreted, but Ariq has no idea.

I really liked both the adventure and relationship aspects of this installment. On the adventure front, the abominable worm was a particularly exciting highlight (as were the jokes that such worms inspired), but I also liked the worldbuilding details about how things work between Ariq and his people and the Aboriginal Australians.

On the relationship side, the chemistry between Ariq and Zenobia continues to develop very satisfyingly. The sexual chemistry is scorching, but what I liked best was seeing how well suited they are to each other, and having them increasingly realise that this is so. I mentioned the worm jokes in the previous paragraphs; what was great about them wasn't just that they were funny, it was the way they showed very clearly Ariq's personality: his confidence and therefore his willingness to take the mickey out of himself quite happily. I can totally see why Zenobia would find this very attractive.

As I mentioned in my review of Part 1, I had this part provided by the author together with the first part, but my intention is to read this serial as it comes out. I resisted the temptation to keep going and read this only on the release date (while on some unexpected travel, which unfortunately prevented me from posting this until now). It worked really well that way. Whatever catch-up there was (mainly about why Ariq wants to find out more about the marauders, and a bit about why Zenobia changed her mind about him) was really unobtrusive and felt natural. I wouldn't think those reading the collected version in a few months would find it cumbersome (or even notice it, really). The break at the end of this part is again at an appropriate place, more a natural break than a cliff-hanger. There is a revelation where one of the protagonists finds out something about the other, and it made me speculate about what effect this would have on their feelings and future actions, but it didn't feel like an unfair or manipulative place to stop.

So far so good, can't wait for next Tuesday!

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The Kraken King Part 1, by Meljean Brook

TITLE: The Kraken King Part 1: The Kraken King and the Scribbling Spinster
AUTHOR: Meljean Brook

COPYRIGHT: 2014 (came out Apr 15th)
PAGES: About 100
PUBLISHER: InterMix

SETTING: Steampunk version of the 19th century
TYPE: Adventure romance
SERIES: Frist part of 4th full length book in the Iron Seas series

A former smuggler and thief, Ariq—better known as the Kraken King—doesn’t know what to make of the clever, mysterious woman he rescues from an airship besieged by marauders. Unsure if she’s a spy or a pawn in someone else’s game, Ariq isn’t about to let her out of his sight until he finds out…

After escaping her fourth kidnapping attempt in a year, Zenobia Fox has learned to vigilantly guard her identity. While her brother Archimedes is notorious for his exploits, Zenobia has had no adventures to call her own—besides the stories she writes. But when she jumps at the chance to escape to the wilds of Australia and acquire research for her next story, Zenobia quickly discovers that the voyage will be far more adventurous than any fiction she could put to paper…

The Kraken King is an 8 part serial, with a new episode coming out every week. It's my first proper serial. I have, of course, read books that were serialised when first published (mostly classics: Dickens, Dumas, that sort of thing), but I read those all in one go. I've never read any serials as they were meant to be read: waiting for new episodes to come out, speculating about what might come after cliffhanger endings.

Actually, I've never particularly wanted to read one that way. A couple of romance authors I like have published serials recently, and so far I've always waited until all parts were out before picking up the collected edition. I do remember saying at one point that I'd only really bother with the concept if a favourite author, like Meljean Brook, did one. Well, this is it, and I'm willing to give it a proper shot.

Part 1, as you might expect, sets up the story. The heroine is Zenobia Fox. Readers of the Iron Seas series will remember her as Archimedes Fox's sister, who chronicles his adventures in extremely successful stories (in serial form, which is very meta). Zenobia loves her brother and writing up his exploits, but she's become dissatisfied with her own unexciting life. Well, unexciting except for people kidnapping her a few times, but even that is more about her brother than about her (see the Tethered novella, for instance).

As the book starts, Zenobia has decided she wants an adventure of her own. Just a small one; she's a sensible woman and is not about to put her life in danger unnecessarily. She decides to accompany an old friend to join her Ambassador husband in the area of Northern Australia where the Nipponese retreated to after fleeing the Horde's invasion of Japan. It doesn't seem too dangerous. She'll be travelling under an assumed identity (Mrs. Geraldine Inkslinger, a widow) and in a huge, official French airship, and she'll have her highly trained bodyguards with her. What could go wrong?

Well, plenty, it turns out, when a group of marauding flyers attack the airship in a sort of suicide attack. Zenobia and her companions are rescued and taken to a nearby small settlement, Krakentown. Krakentown is ran by Ariq, the very man who rescued Zenobia herself. Ariq is not aware of it, but thanks to Archimedes' descriptions, Zenobia has recognised him as the Kraken King. I'm not sure yet what that means, other than that he was the leader of a rebellion against the Horde and is quite famous for it.

What Ariq does know is that he's fascinated by and attracted to this woman and her quick, clever, lateral-thinking mind. He wants her, he wants to know the secrets it's obvious she's hiding, and he's sure she wants him too. He's pretty frank about his attraction and it looks like there will be some time before she and her companions are able to be on their way to their intended destination. This should be enough time for him to convince Zenobia that she should give in to her own attraction, but stuff happens, plus, there are very important reasons why they must get Zenobia's friend to her husband asap.

I really, really enjoyed it. It's a fun setup (and I'll be doing much shorter summaries for future entries, now that this is done), it looks at a part of this universe we've seen nothing of, and I really liked the characters. I found Zenobia to be a very intriguing minor character in the novella Tethered, and she's just as interesting as that story suggested she was. Ariq is just as good. I know less of his background so far, but it sounds like it could be great stuff. Oh, and the chemistry is really, really well done. Ariq is quite frank about his interest, but in a very non-assholey sort of way, and I can totally understand why Zenobia's very tempted.

As for negatives, hmmm, well, there's something that happens which has the potential to become a Big Misunderstanding. This could become a bit annoying, but it's only the beginning of it here, and it could yet be turned around. We'll see how that develops.

I had part 2 available when I finished this, because Meljean had given me that as an ARC as well, but I made the effort to stop for a week and get the proper serial experience. I did want to keep reading, but in an "I'm enjoying this book very much and want more", rather than in an "I can't wait to see what happens next" kind of way. The ending was more a small natural break in the narrative than a cliffhanger. So far, so good. I wouldn't have stopped here on my own, but I'm actually finding it nice to savour this little chunk before the next one.

MY GRADE: I'm not going to grade the book until I get to the end, but if I was doing it for the different parts, this would get a really good grade.

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Being Wrong One Day

TITLE: Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
AUTHOR: Kathryn Schulz

In Being Wrong, Schulz explores the many different aspects of the experience of, yes, being wrong. I was actually quite impressed by how many angles she could take. There's the question of what it is to be wrong, what the essence of wrongness is. There's the many different factors, both psychological and societal that lead us to errors (I'd already covered much of this ground on my behavioural economics reading). There's (and this felt the most novel and insightful) the issue of what it feels like to be wrong and how we humans react to it. And finally, what felt to me the point Schulz was building up to: what does it do to us, and why the author thinks making mistakes is what makes us human.

It was an interesting read and quite an enjoyable one, as well. Schulz has an engaging style and she uses plenty of examples that both illustrate and entertain. Some parts felt a little bit repetitive, but this wasn't a huge issue. Definitely worth a look.

MY GRADE: A B.



TITLE: One Day
AUTHOR: David Nicholls

Emma and Dex meet on their graduation day at university. We follow their lives for the next decades, meeting them on one day a year. We see them as they become friends, as they can't stand each other, as they take different career paths and as they screw up (pretty often, especially in Dex's case).

I really liked this book. It's funny and insightful and the characters are wonderfully done. Yes, Dexter can be a total arsehole (especially during the Thatcher years... god, he was vile then) and Emma a bit of a doormat (especially when it comes to Dexter), but they felt like real people, and I came to care for them. They grow as the years go by, too. I also thought the structure worked beautifully, creating a sort of in-built suspense. Whenever I'd finish a chapter, I'd always get really excited to see what was coming next, how those things I'd just seen being set up would have developed over a year. Sometimes there were huge surprises, sometimes not, so I never knew exactly what to expect.

