I anticipated Lucy Gilmore’s second Forever Home romance, Puppy Christmas, from the moment I turned the last page on the first, Puppy Love. I’m sorry it took me this long to read the former. Equally laugh-out-loud funny, heart-wrenching, and rawr-sexy, it would have made a hellacious work month so much better. Lesson learned: I’ve settled into my romance reading (thirteen years since I picked up a copy of Garwood’s Shadow Music at the local Costco and reignited my love for the genre) with the knowledge that romance is the best respite from daily stress, an oasis of happy in a desert of demands. Gilmore’s series, including this latest (as I anticipate the third, Puppy Kisses!), deserves a spot in the happy-reader Hall of Fame. Continuing with her initial premise, three sisters running a service-dog non-profit, “Puppy Promise,” Puppy Christmas focusses on the eldest, 31-year-old Lila Vasquez, as she works to build the confidence of six-year-old, hearing-impaired Emily Ford with the help of cockapoo Jeeves, while falling in love with Emily’s father, ridiculously-named Ford Ford. Gilmore’s second Forever Home romance is plot-light, but character-deep and chock full of lovely anecdotes, including a funny meet-cute, first date set in a snow maze, Elsa-allusions, cocked-puppy-head adorableness, and hot phone sex.
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Tag: Washington-State-Set
MINI-REVIEW: Wendy Roberts’s A GRAVE END
Wendy Roberts’s fourth Bodies of Evidence mystery finds our heroine and psychic body-finder caught between her past and future, as she has been for the past three books. Without spoiling the series if you’ve yet to read it, heroine Julie Hall uses “dowsing rods” to find missing, deceased people, bringing closure to their families and, more often than not, helping the police solve cold cases. Set in moody-broody Washington state, our Julie is a trailer park gal with supernatural abilities, an up-close-and-personal relationship with beer and wine, and a past as haunting and painful as the murderous circumstances of the bodies she discovers. In each volume, Julie tries to make peace with her abusive past, fend off dipsomania, and draw comfort from a life she’s forged with will power, the wisdom of a great therapist, and the love of her twenty-years-senior FBI-agent boyfriend (I know, but it totally works). (more…)
MINI-REVIEW: Wendy Roberts’s A GRAVE SEARCH (Bodies of Evidence #2)
I’m loving these two contemporary murder mystery series I’m following. I don’t look forward to the day I can only await the next book rather than my present glom of Griffiths’s Ruth Galloway mysteries and Wendy Roberts’s Bodies of Evidence. I finished #2, A Grave Search, today. The Roberts series, unlike Griffiths’s, has a healthy dose of an ongoing romance, which I’m especially enjoying.
Roberts’s heroine, Julie Hall, aka Delma Arsenault, has the power to find dead bodies with dowsing, or divining rods. In book #1, Julie’s supernatural abilities took her into the dark heart of her childhood and ended on a note of high, painful drama. Book #2 sees further resolution to the drama, but also greater peace and yes, even happiness, for Julie-Delma. In Book #1, her romance with older-man and FBI agent, Garrett Pierce, had the desperation of two unhappy, tragic people finding solace in each other. But Book #2 finds Julie and Garrett with an ironed-out relationship, still sexy and bantery, still an overprotective Garrett to a where-angels-fear-to-tread Julie, but they feel like a solid couple, past the first throes of getting to know each other (though the sexy still burns bright). (more…)
MINI-REVIEW: Wendy Roberts’s A GRAVE CALLING
With an ARC of Wendy Roberts’s Bodies of Evidence #4 waiting in the wings, I went to the first because I cannot bear coming to a series midway. Besides, I like two of the series’ premises: a heroine with divining powers and a May-to-December romance (her twenty-five to his forty-five). From the get-go, Roberts’s heroine, Julie Hall, aka Delma Arsenault, is a mess, but a likeable one. She lives with her Rottweiler, Wookie, in an old trailer on her grandfather’s property . She works at the local gas station, plays with her dog, takes care of Gramps, and fights off the urge to drink. Julie is a woman with dark, difficult memories of abandonment (by her mother) and physical abuse by her grandmother. Despite this, she is neither lugubrious, or weepy. I liked her for that: she’s darkly funny, caring, even loving, but rough around the edges and her mouth makes a sailor blush. She also carries an unlikely ability: to locate the missing dead with the use of divining rods, or as they’re called in the novel, dowsing rods. Into Julie’s work-home-walk-dog life walks FBI Agent Garrett Pierce, on the trail of a serial killer. He wants Julie’s help to find the missing girls, to recover their bodies, to bring him closer to catching the killer. (more…)
