What We’ve Been Reading

The Collection

Explore our full library of honest reviews and literary recommendations.

Maybe This Christmas

Sarah Morgan’s Maybe This Christmas is the third in her O’Neil Brothers series. The first two (Sleigh Bells in the Snow and Suddenly Last Summer) received a B+ and an A-…

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Full Throttle

It took me two months to read Ms. McCarthy’s Full Throttle. The novel is the seventh in Ms. McCarthy’s Fast Track series, a sequence of books whose appeal has waned…

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Off the Edge

Romantic suspense is one of the most “difficult to do well” sub genres in romance. If the romance works the suspense is often weak. If the suspense is fabulous, the…

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When the Marquess Met His Match

I’ve read many historical romances featuring either a social climber or a fortune hunter. Usually these characters are paired with their opposite; the social climber falls in love with someone…

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Rumor Has It

I’ve read all of Ms. Shalvis’s Animal Magnetism series and her Lucky Harbor series. So, whatever criticisms I have of her latest, it’s clear, on some level, her work is…

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The Last Hour of Gann

Wendy Clyde here. Dabney Grinnan and I are discussing R. Lee Smith’s The Last Hour of Gann, which was released in September. While Dabney had read Ms. Smith, this is…

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The Ruin of a Rogue

Gertrude Stein famously wrote “a rose is a rose is a rose.” The plot in Ms. Neville’s latest in her The Wild Quartet series, The Ruin of a Rogue, may…

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Glitterland

It would be easy label Alexis Hall’s debut novel Glitterland as literary fiction masquerading as romance. The language he uses – his metaphors are often show stoppingly gorgeous – and…

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Love and Other Scandals

Caroline Linden’s Love and Other Scandals is the best historical romance I’ve read this summer. Joan Bennet, the spinster heroine, has a sharper tongue and a sharper mind. The louche…

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It Happened One Midnight

It Happened One Midnight is the eighth book in Ms. Long’s Pennyroyal Green series. The hero is Jonathan Redmond, the youngest of the Redmonds.This fact alone made me consider downgrading…

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Flirting with Disaster

I am a fan of Ruthie Knox’s works. Her books are filled with characters it’s easy to care for, zingy conversations, smoking love scenes, and realistic relational conundrums. Thus I…

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Taste for Trouble

The last Susan Sey book I read, Money Shot (2011) was set on a remote island in Lake Superior and had deadly money laundering villain, pagan ceremonies, and a smokin’…

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