Review: Playing the Part by Robin Covington

Posted on July 18, 2013December 1, 2013 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | 4 Stars> book reviews> Originally published at Book Lovers, Inc.> The Rocket Lover

Playing the Part by Robin Covington Format read: ebook provided by the publisher
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Release Date: June 10, 2013
Number of pages: 175 pages
Publisher: Entangled: Brazen
Formats available: ebook, paperback
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website | Goodreads | Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Publisher’s Website

The harder they play . . . the harder they fall.

After publicly self-destructing over a heartbreak a year ago, bestselling romance writer Piper James is now making nice with her publisher by agreeing to teach Hollywood’s favorite action star how to act like he’s in love. Only playboy Mick Blackwell has no clue what love looks like.

When a seductive heat ignites between Piper and Mick, she jumps at the chance for a bit of fun between the sheets, but with two stipulations: she’s kept out of the public eye and things end when she returns to New York. Only Mick keeps changing the rules on her. Tempted by America’s favorite bad boy, Piper is wondering how far she’s willing to bend…

My Thoughts:

First of all, this was the third book in a row I read where the heroine wasn’t a tall size two, and I really want to see this trend continue! I want more heroines for the rest of us! More curvy women need to get the hunky guys!

Back to our regularly scheduled review…

Playing the Part was a whole lot of fun. For one thing, we have the Hollywood tinseltown fantasy of an actor who needs the writer to figure out how to play the character from the book. I think I’ve read that they send the author of the book a check and hope never to see them again, so we’re already into fantasyland, but it’s a nice fantasy.

And we have a sex-into-romance story, with a very bad boy of the love-em-and leave-em type, and a woman who is not supposed to get her name into the tabloids again. This last bit sort of tripped my willing-suspension-of-disbelief meter a bit. No one recognizes authors on sight enough to get them in the tabloids.

Although in this particular case she did have a breakup and public meltdown from a scumbag actor just before the wedding. Of course, he cheated. While filming a movie of one of her books. With his co-star and her best friend. Former best friend.

Dragging myself back from digression.

In Playing the Part, star Mick Blackwood is fine in the action scenes of Regan’s Gift, but his acting in the love scenes is terrible. He’s never been in love and has zero experience to draw on. Piper James, the author of the romance novel, is brought in to coach him on the emotional side of the story. The problem is that she hasn’t been in touch with those emotions since she broke up with the scumbag.

Of course they fall for each other. The fun and the amazingly hot love scenes are in watching the way they fall for each other. This book is scorching!

Then it gets to the sweet and gooey center, because the course of true love never does run smooth, especially between two people are aren’t willing to call it what it is. When pictures of their fling get plastered all over those tabloids, Piper loses whatever trust she has, not only in Mick, but also in herself.

Mick has a betrayal to investigate, as well as the depths of the heart he didn’t think he had. Then he has to figure out how to win Piper back–if that’s even possible.

Verdict: A story with a romance writer hasn’t been quite this much fun since Romancing the Stone, and that was a long time ago. Although I’ll confess that this one had me when Mick described Piper as a sexy librarian because of her glasses. It may be a stereotype, but it’s still one of my personal favorites!

Mick and Piper have smoking hot chemistry that practically steams off the pages (or electronics). Piper loves bad boys and that’s exactly what Mick is. They start flirting from the second they meet and it never lets up. This is not insta-love, but it is very much instant sexing. She knows she probably shouldn’t, but he’s just too tempting. The love comes after a 10-day vacation in Hawaii.

The one thing I didn’t quite buy was Piper not understanding, or not expecting, that dating a Hollywood star meant a loss of privacy. Not the first time and not the second. She loved the attention when it was positive and was surprised when it turned on her after it went negative, even though she was the one who had the public meltdown. Um, not realistic. While it’s hateful, it doesn’t seem like something you could have both ways. My 2 cents.

But I loved this story and hope there are more in the series. Mick shared a house with a soulful rock musician named Linc who is just begging for an HEA of his own.

4-Stars

I give Playing the Part by Robin Covington 4 glittering stars!