Just remember it's not a romance novel. I knew what the ending would before I started it, so it worked for me, but if you read it for the romance, you might end up hating it.

MY GRADE: A B+.

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A couple of non-fiction DNFs

Two books that sounded fascinating, but ended up being a disappointment.

TITLE: Amber, Furs and Cockleshells: Bike Rides with Pilgrims and Merchants
AUTHOR: Anne Mustoe

Mustoe is a keen cyclist and in Amber, Furs and Cockleshells we get an account of some of her travels. Each of the three items in the title describes one of the trails she describes in this book. First is the Amber Route (quite simply, the route through which amber from the Baltic was traded south towards the Mediterranean). That's about as far as I got. I missed the Santa Fe Trail (across the Western USA), where I assume furs were traded, as well as the route of the Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, in Northwestern Spain (pilgrims would carry a cockleshell as a symbol that they'd done the pilgrimage).

I stopped reading after about 60 pages, halfway through the Amber Route. The problem was that although the locations Mustoe was cycling through must have been amazing, she wasn't making them come alive. Nor was she providing any of the other things that could make a travel book interesting, whether it's providing insightful cultural commentary or comedy. I find that in travel books the narrator is just as important as the subject matter, and Mustoe was a really bland one. I didn't hate this book, it just bored me.

MY GRADE: DNF.



TITLE: Married To A Bedouin
AUTHOR: Marguerite van Geldermalsen

The author visited Petra in the late 70s and fell in love with a man she met there, a Bedouin. She lived there with him and his family until his death, 24 years later. I thought it'd be interesting to read, having just visited Petra, especially to see how how it's changed over the years.

I didn't get very far into it. After the initial visit where she meets the future husband, the author is invited back by him to attend a Bedouin wedding. The bride is a young girl the author describes as maybe 13, who's marrying a man much older than her. Everyone readily tells van Geldermalsen that the girl doesn't want to marry him, or even like him, but he has paid a very good bride price. So then, through all the wedding preparations, while van Geldermalsen prattled on about the dresses and how they applied kohl on her eyes and henna on her hands, and how pretty everyone looked, I couldn't stop thinking that the girl next to her was about to get raped with everyone's connivance. And all van Geldermalsen will do is describe her as sullen and grumpy (well, you would be, if you were about to get raped) and then blithely go about enjoying the party. It did not endear me to her, and I didn't feel like continuing to read.

MY GRADE: DNF.

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To Darkness And To Death, by Julia Spencer-Fleming

TITLE: To Darkness And To Death
AUTHOR: Julia Spencer-Fleming

COPYRIGHT: 2005
PAGES: 370
PUBLISHER: St. Martin's

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: Mystery
SERIES: 4th in the Rev. Clare Fergusson / Russ Van Alstyne series

Millicent van der Hoeven has decided to sell her family's Adirondack estate to a nature conservancy. But on the day of the land transfer, her brother frantically calls the police. Millie has disappeared in the cold November forest...

Reverend Clare Fergusson gets an early morning phone call to join the Millers Kill search and rescue operation. As a former Army helicopter pilot trained in survival skills, she can't refuse the request--even though it's the day of the bishop's annual visit. Worse for Clare, the search operation will link her up with Russ Van Alstyne, the very married local police chief who is her greatest temptation. Now, as Clare and Russ race time to find Millie van der Hoeven, they soon discover the secrets of someone who is desperate to stop the sale...and a deadly madness waiting to destroy them all.

To Darkness and To Death was my least favourite of the series so far. As in previous books, there are two main elements here. There's a mystery, and there's also the development of the relationship between Clare Fergusson, an Episcopal priest still relatively new to a small town in upstate New York, and Russ Van Alstyne, the chief of police. Over the series so far, Clare and Russ have become good friends, but those feelings have turned into something beyond friendship now. Problem is, Russ is married; happily married, he would even have said.

So, the thing about this book was that one of the elements worked well, but the other didn't. My big problem was with the mystery plot. The action takes place all in one day. It's an important day, the day when the rich Van Der Hoevens will be signing over huge tracts of their land to a conservancy organisation. Only, when Millie van der Hoeven's brother wakes up that morning he finds her gone and suspects she never came back after a late walk through the forest the previous evening. Did she get lost or is there something more sinister going on? We know it's the latter, as one of the first scenes we get shows us Millie is being kept captive by parties unknown.

But that's not all that's happening. The land transfer is generating all sorts of other changes for the people in the area. Local loggers will not be able to operate in that land, and any other woods are too far to make the work profitable. And without them, the local mill loses access to the raw material they need. Many people have an interest in all of this, and before the day is out, they will all get involved in one way or another.

Basically, this means that there are a lot of people running around doing nasty things. I found it incredibly depressing, because we're not talking criminals, we're talking characters who were presented to us as regular people, people who care about their loved ones and their fellow human beings. I could have taken maybe one of them turning bad. Yes, I can accept that some people, when under some pressure, might be tempted to do things that they know are wrong and will hurt others. But here, everyone did. They did incredibly dodgy things for supposedly good people. Faced with evidence of wrongdoing, they immediately turned their thoughts to how they could take advantage of it, however illegal their actions would be, in turn. It's a horrible view of human nature. It ended up taking me over a month to read this, because I really didn't want to spend time with these characters.

The tone was also wrong. There was a definite touch of the slapstick here, and it all felt almost like a farce. It didn't work for me. Additionally, there was absolutely no suspense, because suspense is about more than not knowing what's going to happen, it's about caring what's going to happen, and I didn't. Pretty much all the characters involved, other than Russ and Clare? I could not care less if they dropped dead. And when the resolution came, there were things that really didn't make much sense.

The Clare and Russ element of the book, though, was good. There aren't that many interactions between them here, but at this stage in the series we're past beyond the point where the author needs to show us how well-suited they are and how much chemistry they have. We know, they know, and each knows the other knows. The issue here is how the situation can be resolved, or rather, whether it has to be resolved, or whether they will just continue as they are, friends who know they want to be more but won't do it because it's wrong. The issue is, is that longing just as wrong? Is there any way to resolve this ethically? I won't include any spoilers here, but I'll just say that there is some movement here, and that I'm very interested to see what will happen in the next book.

So yeah, I will be reading the next book. I know that Spencer-Fleming can do really good mysteries, because the last 3 have been exactly that, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how the soap opera continues.

MY GRADE: A C.

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Special Interests, by Emma Barry

TITLE: Special Interests
AUTHOR: Emma Barry

COPYRIGHT: 2014 (comes out today)
PAGES: 201
PUBLISHER: Carina Press

SETTING: Contemporary US (Washington DC)
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: None

Compared to love, politics is easy

Union organizer Millie Frank's world isn't filled with cocktails and nightclubs…until she's turned into an unwitting minor celebrity. As if being part of a hostage situation wasn't traumatizing enough, now her face is splashed across the news. But Millie's got fresher wounds to nurse—like being shot down by the arrogant bad boy she stupidly hit on.

Parker Beckett will do whatever it takes to close a deal for the senate majority leader, including selling out union labor. Charming and smart on the surface, he's also cynical and uncommitted—an asset on the Hill. But something about Millie has stuck with him and when negotiations bring her to his office, Parker breaks his own rules and asks her out.

Parker can't understand how Millie has retained her idealism in a place like D.C. Millie can't believe what Parker's willing to sacrifice in order to pass a budget. But as they navigate their political differences, what grows between them looks a lot like a relationship... and maybe even a little like love.

For various reasons, I don't often go for ARCs (in fact, this is my only one so far this year). However, I saw Emma Barry's tweet offering review copies of her upcoming contemporary polical romance when I was in just the right mood for it. I contacted her and immediately started reading the book.

Special Interests is a romance between two people who, although ultimately on the same side, have very real political differences. I really liked that the politics here seem to be more grounded in reality than I'm used to in romance novels. I understand why authors might prefer to not make their politician characters' party affiliation explicit, but that's a fiction that stretches credulity more and more. A principled politician in one of the big US parties would not believe the same things as one in the other party. Here, both characters are Democrats, but that doesn't mean that this won't be the source of some really fascinating conflict in their relationship.

