A Stormy Greek Marriage by Lynne Graham (The Drakos Baby, Book 2)
Books like this are the reason I stopped reading category romance in my mid-20s. I hope I don’t come across too many more of them in the near future. DNF.
I have five more titles in my Lynne Graham glom pile, but I’m not sure I can bear to go on. On one hand, I knew getting into this book that Graham writes domineering heroes of the 80s alpha kind. I thought I could cope with it, but this book is such a trainwreck I gave up halfway through.
Surprisingly for a category romance, this is part two of a series. (Perhaps Graham should have just written a full length book, did anyone think of that?) The back story is explained well enough to get the gist—I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t be prepared to slog through an entire book to basically learn that Alexei finally slept with his personal assistant, Billie, taking her virginity. She’s pined for him in secret but felt she was no match for the dazzling beauties that naturally flock to her rich, handsome boss.
Unfortunately, Alexei tripped and hit his head and managed to conveniently forget the two nights they were together. More unfortunately for Billie, the oblivious Alexei tried to rekindle a childhood romance as Billie coped with the consequences of their nights together—yes, the old secret baby.
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Ruthless Magnate, Convenient Wife by Lynne Graham (Pregnant Brides, Book 2)
There’s nothing earth-shattering about this story. I didn’t hate the hero or the heroine, but that might be damning with faint praise.
Back in my 20s, I would have loved this book. This may be spoilery to some readers—although if you regularly read in this Mills & Boon line it would amaze me if any of this surprises you—but Ruthless Magnate, Convenient Wife features a tycoon hero who borders on misogyny, a contract marriage, a virgin heroine, an accidental pregnancy and a Small Misunderstanding.
But as far as these things go, Lynne Graham does a decent enough job with the plot. Sergei Antonovich was saved from a troubled childhood by his grandmother, and as she gets older he wants to give her what he knows would make her happy—a grandchild.
As you do when you’re insanely rich but scarred by a money-grubbing first wife and young hotties forever flashing their cleavage in exchange for your wad (of cash, people!), Sergei sets up a business arrangement to acquire a wife and child.
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With This Fling... by Kelly Hunter
This book proves that finely tuned character development and emotional honesty can turn even the most maligned clichés in romance fiction not just into an enjoyable read, but a story worth savouring.
The more I read Kelly Hunter’s work, the more I admire how well she’s able to make each couple and each story fresh, interesting and fun.
With This Fling… features what seems to be Hunter’s favourite type of heroine—a rich one. Charlotte Greenstone invents a fiancé to reassure her dying godmother that she won’t be alone. When said fiancé fails to turn up at the funeral, Charlotte concocts a story in which he’s killed in the wilds of Papua New Guinea.
But in series of spectacular coincidences, she finds herself in possession of Grey Tyler’s, well, office. Her fictional fiancé is not only not dead, he’s back from PNG, he’s hot and it seems he may just have need of a fictional girlfriend of his own.
If you’re looking for an elaborate external plot, you’re in for disappointment. With This Fling… is romance distilled.
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Dragon Bound by Thea Harrison (Elder Races, Book 1)
The Elder Races series has become my BDB replacement. It’s totally cracktastic.
After reading Wandergurl’s review and at the urging of Decadence and Kate, I finally picked up the first book in Thea Harrison’s Elder Races series.
I’m hooked.
Pia Giovanni is blackmailed into stealing from Dragos, Wyr (shapeshifter) leader and one of the most powerful creatures in the world. She’s on the run, but he’s determined to find out who stole his…penny.
Dragon Bound gets off to a snappy start, with Dragos’s pursuit of Pia and her attempts to elude him. Dragos’s enemies are determined to bring him down, and Pia is inadvertently swept up in their conflict. Her life has been based on the need to protect herself, but with Dragos refusing to let her go, it seems her secrets may put her in even greater danger than either of them could have anticipated.
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Chasing Fire by Nora Roberts
A satisfying romantic suspense with a capable heroine. The romance lacks intensity, but a decent mystery plot keeps the pages turning.
The thing about Nora Roberts is that I almost always enjoy her books—just never enough to want to buy her next one and let’s not even contemplate her backlist. Chasing Fire is no exception.
Rowan Tripp is an experienced firefighter with the US equivalent of the rural fire service, but it’s a little different this time. She lost a jump partner in a freak accident the previous season, and it seems someone has put the blame squarely at her feet.
There are a pool potential suspects, even though Rowan isn’t comfortable thinking that any of them could be capable of sabotage and murder. Aside from staff at the base station, there’s her fellow fire fighters, who rely on each other’s trust for survival. There’s also the newest batch of smoke-jumping recruits—firefighters who get flown into a middle of a bush fire.
One of these recruits is Gull Curry—perhaps one of the least romantic names I’ve seen in the genre—who is immediately attracted to Tripp’s ‘package’ and ‘attitude’. Curry’s a nice guy…and remains so throughout the entire book. The romance develops gradually, but it’s not quite central to the story. It’s nice to have, but not essential.
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Red-Hot Renegade by Kelly Hunter (The Bennetts, Book 5)
This RITA-nominated book is sexy, angsty and deeply moving—everything we love about modern category romance. Oh, and the heroine? She’s the tycoon. This one’s a keeper.