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

Review: The Armies of Heaven by Jane Kindred

Posted on June 20, 2013December 1, 2013 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | 4 1/2 Stars> book reviews> Originally published at Book Lovers, Inc.> The Rocket Lover

The Armies of Heaven by Jane Kindred Format read: ebook provided by the publisher
Series: The House of Arkhangel’sk, #3
Genre: Fantasy
Release Date: June 25, 2013
Number of pages: 400 pages
Publisher: Entangled Select
Formats available: ebook, paperback
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website | Goodreads | Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Book Depository US | Book Depository (UK)

Full-scale war has broken out in Heaven, and Anazakia must embrace her destiny, leading an army of Virtues into battle against a Host of enemies to restore the House of Arkhangel’sk. Furious with her for putting her trust in the angel who has done them all irreparable harm, Vasily tries to ignore his growing resentment, while Belphagor returns to the world of Man with a cadre of beautiful androgynous Virtues to restore the sundered alliance between the Fallen and the gypsy underground. Without their help in enlisting the terrestrial forces of Grigori and Nephilim, Anazakia’s Virtues are hopelessly outnumbered. But there are more things in Heaven and Earth than any of them have dreamt of, and those they cannot see will mean the difference between victory and losing everything.

My Thoughts:

What goes around, comes around. Not exactly profound, but there is definitely a sense that everything, good and bad, from The Fallen Queen (reviewed here at BLI) and The Midnight Court (reviewed at Reading Reality) comes back around in The Armies of Heaven.

The chickens all come home to roost. Chickens and angels both have feathers, right?

The House of Arkhangel’sk is the heavenly reflection of the House of Romanov. And both were manipulated by the Snow Queen, Aeval, because she didn’t get what she wanted when she wanted it. Yes, she was just that petty. Aeval is that cold.

Aeval set in motion a series of events with far-reaching consequences on earth and in the Courts of Heaven. Because she is the Snow Queen, she had no care for any of those consequences, as long as she got what she wanted.

But now there are three players on the board. Aeval is still the Usurper Queen of Heaven. Anazakia is fighting to regain her throne. And somewhere, Anazakia’s former nurse Helga is holding Anazakia’s daughter Ola prisoner in an oubliette while she puts forward a surprise candidate for the throne.

All this time, Anazakia believed that Aeval had ensorcelled her cousin Kae into murdering their family, including the child her sister Omelia was carrying. His own child. Now the truth is revealed, that Helga murdered Omelia by performing a butchery of a Cesarean birth and taking the child.

Helga says she wants social justice. Many in heaven who want to see the aristocracy thrown down are rallying to her banner. There have been too many inequities for too long, and reforms are needed, but Helga is only out for herself. At any price, including the sacrifice of both children.

As the armies gather, as allies become enemies become allies, Anazakia and her friends fight to find the children, and to attempt to save as much of both heaven and earth as they can. Every relationship and belief is strained to the breaking point.

But this story is ultimately about the importance of the family you make. On her 17th birthday, Anazakia went riding with her cousin Kae. On that ride, he was ensorcelled by Aeval. Everything else happened because of that ride. Kae was her best friend then, and Anazakia has to admit to herself that she still loves him, that he was not responsible for the things he did while he was under Aeval’s blood-spell.

Kae has to let himself believe that too.

And Anazakia has to make a deal with her worst enemy in order to achieve the best part of what she wants. It’s a damn hard lesson to learn.

Fate is cruel. Even for the Queen of Heaven.

Verdict: What makes this story so fascinating isn’t the battles, or even the politics (although the politics are incredibly intricate), it’s the people.

This is a series that has to be read as a whole, because the relationships are so complex. Even with the summary at the beginning of this volume, there’s no way to understand who these people are to each other without reading the whole series.

Because Anazakia fell from heaven, she becomes more than a spoiled princess. She makes her own family with the demons Belphagor and Vasily, and eventually with Ola, and then Love, and Kirill. And finally, again, Kae. She opens up and grows because she got shaken from her setting, even if that shake was in the worst way possible.

She’s a better person, and a better queen, because of what she experiences. Otherwise she would have been just another complacent, spoiled princess, and nothing would have ever changed.

If The Midnight Court was like Russian tea, The Armies of Heaven is more like baklava, made of of many, many individual layers, each of which has it’s own flavor (and is sometimes full of nuts) and is its own part of the whole melange.

Every single tiny piece of the story, from first to last, came back to haunt by the time this book ended. Every thread got tied off. And the weave of them all was complicated, and very much like the Kushiel series or Babylon 5, every detail mattered.

The end came around to the beginning, both with Aeval and with Kae, although with Aeval, I was left wondering what it was all for from the forest sprites’ point of view. Is there another tale yet untold?

The idea of using the Tarot to send messages to the internet from heaven was just plain cool.

