Review: Lauren Willig’s TWO WARS AND A WEDDING

Two_Wars_WeddingIf a novel ever needed an HEA, Lauren Willig’s prosaically-titled Two Wars and a Wedding does. A multi-hanky read, indeed. A historical saga and sweeping one at that (more sagas, please!): recounting a young woman’s journey from immature and impetuous to worn-down, guilt-ridden, and broken to strong, resolute, and happy across “two wars and a wedding”. And did it ever keep me reading, as steadily as Real Life would allow, over three days. To start, let’s fill in the war and wedding details with the publisher’s blurb:

September 1896: As an aspiring archaeologist, Smith College graduate Betsy Hayes travels to Athens, desperate to break into a very male-dominated field and find work at some of the world’s most famous excavation sites. In the midst of the heat and dust of Greece she finds an unlikely ally in philanthropist Charles, Baron de Robecourt, one of the few men who takes her academic passion seriously. But when a simmering conflict between Greece and Turkey erupts into open warfare, Betsy’s archaeological sites become battlefields and she falls into the grim and heroic task of nursing the wounded. As the world around her is irrevocably changed, Betsy finds her heart pulled in multiple directions.

June 1898: As the Spanish-American war begins, an older and wiser Betsy Hayes is searching for her former best friend Ava, who she last saw in Greece during the Greco-Turkish War. She believes that Ava might be with the Red Cross headed to Cuba, so Betsy herself joins the Red Cross and follows Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders straight to the heart of the fighting. As she enters the war zone, dark memories of her last war resurface and her need to protect old and new friends intensifies. (more…)

Review: Sherry Thomas’s A TEMPEST AT SEA (Lady Sherlock #7)

Tempest_At_SeaI always enjoyed Thomas’s romances, back when she was writing them, but I think she found her “true” genre with the Lady Sherlock mystery series. The latest, A Tempest At Sea, maintains what the previous six proved: Thomas can write clever, complex mystery plots while keeping her ethically-minded, sympathetic protagonists front and centre. Lady Charlotte features, but A Tempest At Sea is an ensemble cast (to the series’s betterment) one in which we get to be with Charlotte’s lover, Lord Ingram, on a greater page count than Charlotte. Given how adorable “Ash,” Lord Ingram, is, the loss is bearable, though I would have liked to see more of Charlotte and even more of Charlotte and Ash together. On the other hand, A Tempest At Sea is a closed-“room”, rather closed-“ship” mystery and, as a Christie-fan, cause for celebration and enjoyment, as Ash notes, ” ‘The isolation of shipboard society heightens the sense of danger.’ “ To orient us, the publisher’s blurb:

Charlotte Holmes’s life is in peril when her brilliant deductive skills are put to the test in her most dangerous investigation yet, locked aboard a ship at sea.

After feigning her own death in Cornwall to escape from Moriarty’s perilous attention, Charlotte Holmes goes into hiding. But then she receives a tempting offer: Find a dossier the crown is desperately seeking, and she might be able to go back to a normal life.
Her search leads her aboard the RMS Provence. But on the night Charlotte makes her move to retrieve the dossier, in the midst of a terrifying storm in the Bay of Biscay, a brutal murder takes place on the ship. Instead of solving the crime, as she is accustomed to doing, Charlotte must take care not to be embroiled in this investigation, lest it become known to those who harbor ill intentions that Sherlock Holmes is abroad and still very much alive. (more…)

Review: KJ Charles’s THE SECRET LIVES OF COUNTRY GENTLEMEN (Doomsday #1)

Secret_LIves_Country_GentlemenI have to start by saying what a fan I am of Will Darling, how much I adore him and enjoyed the first book in his series, Slippery Creatures. Hence, why I was keen to read Charles’s trad-pubbed romance, The Secret Lives of Country Gentleman. Would her unique voice and style be “standardized” for a wider audience, or could Charles retain everything that makes her self-published m/m romance unique? Also, with a selling point of “Bridgerton meets Poldark,” I was doubly intrigued. (I’m still mulling how much I liked this. But let’s consider Secret Lives on its own merit.) The publishers’ details for our orientation:

Abandoned by his father, Gareth Inglis grew up lonely, prickly, and well-used to disappointment. Still, he longs for a connection. When he meets a charming man in a London molly house, he falls head over heels—until everything goes wrong and he’s left alone again. Then Gareth’s father dies, turning the shabby London clerk into Sir Gareth, with a grand house on the remote Romney Marsh and a family he doesn’t know.

