Yesterday’s Steals and Deals offered a twofer: Linda Howard’s Dream Man and After The Night, bound in one book. It was fascinating to read the reviews and the comments on these two books. Several readers found Howard’s sexual politics deeply offensive. Others adore her macho men and terrifyingly creepy villains.
AAR has reviewed Howard 35 times–14 of which are DIKs. Our first review was in 1998 for Heart of Fire; our most recent was in 2018 for The Woman I Left Behind. Amazon says she’s published 76 novels.
I confess–I’ve not read Howard recently. The last time I did so, it was a reread of Death Angel which, taken as an utter fantasy, held up. The first sex scene is not, however, for those who need clear consent in their stories. As Lea Hensley wrote in her review,
A woman willing to pretend adoration for a man she doesn’t even respect, Drea Rousseau is satisfied living a mindless existence in the lap of luxury. Mistress to drug lord Rafael Salinas, Drea doesn’t particularly like it when Rafael and his goons make fun of her, but she knows that behind her dumb blonde facade is a sharp mind capable of fooling them all. As she sits near Rafael one morning while he talks to a dangerous looking man she knows to be an assassin, Drea chooses to think about the color of her toenail polish rather than the conversation taking place around her. As the assassin continues to level his unnerving stare on her, he informs Rafael that he doesn’t want a cash bonus for the job just completed but instead he wants her… now.
Known only to the reader as “the Assassin” until well into the book (and only Simon thereafter), the hero is a cold-blooded killer and considered the best there is. Between jobs he appears to be a regular guy – if you can call a mysterious, sophisticated, extremely well-dressed, hunk of a hero regular. He is a careful calculating man, a master of disguise, and one who studies his employers with a high level of intensity, looking for their weaknesses so that he will always have the upper hand.
When Salinas reluctantly agrees to give Drea to Simon for the afternoon, he asks only that he not harm her, never considering for a moment if she is willing. Drea, knowing that Salinas must be tiring of her to agree to such an offer, panics both at that ugly implication as well as the thought of being alone with a terrifying assassin. What follows between Drea and Simon is intense and, beyond a doubt, extremely hot. Simon proves to be gentle yet ruthless while the incident forces Drea to examine her acceptance of her predicament. Salinas’s thoughtless actions fuel within Drea an intense desire for revenge and a determination to have a better life – at the expense of her now former lover. I must warn readers that this first encounter between Drea and Simon is not for the faint hearted and Simon’s actions come close to coercive. However, it worked for me.
Me too.
What about you? Love Howard? Now, not so much? Read any of her more recent stuff? And if you do like her work, what’s your fave?
Umm, never heard of her, don’t think I’ve ever read anything by her, when I googled her books I didn’t recognise any…………………….
I guess she was published in UK but I was reading other things?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Howard
That’s what I looked at. I don’t recognise any of those titles.
I only know a few titles because of reviews here and at AG. Hers isn’t a name many would recognise in the UK.
She was on the bestseller list a bunch when romances really weren’t there.
I looked at this list since I read a LOT of Linda Howard back in the day – seems like most of the titles I remember reading were published in the 1980s and 1990s.. and I enjoyed many of them back then, too.
Have not reread anything of hers lately.
“waves”
Looks like this is not the same Linda Howard who gave us the MacKenzie’s Mountain books back in the day. I haven’t read her in a long time and it looks like I haven’t missed much.
Well, Linda Howard wrote MacKenzie’s Mountain in 2000 and Death Angel in 2008.
Correct me if I’m wrong but, wasn’t MacKenzie’s Mountain a Silhouette Intimate Moments that was originally published in 1989?
You are correct Bona. First published by Silhouette in 1989.
Our review is wrong! I’ll go and correct it. Thanks! I never read that one so I didn’t have a clue about its pub date.
I thought “To Die For” was hilarious. That and its sequel are the only two of hers I’ve ever read. The first was purchased because of a review on this site.
I’d never heard of her until I started reviewing for US-based sites like this and AG. I’m guessing that, like many US romance authors, her books weren’t published here and were only available as imports (or at airports!) before the ‘zon arrived and made it easier for romance readers outside the US to buy them. I have books by authors regarded as ‘romance staples’ – Balogh, Guhrke, Kleypas and others – I bought in the early 2000s that were US imports, and it was pretty much impossible to find them in shops, even in central London. The romance market here seems to mostly be chick lit, family sagas, WF and Mills & Boon, although you can probably find the TikTok favourites du jour in some supermarkets.
It is pretty incredible that we reviewed her 35 times and yet, to many now, she is unknown.
Yes, I think I must have been reading a lot of ‘chick lit’ from the mid-90s to early 2000s. The publication of Bridget Jones caused a tidal wave of similar books in UK, which were everywhere as 3 for 2 offers – Sophie Kinsella, Does my Bum Look Big in This? etc. and my favourite of these authors, (early) Fiona Walker. I think they would be classed as rom-coms now.