4-one-half-stars

I give The Armies of Heaven by Jane Kindred 4 and ½ heavenly stars!

Guest Post: Author Tonya Burrows on Alpha Heroes + Giveaway

Posted on June 14, 2013June 9, 2013 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | blog tours> Giveaways> Guest Posts

My guest today is Tonya Burrows, the author of the new romantic suspense/military romance SEAL of Honor (review here). Since the hostage rescue team in her new HORNET series features a whole bunch of guys trying to figure out who is the alpha-est, it’s terrific that she’s going to tell us all about her own “Alpha Tolerance Level”. Take it away Tonya!

Alpha Heroes by Tonya Burrows

I love me an alpha male in my romances, but the recent trend of super dominant and controlling heroes got me wondering how much alpha is too much? Where do you draw the line between charmingly alpha and a-hole?

For me, my alpha tolerance level depends on three things:

Genre. I’m much more open to an uber-dominant hero in a paranormal than in a contemporary or romantic suspense.
Motivation. If the hero starts to tell the heroine how or where to fulfill any of her basic needs such as eating, sleeping, living or working, that’s too much. More slavery than romance. And if I come across a hero doing any of that in a book, he better have a damn good reason behind his dominance—e.g. an FBI agent trying to protect the heroine because if she doesn’t do exactly what he says, the baddies will get her. If he’s dominating the heroine just because he can or because he wants to, that doesn’t work for me.
The heroine. If she submissively goes along with him as he orders her around, I’ll probably throw the book against a wall. I like heroines with spine that will stand up to the hero when he crosses the line and tell him exactly what he can do with his alpha-ness.
Honestly, in my new release, SEAL of Honor, Gabe skates close to my alpha limit. As a Navy SEAL Lieutenant Commander, he expects people to just fall in line and follow him without question—so of course I had to throw him into a life-or-death situation with a team that doesn’t follow orders and a heroine who won’t stand for his bossiness.

What can I say? I’m mean like that.

Do you like Alpha heroes? How much alpha is too much for you?

About Tonya BurrowsWriting has always been my one true love. I wrote my first novel-length story in 8th grade and haven’t stopped since. I received a B.A. in creative writing from SUNY Oswego and I’m now working on a MFA in popular fiction at Seton Hill University.

When I’m not writing, I spend my time reading, painting (badly), exploring new places, and enjoying time with my family. Give me a good horror movie over a chick flick any day. (And, let’s be honest, I’ll take a bad horror movie too!) I’m a geek at heart and pledge my avid TV fandom to Supernatural and Doctor Who. I’m also a big fan of The Voice. What can I say? Guilty pleasure.

I share my life with two dogs and a ginormous cat. We live in a small town in PA, but I suffer from a bad case of wanderlust and usually end up moving someplace new every few years. Luckily, my animals are all excellent travel buddies.

To learn more about Tonya, visit her website or follow her on
Facebook and Twitter.

TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY

One lucky winner will receive a signed copy of SEAL of Honor, swag, and will even have a character in one of Tonya’s future releases named after them! For a chance to win, use this Rafflecopter:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Review: SEAL of Honor by Tonya Burrows

Posted on June 14, 2013June 15, 2013 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

Format read: ebook provided by the publisher
Formats available: ebook, paperback
Genre: Romantic suspense, Military romance
Series: HORNET, #1
Length: 352 pages
Publisher: Entangled Select
Date Released: May 28, 2013
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository

It’s a good thing Gabe Bristow lives and breathes the Navy SEAL credo, “the only easy day was yesterday,” because today, his life is unrecognizable. When his prestigious career comes to a crashing halt, he’s left with a bum leg and few prospects for employment that don’t include a desk.

That is, until he’s offered the chance to command a private hostage rescue team and free a wealthy American businessman from Colombian paramilitary rebels. It seems like a good deal—until he meets his new team: a drunk Cajun linguist, a boy-genius CIA threat analyst, an FBI negotiator with mob ties, a cowboy medic, and an EOD expert as volatile as the bombs he defuses. Oh, and who could forget the sexy, frustratingly impulsive Audrey Van Amee? She’s determined to help rescue her brother—or drive Gabe crazy. Whichever comes first.

As the death toll rises, Gabe’s team of delinquents must figure out how to work together long enough to save the day. Or, at least, not get themselves killed.Because Gabe’s finally found something worth living for, and God help him if he can’t bring her brother back alive.