You may have noticed that I’m in the middle of a Kelly Hunter glom. How I missed this awesome Aussie author boggles my mind, but Red-Hot Renegade (published in the US as Her Singapore Fling) is the book that made me first try Hunter’s work. Nominated for this year’s RITA awards, the book also features an Asian heroine with an Australia hero.
The back story for this novel is set up in the previous books of the series, which features the romances of Jacob Bennett’s siblings. Jacob’s estranged wife Jianne is being stalked and, having run out of options, she reluctantly comes to him for help.
Jacob is a martial arts champion who runs his dojo in Singapore. For reasons neither he nor Jianne want to acknowledge, they’re still officially married even though Jianne walked out on the marriage twelve years ago. What makes this reunion story different is that neither of them blame the other—instead, they remind each other of the guilt they feel about not having fought hard enough to save their relationship.
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The Man She Loves To Hate by Kelly Hunter
Mills & Boon conventions aside—yes, he’s a tycoon, she’s totally hot and they don’t use a condom—the heroine and hero of this book are rarely predictable. I only wish it could have been longer.
I don’t know why I didn’t discover Australian author Kelly Hunter sooner because she writes bloody good books.
Jolie Tanner has just removed all of her mother’s possessions from her mother’s recently deceased lover’s hideaway, when she’s caught in an avalanche with the dead lover’s son, Cole. Cole and Jolie used to be friends, but when news of his father’s dalliance with her mother became public ten years ago, Jolie was shunned and she’s borne the stigma of being a mistress’s daughter ever since.
As you do in a blizzard, Jolie and Cole share quite a bit of body heat, and what’s supposed to be a we’re-half-asleep-and-aroused-so-let’s-just-take-the-edge-off kiss ends up in unprotected sex that’s only partially mitigated by the fact that Cole isn’t a shirker and Jolie isn’t stupid enough to have sex without any form of birth control.
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Twilight: The Graphic Novel (Volume 1) by Stephenie Meyer and Young Kim (Twilight Saga)
Twilight lends itself to the shoujo manga format much better than in prose or in film. Young Kim’s renditions of the characters are disarmingly gorgeous, but even they can’t redeem Stephenie Meyer’s story of destructive co-dependency. And then there’s the font.
Jen, graphic designer extraordinaire and pop culture aficionado, generously agreed to do a guest review of this graphic novel. You can read more of her writing at Evening Hour.
Ah, Twilight, the stuff that dreams are made on. It’s not every day that one book, whose very premise was born out of a dream—so its creator, Stephenie Meyer, says—can reduce the time-honoured traits of popular culture’s great vampires to glittering giftwrap in the sunlight. When Kat offered the comic for me to review, who was I to refuse the chance to return to all the loltastic awfulness that encompasses Twilight?
These days, comic book adaptations serve as extended editions in a sea of franchise fodder. Often poor and hurried productions, they’re an easy marketing tactic to gain revenue on the side and to appease the voracious and loyal consumer. For the disinclined readers among us, comics can be a great alternative to absorb a self-contained story without sifting through the boring bits, like watching the film version in one sitting.
Unfortunately, no fast-food serving of Twilight could possibly make me hungry for more.
Yet, despite the frequent jibes I make at the popular YA book, this first volume of the graphic novel is mostly successful.
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Children of Scarabaeus (Scarabaeus, Book 2)
Not quite as compelling as the first book and the romance is underdeveloped, but still a satisfying conclusion to the Scarabaeus duology.
When Edie is recaptured by the Crib, she discovers they’ve been grooming four Talasi children to become cyphertecks for her former mentor’s pet project, Project Ardra. Edie is torn between her freedom, her obligation to free Finn, her desire to save the children, and as she learns the motives behind Project Ardra, to find a way of preventing colonised planets turning into uninhabitable mush.
This book is a continuation of the events in Song of Scarabaeus, and it’s best to read the books in order. Unlike its predecessor, Children of Scarabaeus relies on a series of smaller arcs and plots to keep the momentum going. The pacing isn’t as strong, nor are the conflicts as compelling. There are a lot of antagonists, and they’re not all well developed enough to be interesting.
There’s a bit of deus ex machina in the resolution, which is disappointing given that, for the most part, it wasn’t easy to predict how the story would go. The world building in this book also becomes mired in twists and complications.
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Heart of Steel by Meljean Brook (Iron Seas, Book 2)
It’s rare in romance to find an uncompromisingly strong heroine and even rarer to find a hero who understands how to love such a woman. This book gets it just right.
Although Meljean Brook is one of my autobuy authors, I was hugely disappointed by her first Iron Seas novel, The Iron Duke. I found Rhys Trahaearn unheroic, rapish and generally irritating. I hadn’t planned to read any more of this series, except I forgot to tell the bookshop, and they put aside a copy of Heart of Steel for me.
This is fortunate, because Heart of Steel is everything I love about Brook’s writing. Adventurer Archimedes Fox and Captain Yasmeen, who appeared in the first book, remind me of Hugh and Lilith from Brook’s The Guardians series. Their romance is cheeky but filled with subtext and things left unsaid that make it just that much more thrilling.
Archimedes Fox is presumed dead and Yasmeen makes a bargain with his sister to sell off a valuable Da Vinci sketch in exchange for a portion of the proceeds. But there are complications. Word seems to have got out, and some people are not above a bit of murder to get their hands on it. The sketch is stolen. Oh, and Fox isn’t actually dead.
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