Millie works as a labour organiser. She has a job with a union, and truly believes in the cause of defending workers' rights. It's frustrating work, because it feels like they've lately been perpetually on the losing side, but she feels good about doing it. Parker works as a senior staffer for the Senate majority leader. Millie's union are one of their core consituencies, but in Parker's view, his job is closing deals: making sure the next budget passes, keeping the government from coming to a standstill. And that might mean giving up things that are very important to Millie and her union.

The Washington DC in this novel is a vivid setting, and I liked that this is a novel peopled by characters who actually care and talk about politics and the nitty-gritty of budget negotiations and such. I mean, the external conflict is: will Parker manage to do a deal on the budget and what will it take! I'm not sure if it would be everyone's cup of tea, but as a government economist working very closely with the policy delivery function, it was definitely mine!

My government economist job not being for the American government, I can't know how accurately this shows what actually goes on, but it feels like a real world. There's internal coherence, and FWIW, from what I read about current American politics, it rings true.

I particularly liked the subtlety of the portrayal of the characters' different positions. The author's take on Parker and Millie's very different approaches was interesting and thought-provoking. Parker is focused on outcomes, on getting the deal now, and therefore feels everything has to be negotiable. Millie, on the other hand, feels that this is treating important things like a game, when they should be taken seriously. I feared Barry might overly bash Parker's position, but she didn't. They have some spirited discussions and both get in some zingers (including Parker's accusation that it's very easy to feel superior by holding onself above the system and not engaging). There is no big conclusion, no easy answer, and acknowledgement that Millie's and Parker's roles are important and necessary. It's great.

Heck, even the Republicans are subtly portrayed, and we all know how easy it is to make them into ridiculous figures. They're not portrayed as evil, but as firm believers in things that our protagonists disagree with. They're just refusing to play the game of compromising for the sake of keeping the country working, and this is a source of much frustration both for Parker and for his counterpart on the Republican side. There's a scene when these two characters make an unexpected connection, and that and what develops from it were some of my favourite sections in the book.

So, what about the romance? Well, at the core of it, this is a very traditional relationship arc. Millie and Parker meet and start dating and the relationship proceeds from there, basically. As I mentioned, when it comes to reconciling their political differences, the novel is great. The rest of the development is less great, definitely not as good as the rest of the book. Millie and Parker's relationship is very sweet, but I did have a niggling feeling that it was all a bit too fast. Parker goes from cynical guy who has no time or interest in relationships to someone totally up for falling in love and going to brunch on a Sunday with his new girlfriend, and this happens awfully quickly and without that much angsting about it. Parker's mental monologue is more about how to make Millie and the people around him see that he's not that guy any longer than about whether he's ready to change and stop being that guy and just go for it. And then there is Millie, who is just not sure about Parker and whether someone like him is the right guy for her. I kind of got what was worrying her, but in the second half of the book it sometimes feels as if we're going round in neverending circles and I lost track of what she was on about.

So, not perfect, but I enjoyed this very much, and will definitely keep an eye out for more books by this author.

MY GRADE: A B.

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Play of Passion, by Nalini Singh

TITLE: Play of Passion
AUTHOR: Nalini Singh

COPYRIGHT: 2010
PAGES: 352
PUBLISHER: Berkley

SETTING: US, some 100 years into the future
TYPE: Paranormal romance
SERIES: 9th in the Psy/Changeling series

Passion and reason collide with explosive force in the newest installment of Nalini Singh’s “mesmerizing” Psy/Changeling series. As a conflict with Pure Psy looms on the horizon, two powerful wolves fight a far more intimate war of their own…

In his position as tracker for the SnowDancer pack, it’s up to Drew Kincaid to rein in rogue changelings who have lost control of their animal halves—even if it means killing those who have gone too far. But nothing in his life has prepared him for the battle he must now wage to win the heart of a woman who makes his body ignite…and who threatens to enslave his wolf.

Lieutenant Indigo Riviere doesn’t easily allow skin privileges, especially of the sensual kind—and the last person she expects to find herself craving is the most wickedly playful male in the den. Everything she knows tells her to pull back before the flames burn them both to ash…but she hasn’t counted on Drew’s will.

Now, two of SnowDancer’s most stubborn wolves find themselves playing a hot, sexy game even as lethal danger stalks the very place they call home...

I used to adore the Psy/Changeling series and highly anticipate every entry, but that feeling has faded over the years. I still read the books, but I'm quite behind in the series and don't get anything close to the thrill the first few books would elicit.

Play of Passion is centred on the romance between two changelings. In fact, both are from the same pack, which I don't think we've seen before. Indigo Riviere is a lieutenant with the SnowDancer wolves. She's one of the highest-status, most dominant female wolves, and this creates a problem when it comes to finding a partner. Drew Kincaid is a SnowDancer, too, a tracker, whose job is to keep other wolves from going rogue (and executing those who've actually gone over the line). He is very attracted to the powerful, older Indigo, but she just won't take him seriously.

And as they dance around each other, there's also other stuff going on. The Psy have started to tresspass onto pack territory, and it's clear they're planning something dangerous.

I was looking forward to this, as I'm always really interested in romances where the female character is in a position of more power, but the result was a disappointment, I'm afraid. I was particularly disappointed that Drew had this role that was outside the chain of command, so even though Indigo's ranking was higher, at first sight, he wasn't serving under her and she didn't *really* outrank him. That's very annoying, because even in this series there are books where the heroine is under the hero's command. Why not the opposite? Also, there seemed to be a message here that it's a huge problem if a female changeling is more dominant than her male partner. This is what Indigo fears, that because she's so dominant, her relationship with Drew is doomed from the start. But instead of the resolution of this being that no, this is not the case, the problem is solved by assuring us that it's fine because Drew is really dominant as well, it's just that Indigo doesn't see this, as he's outside the chain of command and therefore doesn't have the obvious mark of a dominant which is high rank. Bah.

The development in the overarching conflict between Psy and changelings was more interesting. It was not my favourite in the series, but I enjoyed it (especially the ending) and there was definitely a feeling that things are fast moving towards some sort of resolution.

So, yeah, I'll keep going, if only just to see what happens, and we'll see about the romance. I'm not sure if it's me or if it's the books that have changed. I think I might have to go back and reread Slave to Sensation, see if I love it as much as I did when I first read it.

MY GRADE: A B-.

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Catching up: two historicals

So, I just realised I've got a few half-written reviews that have basically fallen down the back of the sofa. For completeness' sake, and because I've got more than a touch of OCD, I'll be doing a few round-up posts. I really liked most of these books and I wish I could do proper reviews for them, but unfortunately, it's been so long since I read them that I'd have to reread them if I wanted to do so.

TITLE: The Forbidden Rose
AUTHOR: Joanna Bourne

Just like The Spymaster's Lady, which I adored, Bourne's The Forbidden Rose has spies and adventures in France just after the Revolution. The heroine, Marguerite, is a French aristocrat who's part of a secret organisation devoted to smuggling people out of the country, and she teams up with Doyle, a British spy. Both are pretending to be someone they're not, and each knows the other is doing so.

I enjoyed it. The writing was great and I enjoyed the adventure feel of the story. My only issue was that I felt Marguerite couldn't quite compare to Annique, from Spymaster's Lady. She felt a bit more passive, and wasn't quite as interesting. I did like Doyle, and particularly enjoyed one of the secondary characters, Adrian, the boy Doyle's taken on a sort of apprentice. He has the makings of a fantastic character in his own right, and I will definitely be reading his book, which Bourne has now written.

MY GRADE: A B.



TITLE: A Lady's Lesson in Scandal
AUTHOR: Meredith Duran

A Lady's Lesson in Scandal is a terrible, generic title for a book that's really unique. Our heroine is Nell Whitby, a young woman who was brought up in the slums of London but who turns out to be the long lost heiress of an aristocratic family. Simon St. Maur is the current holder of the title, which came to him without any of the money. So the perfect solution occurs to him: if Nell marries him, he'll help her get access to the family fortune, and as her husband, he'll have access to it as well.