My Review:

This team is a mess. The story, however, isn’t, even though it does have a few moments that are sticky when things shouldn’t be. And not-sticky when they should be.

<sigh> Let me explain…

Two Navy SEALs are forced to retire after a fairly mundane car accident, Gabe Bristow and Travis Quinn. If the only easy day for a SEAL was yesterday, it’s pretty clear that for Bristow, life was way easier as a member of SEAL Team Ten. For Quinn, not so much.

But it’s not Quinn’s book.

Bristow’s the one with the leadership qualities. He’s the guy who can make a SEAL team, or the bunch of highly qualified misfits that gets recruited by “HumInt Consulting, Inc.” to become a private hostage rescue team, follow anybody’s orders willingly.

About those misfits, well, let’s just say that it’s really obvious there’s going to be a book about each one. For the purpose of this first story, the fact that these guys are all still jockeying to figure out whose ass is badder makes for a lot of laugh out loud moments…but it does interfere with the operation they’re supposed to be on. Which is all part of the fun.

It shows that the team is neither all military, which it isn’t, nor is it ready for the job it has been shoved into. The team’s story is how they pull together and get themselves out of really, really deep foo-foo without losing anyone.

Gabe Bristow’s story is learning to live with who he is now. His leg is busted up too bad for him to ever go back to being a SEAL. That’s why they retired him. This is his life, and he can still do a lot of good. He just has to accept that it is what it is.

Part of that acceptance comes in the package of Audrey Van Amee. She’s the sister of the man his team is supposed to recover. She is also an asset. She speaks Spanish like a native, her brother was kidnapped in Colombia, and half of Bristow’s team doesn’t have any language skills.

Audrey not only throws herself into a lot of situations that she shouldn’t, she talks to herself about the fact that she’s walking or running or leaping headfirst into a situation that in the movies always ends up with the heroine getting captured or killed, but she does it anyway. Sometimes she seemed brave, and sometimes not.

SEAL of Honor wouldn’t be romantic suspense without the romance. So the sister of the kidnapping victim, meaning Audrey, and the leader of the rescue team, in the person of Gabe Bristow, naturally have way more chemistry together than they can manage to handle, in spite of, or maybe because of, the heightened tension of the situation they find themselves in.

And let’s not forget about the kidnapping. Bryson Van Amee was in the import/export business. The problem is that Bryson had been doing a little bit of dealing in, let’s call it the shady side of the business. He hadn’t quite reached the dark side yet, but he was getting there. So there are multiple gangs of bad dudes either involved with his kidnapping, killing off the dudes involved with his kidnapping, or threatening the possibility of his rescue from his kidnapping.

Escape Rating B-: On the sticky where it shouldn’t have been side, the heroine was not in the least bit squeamish about having sex with the hero after having been kidnapped at gunpoint by a bunch of drug-running thugs that she had seen murder several cops. And again in the house of a known drug-dealer, admittedly in more plush surroundings. On the not-sticky where it should have been side, she wasn’t willing to let Gabe use the violence necessary to let them escape from said murderous drug-running thugs.

The romance between Gabe and Audrey definitely had a high insta-love quotient. And the whole business where he decides that she doesn’t really love him, that it’s all just the intensity of the situation, well, I wanted to wring Gabe’s neck. That is one of my least favorite misunderstandammit tropes.

One of Gabe’s team members is a Cajun named Jean-Luc. My personal opinion is that there is only one Jean-Luc for this “generation”, and this was the wrong quasi-military. Your fantasy may differ and YMMV.

But the teambuilding aspect of the story, or rather the fact that they do one hell of a lot of fumbling and screwing up, that part was incredibly fun to read. It was great to read about a para-military team that just plain does not have its act in gear.

The suspense part was well done. There was so much double-faking going on, it took most of the book to figure out who was on first. All the bad guys blamed each other, and they kept the good guys (and the reader) plenty confused until the very end.

A version of this review was originally published at Book Lovers Inc.

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

Guest Post by Author Laura Kaye on Contemplating Zombies – The Walking Dead + Giveaway

Posted on June 13, 2013June 9, 2013 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | blog tours> Giveaways> Guest Posts

Today I’d like to welcome Laura Kaye, the author of the fantastic (literally, it’s based on Greek mythology!) Hearts of the Anemoi series (North of Need, West of Want) and the brand spanking new South of Surrender (review here). Laura’s going to talk about her other supernatural addiction, ZOMBIES! Go Laura!