I have a sort of love/hate relationship with her books. When I think about them, I don’t really like her heroes—they’re a bit too alpha for me. However, when I pick up one of her books, I can’t put it down. She’s a great storyteller, her characters are never paper cutouts, her plots are interesting, and she even manages to make her villains interesting. I particularly like Open Season and Mr. Perfect, though I can’t exactly pin down why. And I loved the two comic ones, To Die For and its sequel.
Linda Howard is thorny for me! I read her voraciously as a teen and young adult, and some things I remember loving her books for still hold up — they’re compulsively readable and she wrote hotter-than-usual sex scenes for the time. I went back to a few of them in the last couple of years and was left pretty unsettled not only by her alphahole heroes (which are harder for me to deal with in contemporary romance now) but by some pretty dated references to non-white characters. I also tried re-reading one of her Western historicals, and while the hero was easier to deal with, the truly mind-boggling white saviorism and denouement with Jefferson Davis saving the day are just not elements I can take anymore.
According to Goodreads, I’ve read 38 Linda Howard books although a few might be duplicates (print and audio). That shouldn’t surprise me since I began reading romances by way of romantic mysteries and then romantic suspense books. I was grabbing everyting by her and Nora Roberts, Debra Webb, Susanne Brockmann, Stephanie Bond, and others at the time. Of those 38 books, I’ve reread several in the past 5 or 6 years and they held up to varying degrees. I enjoyed Open Season again, and Dying to Please is still one of my favoirites by her, along with After the Night. But my absolute favorite and the only one of hers I’ve given a A to is Cry No More. That’s a powerful book and the ending is just right.
These days I try not go back and judge the books I read 15, 20 years ago. I enjoyed these books as I read them and even with the fact that I probably woiuldn’t like them if I was reading them for the first time now, I can own that. I’ve changed a lot over the past 15 years and my reading reflects that, but that doesn’t mean the things I enjoyed before aren’t valid. Howard is a great storyteller and I truly enjoyed her romantic suspense books.
TLDR: Linda Howard is a great writer and even if some of her books haven’t aged well, they are very important to the development of romantic suspense as a genre and I admire her a lot.
I love this, Carrie: the idea of accepting that you liked certain books at a certain time and it’s fine if you don’t know. I feel that way about a lot of the books I read when I first came back to romance!
Her novels are hit or miss for me. She has some books that I consider among the best ‘Southern noir’ trend in the romantic suspense. But others…
The last one I read was ‘Troublemaker‘, a three-star novel for me. It was originally published in 2016 but I read it last year. It was OK.
My favourite book by Linda Howards is (surprise – not) ‘Mackenzie’s mountain’ that I still find delicious taking into account when it was published (in the eighties). I have read it and re-read it several times although I see it’s old fashioned.
I also loved ‘Mr. Perfect’ and ‘After the night’.
I would say those three are my favourites of hers.
But I have also enjoyed Mackenzie’s Mission (1992), Mackenzie’s Pleasure (1996), Kill and Tell (1998), A Game of Chance (2000), Cry No More (2003), To Die For (2005) or Shadow Woman (2014).
In my opinion, her plots are better than the ones you can find in a Nora Roberts’ suspense novel, but very far from the cleverness and the twisting plots of a Sandra Brown novel.
The problem I find with her novels is how sexists they some times sound. Some things ‘are for men’ and other ‘for women’, as if we belonged to different species or come from different planets. Her alpha heroes are sometimes great and powerful and swoonworthy and ither times just plain alphaholes. Hit or miss, as I have already said.
It surprises me that she is not very known in the UK, if I have understood your comments correctly.
In Spain the majority of her books have been translated, by Harlequin Ibérica (the local branch of Harlequin), and other labels. Her oldies have been translated from 2000 onward, as far as I know.
Apart from that, O’d like to say that she’s one of those greats names in the romance genre that started writing category romances in the eighties. Nora Roberts dis the same, as Sandra Brown or Jayne Ann Krentz. Suzanne Brockmann did the same, but in the nineties. And Putney, Chase and Balogh, among others, had their own kind of ‘category’ which were the Traditional Regency.
I have always found interesting that they wrote many short novels of this kind, for years, before trying the longer format. The category romances are a good school for writers?
The majority of these category novels do not pass the test of time, even with great names on their covers but there are still I few that can be enjoyed nowadays if you read them as products of their time and try not to look at them with an activist eye.
I agree that Sandra Brown’s books often have more nuanced characters and clever plots. Envy and Lethal are two of my favorite romantic suspense books. Unfortunately I didn’t care for her latest one.