The Marsh is another world, a strange, empty place notorious for its ruthless gangs of smugglers. And one of them is dangerously familiar…

Joss Doomsday has run the Doomsday smuggling clan since he was a boy. When the new baronet—his old lover—agrees to testify against Joss’s sister, Joss acts fast to stop him. Their reunion is anything but happy, yet after the dust settles, neither can stay away. Soon, all Joss and Gareth want is the chance to be together. But the bleak, bare Marsh holds deadly secrets. And when Gareth finds himself threatened from every side, the gentleman and the smuggler must trust one another not just with their hearts, but with their lives. (more…)

Review: Deanna Raybourn’s A SINISTER REVENGE (Veronica Speedwell #8)

Sinister_RevengeAfter my recent disappointment in Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age, I admit to a lack of confidence in the latest Veronica Speedwell, despite the series being one of my favourites. What if Raybourn has lost her magic? My reader nervousness, however, dissipated on the first page of Veronica and Stoker’s latest adventure, A Sinister Revenge. And this time around, Raybourn brings Stoker’s brothers along, older bro Tiberius, the imperious looker, pretend-dissolute, and paterfamilias, much as he’d scoff at the role, and the adorable baby-bro, Merryweather, the vicar, innocent, handsome, and a trifle bumbling. They are brought together when Tiberius’s past necessitates a trip to the family’s Devon estate, Cherboys, and also as it returns to endanger him. The publisher’s blurb will fill in some details:

Veronica’s natural-historian beau, Stoker, has been away in Bavaria for months and their relationship is at an impasse. But when Veronica shows up before him with his brother, Tiberius, Lord Templeton-Vane, he is lured back home by an intriguing job offer: preparing an iguanodon for a very special dinner party.

Tiberius has received a cryptic message—along with the obituaries of two recently deceased members of his old group of friends, the Seven Sinners—that he too should get his affairs in order. Realizing he is in grave danger but not knowing why, he plans a reunion party for the remaining Sinners at his family estate to lure the killer out while Veronica and Stoker investigate.

As the guests arrive and settle in, the evening’s events turn deadly. More clues come to light, leading Veronica, Stoker, and Tiberius to uncover a shared past among the Sinners that has led to the fatal present. But the truth might be far more sinister than what they were prepared for. (more…)

Review: Becky Wade’s MEMORY LANE (Sons of Scandal #1)

Memory_LaneAmnesia romance narrative? Sold. I love the possibilities of what it allows the romance genre to explore: how the familiar is skewed for the character without memory, how it is anchored for those who are possessed of memory and how the twain can’t meet. And I’d read and enjoyed Becky Wade in the past. Much of what I enjoyed then is still present and something more besides: as Wade is no longer under the constraints of traditional Christian publishers, she includes narrative elements worth exploring, make for something deeper, more real, and interesting. But there are also losses, all of which I’ll discuss by and by. For now, the blurb to help orient us with some detail: 

After surviving a trauma several years back, Remy Reed relocated to a cottage on one of Maine’s most remote islands. She’s arranged her life just the way she wants it, spending her time working on her wood sculptures and soaking in the beauty of nature. It’s quiet and solitary—until the day she spots something bobbing in the ocean.

Her binoculars reveal the “something” to be a man, and he’s struggling to keep his head above water. She races out to save him and brings him into her home. He’s injured, which doesn’t detract from his handsomeness nor make him any easier to bear. He acts like a duke who’s misplaced his dukedom . . . expensive tastes, lazy charm, bossy ideas.

Remy would love nothing more than to return him to his people, but he has no recollection of his life prior to the moment she rescued him. Though she’s not interested in relationships other than the safe ones she’s already established, she begins to realize that he’s coming to depend on her. Who is he? What happened that landed him in the Atlantic Ocean? And why is she drawn to him more and more as time goes by? There’s no way to discover those answers except to walk beside him down memory lane.
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Mini-Review: Patrick Radden Keefe’s EMPIRE OF PAIN

Empire_of_PainPatrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021) is as remarkable, precise, well-written, measured, and ethical a book as Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, my 2021 book of the year. And Empire of Pain may take it for 2023. It’s early days yet, but it’s not likely I’ll forget it.

What I appreciate the most about Radden Keefe is his ability to balance impeccably sourced and researched content AND a tone of banked righteous anger, a moral core, a sense of things not right. Radden Keefe, through careful, thorough research, interviews, and clear, penetrating prose brings the sins of the Sacklers to life in the lives of the people most hurt by their dishonest business practices in selling Oxycontin and bringing us to the opioid crisis as we know it today. (more…)

Review: Emma Barry’s CHICK MAGNET

Chick_Magnet I’ve enjoyed Emma Barry’s romances since reading her histrom, Brave In Heart. I have sentimental affection for it because it was one of the first romances I reviewed on this very blog (turning TEN in May). So I was awfully glad to see another Barry romance on the horizon, except I admit approaching it with a gimlet eye: while I love Barry’s romances, I really really hate chickens. When I used to spend summers in my parents’ Greek village, stray, mangy dogs and squawking, fluttering, pea-brained, eat-anything, gag-inducing-smelly chickens were what I hated most about it (also roosters crowing at sun-rise when you’d been pickled in ouzo the night before). Like Chick Magnet‘s hero, Will Lund, I never warmed to heroine Nicole Jones’ chickens, but like Will, I liked Nicole and I liked what Barry wrought. I don’t think Chick Magnet has the wit and fun of Barry’s Political Persuasions series (once in a while, it peeked through), but I still read this in one sitting during a work-week from hell (five-hour Zoom, anyone?); and, except for an uncertain beginning, it got better and better with each page-turn. To give you a more-details picture, the publisher’s blurb:

Nicole Jones needs a fresh start. “Chick Nic” to millions of internet fans, the social media star and her flock of chickens bask in the spotlight—until she’s publicly dumped by a YouTuber for clout. She has no choice but to round up her birds and move on.