Contemplating Zombies – The Walking Dead

by Laura Kaye

I’m very excited to be at Reading Reality today to celebrate the release of my Greek-mythology-inspired South of Surrender, the third book in my Hearts of the Anemoi series. This book is about the Supreme God of the South Wind and Summer, Chrysander Notos, who literally falls into the life of human mortal Laney Summerlyn, who is nearly blind. Chrys’s hard landing into Laney’s life forces her to confront a new reality—that other, supernatural beings exist in the world.

One of my favorite things about reading paranormal stories is watching the human characters learn that paranormal things exist in the world and try to figure out how to accept and deal with that. And I think that’s why The Walking Dead TV show has become my newest paranormal obsession. Yes, I’m late to the party! But within the past week, I’ve watched the whole first season and the first episodes of the second, and I am hooked. This is interesting for me, because zombies in general do not attract me. I mean, I write Greek gods and vampire warrior kings—the definition of sexy! LOL

One of the reasons this show has hooked me is because zombies are truly horrible to contemplate. Real people you used to know and love become mindless, flesh-eating attackers. Everything about that is horrible to think about. And you MUST kill them to save yourself. The sheer horror of that makes you think how you would deal with it, and this tweaks my interest in watching the human characters learn about and deal with the paranormal. Put zombies into a kind of dystopian, post-apocalyptic framework where their presence has led to the downfall of society and government and now you’re forced to think about what it would be like to live in that kind of world—and whether you’d think it was worth fighting to do so.

Another reason The Walking Dead appeals to me is that there’s plenty of that old-fashioned horror movie goodness of things jumping out at you and making you bury your fashion in a couch pillow. There’s tons of moments where you find yourself holding your breath alongside the characters so the zombies don’t hear you either. And, when you turn the TV off late at night, you find yourself peering outside your front windows to see whether Walkers are shuffling around in the street outside your house LOL. This is horror done well.

A final reason the show is so much fun to watch is because they’ve given us characters to love and root for. We don’t want the small children to die. Or the family that fought to be reunited. Or the kind-hearted old man. Or Daryl! For Pete’s sake! LOL And so we worry about them every step of the way, and that certainly invests us as viewers.

Now, zombies have absolutely nothing to do with South of Surrender, LOL, except that as a life-long fan of all things paranormal, both of these are the kinds of stories I love! But, to give you more of a taste of my story, here’s an excerpt of the moment right after heroine Laney Summerlyn has been attacked by one of Chrys’s enemies:

Needing to see her more clearly, Chrys willed on the lights and dragged gentle fingertips over her cheek. Her shirt and shorts were badly singed. Sweat beaded over her red, puffy skin. And, good gods, was she on the verge of blistering?

Enough! She needs you!

Too hot. He had to bring her temperature down. Fast.

Without a moment’s debate, Chrys willed all of their clothing away. The more of him that touched her, the faster he could syphon the heat from her body. He moved to cover her, and hated himself a little more—if that was possible—for having to push through the ancient anxiety that gripped him as he anticipated all that skin-on-skin contact.

His chest settled on her chest. His hips on her hips. His legs covered and surrounded hers.

Scorching. She was absolutely, intoxicatingly on fire. It would’ve been mind-numbingly arousing if he didn’t know the threat the heat posed to her well-being. Still, blood filled his cock and turned it to steel between them. He gritted his teeth, unable to control his body’s natural reaction to the temperature.

Breathing deeply, he concentrated on pulling the heat into himself.

Please let this work. Gods, maybe the amulet hadn’t protected her after all.

He absorbed what he could. And then he took more. He would take whatever he had to. For her.

Chrys pulled the energy in until it turned volcanic inside him. Restraining that amount of power had him shaking so hard he feared hurting her. He locked his jaw and muscled through the burn, intent upon his life not to fail at this one thing.

Come on, Laney! Come back to me.

About Laura KayeLaura is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of a dozen books in contemporary and paranormal romance. Growing up, Laura’s large extended family believed in the supernatural, and family lore involving angels, ghosts, and evil-eye curses cemented in Laura a life-long fascination with storytelling and all things paranormal. She lives in Maryland with her husband, two daughters, and cute-but-bad dog, and appreciates her view of the Chesapeake Bay every day.

To learn more about Laura, visit her website and blog or follow her on Facebook or Twitter.