MINI-REVIEW: Lucy Gilmore’s PUPPY LOVE
While Lucy Gilmore is a new-to-me romance author, some of you may know her under the name Tamara Morgan. (I may even have some of “Morgan’s” romances lurking in the TBR.) Though I’m leery of new-to-me romance authors, I succumbed to the cover puppy’s cuteness. If I were to ever have a dog, it would be a Pomeranian, though in truth, I’m a cat-lady. Reading Gilmore’s first volume in the Service Puppies series, I didn’t regret my venture to new-author territory for a moment. Gilmore’s romance may not break new genre ground, but it delighted me. To start, I loved the premise and meet-cute and recounting them will give you a good idea of what you can expect. Harrison Parks is my favourite kind of hero: huge, grumpy, rhetorically monosyllabic, introverted, and a sentimental softie under the bluster and muscle. He’s also a wildfire firefighter and type 1 diabetic, whose workaholism put him into a diabetic coma. Now his boss, Oscar, wants him to get a service dog to detect his blood sugar — before he’ll let him anywhere near a wildfire again. Harrison loves his work and, grumbling and whinging up a storm, he finds himself at the Puppy Promise kennel staring down at a ball of fluff named Bubbles and a bitty woman in a ruffled dress telling him Bubbles is his new lifeline to getting back to the work he loves.
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REVIEW: Janice Kay Johnson’s IN HOPE’S SHADOW
Janice Kay Johnson’s In Hope’s Shadow is second in the “Two Daughters” series. As its title suggests, the second is a “shadow” of the first. Yesterday’s Gone is dramatically visceral: after twenty-some years, a family recovers Hope, their abducted biological daughter, with the help of Seth Chandler, a dedicated police detective. In Hope’s Shadow tells of the romance between Eve Lawson, the family’s adopted daughter, and Ben Kemper, the detective’s partner. Yesterday’s Gone is as a stone thrown in clear water to Hope’s Shadow, its rippling effects bearing on the secondary characters’ lives. Those who merely witnessed the events of the first story are the focus of the second. Eve’s, the adopted daughter’s, insecurities come to the foreground and colour her relationships with Hope, her “new” sister, parents, and evolving relationship with hero Ben. In Hope’s Shadow is a romance novel about the emotional aftermath of a seismic event in the characters’ lives. Eve, her family, Hope and her now-fiancé, Seth, are still adjusting their lives to each others, trying to find an equilibrium in the family dynamic. Ben too is adjusting to new life circumstances. He still smarts from his divorce from Nicole, his high school sweetheart and love of his life, and new role as an every-second-weekend single dad to Rachel, his six-year-old daughter.
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MINI-REVIEW: Regina Scott’s FRONTIER ENGAGEMENT
Regina Scott is a new-to-Miss-B author. Miss B’s relentless pursuit of good inspie fiction is running down like an wound-up toy. Scott’s Frontier Engagement is inspie-light (some heartfelt praying and one lovely forest-set singing of “Amazing Grace”), but not inspired to offer anything new or original in the subgenre. If you’re looking no further than the pleasantness that the subgenre has on offer with none of the offense that it occasionally exhibits, Scott’s 1866-Washington-frontier romance will be for you. Logger James Wallin travels to Seattle to bring a school teacher to Wallin Landing, his family’s fledgling town, and finds Alexandrina Eugenia Fosgrave, newly arrived with the Mercer expedition. Like all good inspie heroines, she’s suspicious and mistrustful, but James’ charm and persistence pay off: “So, like it or not, that schoolmarm had an engagement with the frontier.” James convinces Alexandrina, re-christening her with the diminutive “Rina,” as they set off for Wallin Landing, where Rina hopes to “make something good out of the tatters of her life, where she could make a difference.” Readers soon realize that James’ charm and humour, as well as Rina’s regal bearing, conceal psychic wounds. But Rina is barely established in Wallin Landing when the challenges of teaching leave her tear-eyed and on her way to an easier teaching post. To ensure her safety and, frankly, because he’s sweet on her, James accompanies her in the guise of her fiancé and the narrative makes an about-face, becoming an inspie road romance. The “road” provides much fodder for both humorous and dangerous incidents, as well as James and Rina opportunity to know each other better and grow closer in love and friendship. Continue reading
Miss Bates Reads Romance 