It sounds like a bit of a hokey setup, but the thing is, it's done with subtlety and characters who have real psychological grounding. Ok, so if a woman really had grown up in the slums and now had the chance to take her place as a heiress, how would she feel about it? How would she react? And how does a cynical man react to someone like her? We get the full thing, complete with complex feelings and motivations. Both Nell and Simon are intelligent and realistic and they fall in love with their eyes wide open. I really enjoyed it.

MY GRADE: A B+.

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March 2014 reads

Fewer books than usual, and not much romance, but I did enjoy my reading this month.


1 - The Vor Game, by Lois McMaster Bujold: A-
review coming soon

Audiobook. I'm still very early in the Vorkosigan series, but I'm loving the books so much that I'm doling them out to myself like a total miser, no more than one a month. This is the 2nd full-length Miles book, and covers what happens right after his graduation as a Barrayaran officer. Obviously, this being Miles, things go to hell pretty quickly. Loved it.


2 - The Circle, by Dave Eggers: A-
review coming soon

Audiobook. A satirical look at social media, technology and privacy. Scarily plausible. You can argue that some of it was a bit heavy-handed, but it still worked for me perfectly. We read this for my book club, and I'd highly recommend it for that purpose. The discussion was really enjoyable.


3 - Alien Taste, by Wen Spencer: B+
original review here

Reread of an old favourite, one of the few UF-type books I've liked. Ukiah and his partner Max usually only work on missing people cases. Their latest case, which gets them involved in some seriously weird killings, reveals some surprising things about Ukiah's unique abilities. Love the characters.


4 - Special Interests, by Emma Barry: B
review coming soon

The hero is a senior aide to a pre-eminent senator, the heroine works as a labour organiser. I loved the detailed look at what working in politics might be actually like, and liked the romance.


5 - The Surgeon's Lady, by Carla Kelly: B-
review here

A lady and a 'common surgeon' fall in love while working in a navy hospital during the Napoleonic wars. I loved the hospital stuff, but thought the romance fizzled out.


6 - Amber, Furs and Cockleshells, by Anne Mustoe: DNF
review coming soon

Non fiction, subtitled "Bike Rides with Pilgrims and Merchants". The areas the author was biking through sounded great, but the writing style was very boring.


7 - To Darkness and to Death, by Julia Spencer-Fleming: still reading
review coming soon

Mystery, part of the Rev. Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne series. The plot concerns the search for a young woman who has disappeared the very day she was supposed to sign over a big swathe of land to a conservation group. Not liking it very much, so far my least favourite in the series.


8 - The 5th Wave, by Rick Yancey: still reading
review coming soon

YA, post-alien invasion. Grim and bleak and really absorbing. No idea where it's going, and I love that.

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April 2014 wish list

April is going to be an insanely expensive month. If you hear any screaming around the 14th/15th, it'll be my credit card. A lot of those (the sports romances, mainly) are Carina Press books I added after reading the letter from the editor at the front of Emma Barry's Special Interests. That one I've actually already read, so it shouldn't be here, technically, but I liked it and want to highlight it

Books I'm definitely planning to get


Her Kind of Trouble by Sarah Mayberry (Apr 1)

Mayberry is an autobuy, and I like the sound of this one: a couple building a relationship after having a one-night-stand years earlier. There’s kids, though, which is something I don’t like that much.





The Wedding Ring Quest by Carla Kelly (Apr 1)

Ditto the previous one. It sounds like a lot of fun, too.






Special Interests, by Emma Barry (Apr 7)

As I mention above, I've read this already (I don't request ARCs very often, maybe a couple of times a year, and this was one of them). I was interested because the hero and heroine are in politics, but both are working on the nitty gritty of policy behind the scenes, which is a point of view we don't see often.





The Kraken King Part I: The Kraken King and the Scribbling Spinster, by Meljean Brook (Apr 15)

Talking about serials a while ago I said I'd only go for one if it was written by someone like Meljean Brook. Well, this is it. The Kraken King is the story of Archimedes Fox's sister, Zenobia. There are two further entries coming out in April: The Kraken King and the Abominable Worm on the 22nd, and The Kraken King and the Fox's Den on the 29th. There will be 8 episodes, with the latest coming out in early June.



Her Best Laid Plans, by Cara McKenna (Apr 15)

I’ll be honest, the “Cosmo Red Hot Reads” sign on the cover sort of puts me off, but it’s Cara McKenna, and I adore her books.





Hard Time, by Cara McKenna (Apr 15)

Not sure why McKenna has 2 books coming out on the same day, but hey, brilliant for me. This one I’ve actually preordered, as it sounds to be along the same lines as the wonderful After Hours and Unbound.





The Collector, by Nora Roberts (Apr 15)

Another autobuy. I’ve been enjoying Roberts’ latest stand-alone romantic suspense novels, so even though the early reviews I've seen of this one are very lukewarm, I know I'll still be reading it.




An Unsuitable Husband, by Ros Clarke (Apr 21)

Lots of sports romances this year, but this is the only one centred on a sport I actually care about. Not many details around yet (not even a cover!), but the author posted on the Dear Author open thread for authors and called it "the sexy French footballer story". I'm really not convinced a footballer would feel he has to enter a marriage of convenience as "a way to clean up his act for the sake of his next contract" (not when Wayne Rooney is the highest paid footballer in the Premier League), but hey, I'll give it a chance!



Books that interest me and I'll keep an eye on


Silence for the Dead, by Simone St. James (Apr 1)

A ghost story set in a hospital for World War I soldiers. I didn’t love the one book I read by this author, but her plots always intrigue me.





Prince's Fire, by Amy Raby (Apr 1)

I’m always looking for good fantasy romance, so I’ll keep an eye on this one.





Night Diver, by Elizabeth Lowell (Apr 8)

I'm always hoping for another series from Elizabeth Lowell like the one that starts with Amber Beach. Maybe this one will be it.





Imaginary Lines, by Allison Parr (Apr 14)

I liked the first in the series, Rush Me, and what I saw of the hero of this one there. Also, there aren’t enough romance novels with Jewish protagonists out there.





Playing It Close, by Kat Latham (Apr 14)

A sports romance centred on rugby? Oh, yeah! The only thing that would make me happier would be if it was League, rather than Union.





On the Surface, by Kate Willoughby (Apr 14)

And this one is a hockey romance. I’ve heard good things about it from Jane, from Dear Author. She says the hero is really sweet.





Love in Straight Sets by Rebecca Crowley (Apr 14)

And finally, tennis! With the heroine being the professional athlete, too!





Heaven's Queen, by Rachel Bach (Apr 22)

This one is part of the series that starts with Fortune's Pawn, which is on my TBR and has had excellent reviews.





Ladder to the Red Star, by Jael Wye (Apr 28)

Part of a series called Once Upon a Red World. I’m intrigued by the idea of sci-fi fairy tale adaptations. This entry, as you might deduce from the title, appears to be based on Jack and the Beanstalk, which sounds like fun. There was a review recently on SBTB of the first in the series which said the plot was good but pointed out some issues with misogynistic portrayal of some of the female characters. I'll wait and see on this one.

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The Surgeon's Lady, by Carla Kelly

TITLE: The Surgeon's Lady
AUTHOR: Carla Kelly

COPYRIGHT: 2009
PAGES: 299
PUBLISHER: Mills & Boon Historical

SETTING: Early 19th century England
TYPE: Historical romance
SERIES: Follows Marrying The Captain

Coldly sold for marriage to the highest bidder, Lady Laura Taunton does not hold much faith in love and kindness. The war against Napoleon only serves to echo this feeling, until she meets intriguing Royal Naval surgeon Lieutenant Brittle – a man who’s the exact opposite of her cruel late husband. Taking up his offer to help aid the battle’s injured, Laura starts to believe that she could have a place in the world…and a man who can show her true happiness.