But when one of her hens has an emergency, Nic gets her first taste of her new stomping grounds—and it isn’t good. Veterinarian Will Lund is wildly attractive, yes, but he’s also surly. In fact, he comes right out and calls her a menace for parading her chickens on social media.

As neighbors, Nic and Will can’t exactly avoid each other. Then again, maybe they don’t want to. The two can’t deny their smoldering attraction, and it isn’t long before late-night confessions lead to backyard shenanigans.

Is this the start of a neighborly relationship—or could something more be hatching?

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Audio-Book Review: Elle Cosimano’s FINLAY DONOVAN JUMPS THE GUN

Finlay_Donovan_Jumps_Gun“Murder and mayhem,” many reviewers note about Cosimano’s Finlay Donovan series… And I certainly got gobs of it listening to book #3. There are readers who love a plot-driven narrative and readers who don’t and what I again learned was I’m not the lover of the plot-driven narrative…BUT I absolutely loved this narrator and would listen to her read a grocery list. More of why later. For now, here’s the convoluted Finlay Donovan plot from the, thank the reading gods, publisher, because I certainly couldn’t unravel it:

Finlay Donovan has been in messes before—after all, she’s an author and single mom who’s a pro at getting out bloodstains for rather unexpected reasons—but none quite like this. After she and her nanny/partner-in-crime Vero accidentally destroyed a luxury car that they may have “borrowed” in the process of saving the life of Finlay’s ex-husband, the Russian mob got her out of debt. But now Finlay owes them.

Still running the show from behind bars, mob boss Feliks has a task for Finlay: find a contract killer before the cops do. Problem is, the killer might be an officer.

Luckily, hot cop Nick has started up a citizen’s police academy, and combined pressure from Finlay’s looming book deadline and Feliks is enough to convince Finlay and Vero to get involved. Through firearm training and forensic classes (and some hands-on research with the tempting detective), Finlay and Vero have the perfect cover-up to sleuth out the real criminal and free themselves from the mob’s clutches—all the while dodging spies, confronting Vero’s past, and juggling the daily trials of parenthood.
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Further Wintry Reading

Pic_IIt has been a brutal winter chez the Bateses this year: December saw a deadly snowstorm; January, a visit by the polar vortex; and, intermittently, snow snow snow, some ice, sleet, freezing rain, more snow. I had a fine Christmas season, horrible milestone birthday soon thereafter, and some desultory reading. Back to work in early January and the work pile-on has been relentless… and yet, I read a few murder mysteries and it made the bad a bit better:

Mick Herron’s Dead Lions (2013)

Dorothy L. Sayers’s Have His Carcase (1932)

Tana French’s Faithful Place (2010)

As you can see, I sandwiched a classic mystery with contemporary ones and enjoyed all three, though I wish I’d been able to read them “straight-through” instead of piecemeal, juggling work and family obligations and coming to terms with memento mori… (more…)

Audio-Book Review: Amy Andrews’s BREAKING ALL THE RULES

Breaking_All_RulesRomcom is the new chicklit, or chicklit was the old romcom: chicken-egg, does it really matter when entertaining, light-hearted, heartfelt romance is being written? Because that’s certainly what you’ll get in Amy Andrews’s standalone, Breaking All the Rules. Andrews loves a life-restart-romance, especially on her heroines’ parts: Beatrice Archer has burned bridges big-time and docked her life-shambles in small-town Credence, Colorado with resolve to burn even more by “breaking all the rules” which held her rigid and controlled in the past. No more of that, baby, is her ‘tude! The publisher’s blurb will fill in some further details:

Sometimes you gotta toss your whole life into a burning dumpster to find what’s most important…

Beatrice Archer has always done everything she’s supposed to ―worked her ass off, ignored her non-existent personal life, and kept her mouth shut. Now she’s over it. The rat race, respectability…the underwire bras. She’s taking her life back. Starting with moving to Nowhere, Colorado to live life on her own terms.

Now Bea gives exactly zero forks. Beer for breakfast. Sugar for everything else. Baggy sweats and soft cotton undies FTW. Then a much younger and delightfully attractive cop is called to deal with her flagrant disregard for appropriate clothing outside the local diner (some folks just don’t appreciate bunny slippers) and Bea realizes there’s something missing from her little decathlon of decadence…and he might be the guy to help her out.

When it comes to breaking rules, Officer Austin Cooper is surprisingly eager to assist. He’s charming, a little bit cowboy, and a whole lot sexy. But Bea’s about to discover that breaking the rules has consequences. And all of the cherry pies in Colorado can’t save her from what’s coming… (more…)