About 15 years ago I read at least 8 Howard titles. The only two I really enjoyed (based on my star ratings in LibraryThing) were Mackenzie’s Mountain (c1989) and Open Season (c 2001). Dream Man and Mr. Perfect, two titles that were regularly recommended as some of Howard’s best work, I actually disliked although I can’t tell you why (I didn’t keep notes about why, just “stars”). A couple of others were ok but nothing special, including the Mackenzie’s Mountain sequels. OTOH, there were a bunch of “well-regarded” romance writers I explored at the same time that didn’t and have subsequently never really worked for me (Nora Roberts, Danielle Steele, Johanna Lindsey, Jude Devereaux, Judith McNaught, etc.) and I think I benefited from not being a romance reader until at least one more generation of authors were writing stories that worked better for me.
I do think so much of what we love is often strongly colored by our past. I didn’t read romance from 1978 until 2008 so I missed tons of authors. But I did read Howard in 2008 and I found her stories to be sexy but lacking subtlety. I will say she’s not an author I feel called to reread.
What a coincidence! Your romance reading timeline mirrors mine so closely. I read a few (Barbara Cartland, for example) as a teenager but by the 4th or 5th book was bored. I wrote off the entire genre in about 1975. Although to be fair, required reading for college, and then and then hours and hours of non-fiction reading for work, meant that I pretty much eschewed all fiction for several decades. I didn’t begin reading romance again until library school 2003/04 when a Georgette Heyer novel was required reading. I couldn’t believe I was a romance reader! I had a lot of ground to make up for when I began working as a public librarian. . . hence the authors noted above and many more. 2005 is also about when I discovered AAR as well. 😉
I didn’t start reading romances (other than Victoria Holt, et al as a teen) until about 2008. As I’ve said, I came to romances mainly through mysteries which led me to romantic suspense. The other gateway into romance was Georgette Heyer! A friend pushed me to read her books back when you could only find them in used book stores. She made me realize I might enjoy other romances besides romantic suspense.
Linda Howard is a very talented storyteller and I read several of her books about 20 years ago, but even then I felt that I had to hold my nose to ignore the reek of the heroes’ attitudes and behaviour.
After #MeToo, I no longer accept the justification that “it’s only fiction”, and I won’t re-read her books.
I find Linda Howard hit and miss. Some of her books are very dated and some I read when I was younger and hold up for nostalgia reasons to me personally. I don’t feel it’s fair to judge a book by the standards of 2024 when it was written in the 1980s. There was a different collective societal understanding at the time. I get that everyone’s mileage may vary. I also understand that her personal politics may be problematic to some (certainly to me) however I am someone who believes freedom of thought and her books are not political to me so I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater over it.
Having said all of that I really enjoyed The Woman Left behind. I think it’s her best book for a long while. As others have mentioned Mr Perfect and Open Season are great, and I also enjoyed After the Night and Shades of Twilight. Special mention to Sarah’s Child. Originally published in 1985 it’s not going to work for everyone but it’s probably one of the first romances I ever read.
LH’s heroines excel in being competent and I think that’s one of the things I enjoy theost about her writing
I think your attitude is one that many of our readers share (and others don’t, which is fine.)
You can know the sexual politics of a book don’t reflect your values and still enjoy the story despite that. It’s sort of what you choose to focus on.
Absolutely LOVED The Woman Left Behind! Although ironically, the first in the series (Troublemaker) didn’t really do it for me – I felt like I got to know the dog much better than I got to know the hero. I just reread Open Season last year and still enjoyed it – as I recall, it was one of the first romance novels I ever read in my early 20’s when it was first released, so there may be some nostalgia mixed in for me as a reader!
Death Angel worked for me. It remains on my keeper shelf. The consent/non-consent was troublesome at first; however, the assassin made it work. Her fear later when the nameless “man” was stalking her is palpable — kept me reading — the resolution was even more shocking. I actually disliked how naive she remained after living with a drug lord for so many years.
I think I need to reread it. It’s been over a decade.
I enjoy her books and accept the sexual politics in them for what they are — a mashup of regressive 80s/90s ideas plus fantasy. I actually like that however obnoxious the hero may be, the woman is never a doormat. I think one of my favorites was Cry No More, because the grief the woman feels about her child being stolen really worked. The villain in that one, however, I wasn’t wholly convinced by.
I do remember feeling her grief was powerfully real in Cry No More. I think that’s one reason I’ve never re-read it. I tend to avoid kids in danger stories. The mom in me can’t take them!
I am 100% with you re: Cry No More! I read it once years ago, long before I had my daughter, and I thought it was a really good book – but I will never, EVER reread it at this point. I can no longer read anything with kids in danger. Might as well clear any titles like that off of my shelves!
A mixed bag for me as well. Sometimes her formula works for me, sometimes you end up with Sarah’s Child.