We meet Lady Laura Taunton at a bit of a turning point in her life. She's recently widowed and the death of her husband, meant relief, rather than bereavement. It's not just that he was a much older man her father forced her into marrying and he was obsessed with getting her pregnant. It's also that Laura spent the last few years nursing her husband after a really bad stroke, and she's glad both of them are free of this (I didn't quite get why she felt she had to do the most intimate tasks of nursing an invalid herself, when she did not like the man, they had plenty of money to hire someone else to do them, and it's not like fine ladies were expected to take on such tasks, anyway, but I was willing to suspend disbelief and go with it).

Laura has recently found out that she wasn't her father's only illegitimate daughter, and as the book starts, she decides to get over her fear and contact one of the others, Nana. Rather than write and give herself time to chicken out, Laura just gets on a carriage and travels to the house where Nana lives with her new husband.

Nana is married to a ship captain, and at her place, Laura meets Lt. Philemon Brittle, a naval surgeon. Each is very impressed by the other, but their stations are far apart, and both assume they'll never see each other again. But then Nana, who's far along in her pregnancy, asks Laura to make the trip to the hospital to visit a boy who served on her husband's ship and has been wounded in battle. And of course, the boy is being cared for in Philemon's ward, so the two reconnect.

The Surgeon's Lady started out pretty confusing. This is the 2nd book in a series, and Kelly drew heavily on the events of the 1st book in this section. For a while I wondered who Nana and Lord Ratcliff were and why Laura was afraid to contact Nana, and I felt hopelessly muddled. I got it after a while, and things got off the ground, but throughout the book, I felt like there were things I didn't quite get, and I suspected I'd understand their significance a lot better if I'd read book 1. For instance, all the stuff about Laura and Nana's father and his perfidy. We only get passing references to his treatment of Laura and what happened when he forced her to marry her husband. It sounds like he wasn't at all a loving father to Laura, but deciding whom his daughter should marry doesn't seem extraordinarily mean or cruel. And yet Laura flips at the very idea of seeing him again, while she seems to forgive her late husband, who was basically verbally and sexually abusive. I'm pretty sure if I'd read the first book I'd have understood her feelings towards her father much better, but from what was in this book, it doesn't quite make sense.

The middle sections, though, I loved. Laura's visit to Philemon's hospital ends up with her accepting an offer to work as a matron, both organising the place and dealing with patients. The hospital stuff is fascinating, and I really liked the camaraderie that develops. I particularly loved Philemon's immediate assumption that Laura is competent and caring and will want to and can help. It's not based on nothing (after all, he knows she's nursed her late husband even though she wasn't in love with him), but he could have assumed that as a lady there was no way she would even consider coming within a mile of, as they're described here, "common tars". Actually, it might strain disbelief that he does assume this, but it's just such a Philemon thing to do. The man is completely focused on healing and helping people, and I thought he was lovely.

I loved all this, but Kelly kind of lost me as we got closer to the end. I lost interest in what was going on once the main thrust of the plot wasn't the work in the hospital any longer, but the romance and whether Laura could trust another man given her treatment by her late husband. I don't know why I wasn't interested in this, it's exactly the sort of plot that appeals to me and that I've liked in the past. It just didn't work for me here. I guess it might be that there wasn't much tension to it. I knew exactly what was going to happen, and there were no surprises, so I was bored.

So, a really good middle, bookended by a begining and an end that didn't really work for me. I'd still recommend reading it (especially if you have read the 1st book in the series), but Kelly's definitely written better.

MY GRADE: A B-.

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Unlocked, by Courtney Milan

TITLE: Unlocked
AUTHOR: Courtney Milan

COPYRIGHT: 2011
PAGES: About 110 pages
PUBLISHER: Self-published

SETTING: Early 19th century England
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: Part of the Turner series (not many connections, though)

A perpetual wallflower destined for spinsterhood, Lady Elaine Warren is resigned to her position in society. So when Evan Carlton, the powerful, popular Earl of Westfeld, singles her out upon his return to England, she knows what it means. Her former tormenter is up to his old tricks, and she’s his intended victim. This time, though, the earl is going to discover that wallflowers can fight back.

Evan has come to regret his cruel, callow past. At first, he only wants to make up for past wrongs. But when Elaine throws his initial apology in his face, he finds himself wanting more. And this time, what torments him might be love...

Something I've often thought when it comes to Regency-set historicals is that these young women coming out in society would have been very, very young, and so would have many of the young men attending all those balls with them. Would they have been any less thoughtless and cruel than teenagers today?

It's clear that the young people in Unlocked could be just as cruel and thoughtless as the most self-absorbed teens today, as shown by the treatment meted out to Lady Elaine Warren. Elaine couldn't wait to have her first season. A happy, exuberant girl, she was ready to enjoy herself. And then she met Evan Carlton.

Evan found himself very attracted to Elaine's vitality, but young as he was, he opted to show this attraction by basically pulling her pigtails. He kept mocking her, and since he was the popular boy, the rest of society followed suit. By the time Evan realised what he had done the damage was done, and like the immature idiot he was, he ran away instead of trying to fix the mess he'd created.

Elaine had nowhere to run to, though, and 10 years later, she's still stuck in the same cycle. She's a laughingstock, especially because she refuses to be cowed and hide in a corner. So her laugh makes her sound like a horse? Well, she'll keep laughing, and let them mock her. But continuing to smile in the face of humiliation is not easy, and her defiance has taken a huge toll on her.

And then Evan comes back from his self-imposed exile, and is shocked to see that what he set in motion has taken on a life of its own. He had expected (or hoped, rather) that society would have got bored of mocking Elaine and moved on to other victims, leaving her to make a good marriage. He can't believe they're still picking on her and that, as a result, she's still single. And he's even more surprised to realise that his old attraction is still there, and even stronger now.

Ahh, the lovely, lovely angst. I really enjoyed this. Milan is really good at novellas, and Unlocked is one of her best. It's not an easy conflict to solve, because Elaine has excellent reasons to detest Evan and, at the beginning, I honestly didn't know whether she should forgive him at all. Evan has his work cut out for him, and I liked that he realised it and understood that Elaine had no obligation to forgive him, no matter how sorry he now felt about what he'd done all those years ago. He also didn't set out to get her to forgive him, his motivation in the present day was simply to make amends for the harm he had caused. This is romance, so of course, Elaine does forgive him, but it was important to me that Evan wasn't doing it for that. And I believed fully in Elaine's forgiveness. This is a novella, so there isn't a whole lot of space, but Milan convinced me about the gradual development of a changing relationship between them. Lovely.

In addition to this, I particularly liked something that I've liked in other Milan works, and that is the mixture of love and pain that can occur in the parent/child relationship. Elaine's mother is a genius, an absolutely brilliant woman in her field, but completely oblivious. She loves her daughter, but has absolutely no idea what her social situation is. So Elaine is not just defending herself from society, but also her mother. Her mother, meanwhile, and with the best of intentions, keeps making things worse. These sections made me cry.

So, so good.

MY GRADE: An A-.

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Dark Matter, by Michelle Paver

TITLE: Dark Matter
AUTHOR: Michelle Paver

COPYRIGHT: 2010
PAGES: 256
PUBLISHER: Orion

SETTING: 1930s London and and island beyond the Arctic circle
TYPE: Horror
SERIES: None

January 1937. Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely and desperate to change his life. So when he's offered the chance to join an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it. Spirits are high as the ship leaves Norway: five men and eight huskies, crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year. Gruhuken. But the Arctic summer is brief. As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave. He faces a stark choice. Stay or go. Soon he will see the last of the sun, as the polar night engulfs the camp in months of darkness. Soon he will reach the point of no return - when the sea will freeze, making escape impossible. And Gruhuken is not uninhabited. Jack is not alone. Something walks there in the dark...

It's 1937. Jack Miller had hoped his escape from poverty would come through academia, but after that turned into a failure, he's stuck in an impoverished, depressing life. An offer to take part in an Arctic expedition as a wireless operator is not particularly tempting, but as the only way to change his life, Jack takes it.

The group, mainly composed of upper class academics, aim to settle in Gruhuken, on a small island in the Barents Sea, and spend a year there. As they approach the site, though, it becomes clear the locals are very uneasy about it. A couple of the expedition members drop out before they even get to their destination. Only three of them make it to the camp, where Jack experiences some of the same discomfort the locals seemed to show. He even sees something, but convinces himself he must have been wrong.

And then disaster strikes, and his two companions must leave. Jack can either go with them, allowing the expedition to fail, or stay on his own through the Arctic winter. He chooses to stay. And through his diary entries, we get to share his experiences.

This is one of the best, most original and most terrifying ghost stories I've ever read. Everything about it is perfectly executed. One of the things that impressed me the most was how Paver used characterisation to justify what was the main suspension of disbelief issue: why Jack would decide to stay on on his own in Gruhuken, ignoring his unease. Jack's motivations were completely convincing. There's the class envy-based need to prove himself by keeping the expedition going, plus his hero-worship, maybe more, of Gus. It made complete sense that he would stay. After all, he doesn't know what's going to happen.

What does happen after Jack is alone is something I'm not even going to hint at. All I'll say is that it's deliciously chilling, and that Paver relies on suggestion and psychological development, rather than on gruesomeness, to generate the growing sense of terror. The narration, through Jack's diary entries, is genius. The writing itself conveys Jack's state of mind much better than any description could.

If you're even mildly interested in horror, you should read this. Just, maybe, wait until the summer.

MY GRADE: An A-.

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The Chocolate Rose, by Laura Florand

TITLE: The Chocolate Rose
AUTHOR: Laura Florand

COPYRIGHT: 2013
PAGES: 245
PUBLISHER: Self-published

SETTING: Contemporary France
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: Part of two different series: #3 in Amour et Chocolat and #1 in La Vie en Roses

Romantic Times calls Laura Florand's writing "sensuous and sumptuous", awarding her their Seal of Excellence, and NPR says it's "explosive, sensual... and utterly sweet".

Now, in the third book in the Amour et Chocolat series, a book USA Today calls "so romantic and sexy", Florand takes us from Paris to summer in Provence, for the steamy encounter between top chef Gabriel Delange and the daughter of his worst enemy, Jolie Manon. Hot-tempered Gabriel isn't above blackmail to get what he wants, but what he wants might very well be Jolie herself. Because in the heat and sun of Provence, where jasmine and roses climb up old colored walls and fountains play in ancient stone villages, even a beast can prove he is a prince at heart...

Jolie Manon's father Pierre, one of the world's top chefs, has always been a difficult man. Jolie loves him, though, so she's very disturbed when she sees the letter announcing that a former pastry chef of her dad's is suing him. Gabriel Delange, now the head of his very own 3 Michelin starred kitchen, claims that the recipe book that Jolie (a food writer) and Pierre recently cowrote includes several recipes created by Gabriel, including the spectacular and extremely famous chocolate rose on the cover.

Pierre is recovering from a pretty bad stroke which has left him with some motor impairment, and Jolie refuses to put his recovery in danger by bringing up the lawsuit. She'll deal with it herself, even if it means travelling to the little village where Gabriel has set up his own restaurant.

The premise of The Chocolate Rose is quite clearly based on the Beauty and the Beast basic storyline, which is always something I like. There's the father who steals a rose from the Beast, whom the daughter must then appease (Gabriel even roars quite frequently, at least at the beginning). Gabriel, who's attracted to Jolie from the start, demands that she cowrite a recipe book with him, as an excuse to spend time with her.

I think this might not have been the best book to start reading Florand. I did end up liking it and it made me want to read more by her (good thing, too, because I have several of her books in my TBR). However, it was touch and go for a while. It was a very rocky start and I really struggled with it, coming close to abandoning the book several times.

The problem was that in the first sections of the book, Gabriel's behaviour came across as sleazy and smarmy, rather than seductive. When Jolie first shows up in his kitchen there's a mixup and he thinks she's a new potential staff member, there for a trial. She knows she shouldn't, but she jumps at the opportunity of doing a day in a kitchen such as Gabriel's, even if all she's doing is the nasty, boring jobs. She doesn't do great, but doesn't humiliate herself, either. At the end of the day, Gabriel fires her, which is fair enough, because she clearly doesn't have the experience the job candidate claimed. What is not fair enough is that he thinks to himself that he's so attracted to her that the choice was between sexually harassing her if she continued to work there or fire her now and just ask her out (which he then promptly does). There follow loads of overly familiar and sexually aggressive innuendo (including constant talk about how she's clearly aroused by him, and look at how perky her nipples are, etc.) that I didn't find charming or sexy. I found it offensive, and would have liked to see Jolie tell him where she could shove his advances.

He also kept (as in, every couple of paragraphs, when we were in his POV) using the expletive "putain", which means 'whore' in French. Things like "Putain, but she was beautiful". I understand he wasn't calling Jolie a whore (we have a similar expletive in Spanish, and while you can (and I do) argue that it's offensive that the word should be an expletive at all, it doesn't mean you're calling anyone a whore). Once or twice would have been fine, it was the neverending litany, combined with his sleaziness at that point in the book. It was especially weird at one point when Jolie had just complained that the way he was treating her made her feel like a prostitute.

It took me weeks to get past the first quarter or so of the book. But then things suddenly got a LOT better. Jolie and Gabriel start a relationship of sorts, where the attraction is acknowledged. Gabriel continued to be a bit out there about his sexual interest in Jolie, but now it felt more like mutual flirting... consensual foreplay, basically. Now that it was appropriate, the same sorts of things felt hot, rather than smarmy, as they did when they were directed at a total stranger.

I also started to find Gabriel endearing, with his lack of a filter that keeps getting him in trouble and loneliness and need for a mate. He envies men, especially other chefs, who have managed to find someone to love them and tolerate a chef's long hours. But at the same time, I never got the feeling he fell for Jolie just because she was the first to be willing to do so.

Florand managed to convince me that these two fit together perfectly. She made the argument well, making it clear that Jolie's personality and her need to have her own space would make Gabriel, with his long hours and focus on his own thing as well, exactly the right guy for her, someone who wouldn't cling and smother her.

MY GRADE: A B. The last section is more like a B+, but I really was annoyed by the start.

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Hero, by Alethea Kontis

TITLE: Hero
AUTHOR: Alethea Kontis

COPYRIGHT: 2013
PAGES: 304
PUBLISHER: HMH Books for Young Readers

SETTING: Alternate world
TYPE: Fantasy
SERIES: Second in the Woodcutters series

Rough-and-tumble Saturday Woodcutter thinks she's the only one of her sisters without any magic—until the day she accidentally conjures an ocean in the backyard. With her sword in tow, Saturday sets sail on a pirate ship, only to find herself kidnapped and whisked off to the top of the world. Is Saturday powerful enough to kill the mountain witch who holds her captive and save the world from sure destruction? And, as she wonders grumpily, "Did romance have to be part of the adventure?" As in Enchanted, readers will revel in the fragments of fairy tales that embellish this action-packed story of adventure and, yes, romance.

Hero is the second in a series based around a family that will sound familiar from pretty much every fairy tale you've ever read. Saturday Woodcutter's magical brother and sisters have had all sorts of adventures already. One sister married a king, a brother was once captured by a witch and managed to escape after stealing her eyes, that sort of thing. Saturday is the only one who doesn't have any magic of her own, but it's been predicted she'll have some sort of Destiny, and as the book starts, things get going.

One day, Saturday accidentally breaks a magical mirror and calls up a huge sea. Her Pirate Queen sister sails up to her door and Saturday goes with her, only to be plucked from the deck by a bird and taken to the same witch who'd captured her brother all those years ago. Turns out Saturday, who is tall and strong and wears trousers (and who has cut off her hair) has been confused with her brother, and the witch is demanding her eyes back.

Joining a young prince who was tricked long ago by the witch's daughter into taking her place, and some interesting creatures, Saturday must figure out how to stop the witch from releasing a dragon and causing the end of the world.

There were things I liked about Hero. I liked the role reversal of having a heroine who has the characteristics more commonly ascribed to male heros in fairy tales, and a hero with traditionally 'female' characteristics. I also like it very much when authors chop and mix up different fairy tales and create something new.

And yet, this did not work for me at all. It all came down to me not being able to buy the internal truth and coherence of the plot and characters. The plot felt disjointed and confusing and made little sense to me, and the characters didn't feel like real people at all. They kept behaving in ways that made me go "Hang on, what? Who does that?". I didn't buy the characters' motivations and often didn't understand why they did what they did.

It was a pretty quick read, thankfully, and I give Kontis points for originality, but it felt very unsatisfying.

MY GRADE: A C-.

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River Road, by Jayne Ann Krentz

TITLE: River Road
AUTHOR: Jayne Ann Krentz

COPYRIGHT: 2014
PAGES: 352
PUBLISHER: Putnam

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: Romantic Suspense
SERIES: Not sure. If it is, it's the first in the series.

It's been thirteen years since Lucy Sheridan was in Summer River. The last time she visited her aunt Sara there, as a teenager, she'd been sent home suddenly after being dragged out of a wild party-by the guy she had a crush on, just to make it more embarrassing. Obviously Mason Fletcher-only a few years older but somehow a lot more of a grown-up-was the overprotective type who thought he had to come to her rescue.

Now, returning after her aunt's fatal car accident, Lucy is learning there was more to the story than she realized at the time. Mason had saved her from a very nasty crime that night-and soon afterward, Tristan, the cold-blooded rich kid who'd targeted her, disappeared mysteriously, his body never found.

A lot has changed in thirteen years. Lucy now works for a private investigation firm as a forensic genealogist, while Mason has quit the police force to run a successful security firm with his brother-though he still knows his way around a wrench when he fills in at his uncle's local hardware store. Even Summer River has changed, from a sleepy farm town into a trendy upscale spot in California's wine country. But Mason is still a protector at heart, a serious (and seriously attractive) man. And when he and Lucy make a shocking discovery inside Sara's house, and some of Tristan's old friends start acting suspicious, Mason's quietly fierce instincts kick into gear. He saved Lucy once, and he'll save her again. But this time, she insists on playing a role in her own rescue...

As a teenager, Lucy Sheridan had a very close escape. Visiting her aunt in the small California town of Summer River during her holidays, she was (she felt) lucky enough to be invited to a party thrown by the popular kids. When Mason Fletcher, the somewhat older boy she'd been crushing on for weeks, turned up and announced he was taking her back home to her aunt, Lucy felt humiliated. What she didn't know was that the ringleader of the popular kids had been planning to drug her and rape her. Mason, having heard about what was going to go down, was taking matters into his own hands. A few days later, the would-be rapist disappeared and after a while, was declared dead. Mason, who'd had a bit of a conversation with him after his rescue of Lucy, had some attention by the police, but he had an alibi, so nothing came from that.

Thirteen years later, Lucy is back in Summer River. She hasn't been back since that summer all those years earlier, but her aunt and her partner have recently died in an accident, and Lucy has inherited from them. She has their house to sort out, but also, surprisingly, she's been left shares in a local company owned by the town's preeminent family. Everyone keeps advising her to sell the family back those shares, as she seems to have stumbled into a battle for control of the company.

Lucy, however, is not quite ready to sell and get out of town. She suspects that the accident that killed her aunt and her partner wasn't an accident, and that it might have something to do with those shares. Lucy is determined to investigate, and it soon becomes clear that she might be right about the accident not being one. Furthermore, it looks like there might also be a connection with the would-be rapist, who, it turns out, might actually have been a serial rapist the police had been looking for.

Lucy had planned to do her investigating on her own, but Mason is back in town as well, and she's finding him hard to shake off. He's determined to be helpful to her, and supposedly businesslike appointments with him have a way of turning into dates.

This is the first JAK book in years that isn't part of her paranormal Arcane Society series. I've been quite vocal about my opinion that all this Arcane Society stuff hasn't been good at all. From the start, the paranormal elements have been half-baked and remarkably tedious (surprisingly, because her Jayne Castle books, which have a sort of paranormal element to them, have always been great). So as you might imagine, I was ecstatic to hear JAK was ditching that element. I was hoping to a return to the sort of books she was writing in the 90s.

Did I get that? In part, I did. There were bits here that reminded me of older JAKs. For instance, the way Lucy's forced by circumstances into the midst of a family dispute, one based on issues around the family business but born from family relationships, reminded me of books like The Golden Chance. That was really enjoyable, as was all the small town stuff. The balance between the mystery and the romance was also better than it's been for a while, with quite a bit of emphasis on the relationship between Lucy and Mason. It was a nice romance, too.

What didn't quite work as well was the nature of the mystery element. It felt like it didn't go well with the tone of the book, which was mainly nice and pleasant. The crimes here were much too traumatic and there were too many of them. Some of them were also very close to Lucy (her beloved aunt, for instance) and yet she didn't seem to be grieving, particularly. I also couldn't quite wrap my mind around the timing of the serial rapist thing. 13 years ago it was 2001. The things that the rapist did at the time (namely, filming his rapes and putting them online) felt a bit too modern. I mean, YouTube was only founded in 2005. Also, no one seemed particularly fussed about it all, not at the time and not even in the present day. That element just didn't gel at all.

At least, given the balance between romance and mystery, it wasn't enough to put a dent in my enjoyment of all the other stuff.

MY GRADE: A B. I fully admit I might be being a bit overenthusiastic here. Objectively, maybe it wasn't that great. I guess I'm just so happy that JAK's books seem to be moving in the right direction that I've temporarily suspended judgement.

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Burning Angel, by James Lee Burke

TITLE: Burning Angel
AUTHOR: James Lee Burke

COPYRIGHT: 1995
PAGES: 468
PUBLISHER: Orion

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: 8th in the Dave Robicheaux series

Sonny Boy Marsallas, a New Orleans street hustler, entrusts Detective Dave Robicheaux with a mysterious notebook, kicking off a series of violent incidents and raising questions that need answers, and fast… What did Sonny’s girlfriend know that got her murdered? Why is Sonny known as Red Angel by Central American guerrillas? And what do the Mafia want with a desolate stretch of New Iberia? This time Sonny Boy may have pushed his luck with the Giacano family one deal too far. A rich, sardonic and terrifying portrayal of contemporary America with a setting which is as charged as an electric storm.

This was the book chosen for my January book club. It's the 8th entry in James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series of crime thrillers/detective novels set in Louisiana. Dave Robicheaux is a detective in a rural parish (I get the feeling he used to work in the big city earlier in the series). At the start, he runs into an old contact, Sonny Boy Marsallas, who entrusts him a notebook. After that, all hell breaks lose. Clearly someone is after Sonny Boy, but who is it, amongst the legions who might have a problem with him? The man spent some time as a DEA agent and a mercenary in Latin America at the time really nasty stuff was going on. He also has mafia connections. People related to all of this seem to be crawling out of the woodwork, and Dave doesn't know what's going on.

I’m going to be pretty unfair here. I suppose for what it is, the book may be well done. All the fans of the series on goodreads and amazon seem to think so. It’s just that I really, really, really don’t like what it is. I wouldn’t choose to read about mobsters and criminals and generally dodgy people living in what comes across here as a real shithole. And if I accidentally started reading a book like that, I’d normally just not finish it. Guess that’s the thing about book clubs. Picking up stuff you wouldn’t normally read can work, but it can also go horribly wrong.

So yeah, all I have are gripes. Even the things that normally would be good (e.g. a vivid setting) turned out to be negatives for me (e.g. the more vivid a nasty, horrible setting is, the more I hate it).

I particularly hated the way the cops worked here. They were awfully ready to operate outside of the rules, it was done as a matter of course. Dave’s partner Helen beats up suspects, he smashes a glass into someone’s face because they give him a bit of lip, and all sorts of stuff like that. They are very self-righteous about it, too, going on about how “when the rules start working for the lowlifes, get a new set of rules” and crap like that. No. Just no. The rules are there because the police DOES NOT have the right to decide whether someone is guilty or not. And at the same time this crap morality is being preached, violence is glamourised and criminals made protagonists. Ugh.

Even if I did like this sort of book, I think I might still have had trouble with this particular title. For starters, it really doesn't stand alone very well. I felt like I was lost, because the characters clearly had a history that strongly influenced their characters and relationships, and Burke didn't find it necessary to allow new readers to catch up at all. It made it very hard to understand why people were reacting in the way they did. Also, I often found the slang completely incomprehensible, the sort of thing I just couldn’t figure out from context. That happened all the fricking time.

Oh, and by the way, the female characters were really horribly done. Mainly they were pure stereotypes (like Ruthie Jean, who couldn’t have been more of a cliche if she'd tried, or Helen, the butch lesbian). The one who sounded like she might be a bit more interesting (Dave's wife, Bootsie, whose late husband was apparently a mobster) felt like a blank. Bootsie had absolutely no personality, she was just there. Infuriating.

The ending was particularly bad. Things just petered out, without much resolution. During the book club discussion, even those who'd liked the book couldn't really explain what the 'solution' to the mystery plotline was. To be fair, I don't think this was a mystery/thriller at all. I think it's literary fiction that borrows some of the staples and conventions of a crime thriller. As such, Burke is not concerned with story and plot at all, he seems more interested in creating an atmosphere and characters. Still, it was unsatisfying.

MY GRADE: A D. I really didn't enjoy it at all.

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So Tough To Tame, by Victoria Dahl

TITLE: So Tough To Tame
AUTHOR: Victoria Dahl

COPYRIGHT: 2013
PAGES: 380
PUBLISHER: HQN

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: Part of the Jackson Hole series

Tough to tame, but not too tough to love…

Charlie Allington is supposed to be on the fast track to the top—a small-town girl who was making it big in her career. Instead, she's reeling from a scandal that's pretty much burned all her bridges. Now, out of options, she needs a place to lick her wounds and figure out her future. True, working at a ski resort in rugged Jackson Hole, Wyoming, isn't her dream job. But if there's one perk to coming back, it's a certain sexy hometown boy who knows how to make a girl feel welcome.

Cowboy Walker Pearce never expected a grown-up Charlie to be temptation in tight jeans. She's smart and successful—way out of league for a man like him. But he's not about to let that, or his secrets, get in the way of their blazing-hot attraction. Yet when passion turns to something more, will the truth—about both of them—send her out of his life for good…or into his arms forever?

Victoria Dahl is one of my favourite authors of contemporary romance, but I let myself be put off by the very lukewarm reviews of her latest series (especially the first book in it). Well, I shouldn't have, because her contemps just work for me, even when I see some issues with them.

So Tough To Tame is the third in the series (which also includes a couple of short stories), but stands alone fine. Charlie Allington is used to being respected. She was a studious girl in school and, after leaving the small town of Jackson Hole, she started to build a very successful career in security. She was flying high until she trusted the wrong person and was left holding the bag (if you forgive the mixed metaphor). While the police withdrew criminal charges, her reputation in the business was ruined, as people assumed there must have been something to the accusations.

As the book starts Charlie is back in Jackson Hole, where a former school friend and her husband have given her a job as head of security in the new resort they're about to open. It sounded like a great opportunity, but it's turned out to be a nightmare. The former friend has turned into a complete nutter who disrespects Charlie and makes it clear she suspects her of all sorts of misconduct, including wanting to seduce her husband. At her wits' ends, Charlie decides the only way her sanity will survive is to keep their interactions only to working hours, so she moves out of the provided accomodation in the resort and into an appartment in town.

And immediately, things start to look up. One of the first people she meets there is Walker Pearce, whom she used to tutor when they were in high school. Walker was attractive as a teenager, but he's off the charts now. And he's just as attracted to her. He used to fantasise about her during their tutoring sessions, but he felt clever, good girl Charlie was out of his league.

I really liked both characters, especially Walker. I thought his character was particularly well done. Walker is dyslexic, and this has had a big effect on how he sees himself and what he's capable off. This is not one of those books where dyslexia is ridiculously presented as this huge, horrible, shameful secret. It’s not at all a secret. People know and some mild accommodation was made for Walker when he was in high school, although not really as much as he needed, or as would be made today as a matter of course (at least from what I hear from my friends who have kids). But, combined with the fact that his father saw and treated him as stupid, and that Walker has absorbed those views, this has resulted in a man with a low view of his own intellectual abilities and capabilities.

Walker is a cowboy, and although he enjoys some of the work, Dahl gives us a more realistic and unromantic view of the job than found in most romances. It can be back-breakingly hard work, especially as a man gets older. It's pretty miserable in bad weather and the job security sucks. When Walker is earning money he makes enough to live comfortably, and has managed to set aside a small amount, but he doesn't know what he'll be able to do in a few years, or what would happen if he got injured and had to miss even a couple of months of work. It's heart-breaking, because it becomes quite clear that he's got some outstanding skills, especially with people, and he could get a job that he'd like more and would be better for him, if only he dared go for it.

The relationship between him and Charlie was also affected by this, and in a way that broke my heart as well. Over the years, Walker has become someone who's seen as only good for showing a girl a great time in bed. He's just not someone women will consider as a prospect for a relationship. Walker feels that this is because he's just not good enough for the kind of intelligent woman he feels attracted to. And once he starts a relationship with Charlie, it feels like it's going to follow the script of all other relationships in his life. Charlie thinks so as well, not because she feels he's not good enough, but because he's developed a reputation for loving them and leaving them, so she feels that trying to have something serious with him is setting herself up for a fall. Watching them negotiating all this made for fascinating reading. This sort of plot is also a weakness of mine. I enjoy the role reversal, because it’s so often the hero is all confident and arrogant, and the heroine who’s suffering from self-esteem issues. I love it when it’s the opposite.

And by the way, those love scenes. Dahl is one of the very few authors whose scenes work for me (although there was one in this one where she lost me). Her love scenes are all about the feelings, not so much about what is going on physically. Oh, we get the physical as well, it's just that it’s not the whole point. They are also about developing the relationship. You couldn't just cut them out, because the relationship just wouldn't work without what's being shown in them.

Something else I really appreciated here was that there was none of the 'blood is thicker than water' crap we get in so many romances, where there’s this decree that you MUST forgive and love your relatives, even if they’ve been crap to you. We could have got that with both Walker and Charlie (father and brother, respectively), but we absolutely don’t. In fact, the resolution of a certain threat against Charlie is exactly as it should be (don’t want to add more detail than that), and I cheered her for it.

I had more mixed feelings about another element I usually love in Dahl's books, which is how her books often deliver an explicitly feminist message. This happens here as well, although with mixed success.

The successful part was the characterisation of Charlie, who is completely unconflicted about her sexuality. She knows (and even insists out loud to her slut-shaming boss) that there is absolutely nothing wrong with her enjoying sex and that no one has the right to judge her for it. I loved that.

However, what I didn’t love is that Dahl seems to think that it’s sex-positive and feminist to have women engage in the sort of behaviour that would brand men sexually harassing assholes. I’m talking about Rayleen, who seems to be a recurring character in the series. She is the owner of the apartment complex where Walker and Charlie rent, an old woman who constantly makes crude sexual comments to Walker (and apparently to any other young man who may live in the complex -she insists on only renting to hot “studs”). I get that she’s meant to be funny (Charlie finds her absolutely hilarious), but I didn’t find her so at all. Yeah, call me humourless, but I don’t think the aim of feminism should be to allow women to objectify men in exactly the same hurtful way they have objectified us over the years. Doing so can be a weapon in the fight (‘this is what it feels like, see why I’m saying it’s harmful and awful for us?’), but I didn't feel that was what was going on here. I had similar mixed feelings about the girls’ night Charlie has with her new friends. I'm all for women being frank about sex and about enjoying it, and I’ve had plenty of girls' nights with my own friends,where we bullshit about sex and it’s so much fun. This one, I'm afraid, felt forced and fake and pretty immature, like a bunch of little girls trying hard to be shocking.

This is only a very minor element of the book, though. On the whole, I enjoyed it very much, and will definitely go back and read all the others in the series.

MY GRADE: A B+.

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