GIVEAWAYS

How many of you are addicted to The Walking Dead, too? If you are, what about it most appeals to you? One commenter who leaves their email address will win a $5 gift card to either Amazon or B&N. Open to international. Good luck!

For a chance to win the grand prize on Laura’s blog tour, use the Rafflecopter here:

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Review: South of Surrender by Laura Kaye

Posted on June 13, 2013June 15, 2013 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B Reviews> book reviews

Format read: ebook provided by the publisher
Formats available: ebook, paperback
Genre: Paranormal romance
Series: Hearts of the Anemoi, #3
Length: 400 pages
Publisher: Entangled Publishing
Date Released: May 28 ,2013
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository

Chrysander Notos, Supreme God of the South Wind and Summer, is on a mission: save Eurus from his death sentence, and prove his troubled brother can be redeemed. But Eurus fights back, triggering vicious summer storms that threaten the mortal realm, dangerously drain Chrys, and earn the ire of the Olympic gods who ordered Eurus dead.

Laney Summerlyn refuses to give up her grandfather’s horse farm, despite her deteriorating vision. More than ever, she needs the organized routine of her life at Summerlyn Stables, until a ferocious storm brings an impossible—and beautiful—creature crashing down from the heavens.

Injured while fighting Eurus, Chrys finds himself at the mercy of a mortal woman whose compassion and acceptance he can’t resist. As they surrender to the passion flaring between them, immortal enemies close in, forcing Chrys to choose between his brother and the only woman who’s ever loved the real him.

My Review:

South of Surrender falls somewhere between north and west. Yes, I know the compass points aren’t laid out that way.

However…

I’m talking about Laura Kaye’s Hearts of the Anemoi series, and the way the books feel/read, at least to this reader. YMMV.

North of Need was positively luminous. Sunlight sparkling on new-fallen snow shiny. Not just original, but absolutely awesomesauce (review here). And it set the bar incredibly high for the rest of the series.

West of Want left me (actually us, see Stella’s and my dual review at BLI) definitely wanting. Insta-love, not enough world-building or relationship-building, and very much of a multiple deus-ex-machina ending.

Now that we’ve reached Chrysander Notos, the god of the south wind and summer, the story and the storm are both starting to come to a climax.

Something is horribly wrong with Eurus, the god of the east. He’s responsible for all the bad stuff that has happened in the story so far. The question is, what’s the matter with this dude? It sounds like he has one heck of a lot of “daddy issues”, but we don’t get much of an explanation. What we do know is that the pack on Olympus have sentenced him to death for his evil in West of Want.

Meanwhile, the story starts with him pounding Chrys into godlike bits, the same thing he’s been doing all summer. Eurus has managed to steal a ring from their father that has power over all the wind gods. The fact that their father Aeolus created such a ring may be a tiny part of the explanation for the aforementioned “daddy issues”.

Aeolus is not a candidate for father of the millennium, or even the year, let’s put it that way. But we don’t quite get enough to explain Eurus’ brand of bwahaha evil. He’s pretty far out there.

We do get a love story between Chrys and Laney Summerlyn, because he falls unconscious through her barn roof at the end of one of his epic stormy battles with his brother.

Two things are different about this, Laney has retinitis pigmentosa, so she’s nearly blind (see Tanya Huff’s Blood Ties for the last time I’ve seen this used in paranormal romance) and Chrys has lost so much control he crashes as a Pegasus.

Laney may be mostly blind, but she knows that the horse she cared for during the night had wings, and that when she woke up in the morning in the horse’s stall, she lay cuddled with a man. A man who disappears when her ranch foreman comes to check on the damage.

Chrys just knows that Laney is the first person he’s been able to let touch him without panicking. And we’re never clear on exactly why he panics, only that he’s been doing it for centuries. So yes, we have the insta-connection thing going on.

Escape Rating B: While it added more dimension to Laney’s character that she was dealing with her blindness, the romance still hinged on the insta-connection between Chrys and Laney as well as his issues with not being touched. Which weren’t explained as well as I might have liked. I liked them as a couple, but I just didn’t get what his original trauma was.

There was a lot more action and downright plotting and planning going on in South of Surrender than in either of the previous books. Chrys, Zeph (West) and Boreas (the actual North Wind) have to take care of Eurus before he either takes care of them or comes into his own season. Or before the Olympians just plain kill him. The whole god-plotting and double-crossing was added a lot of zing to the second half of the story (along with some thunderbolts and a tornado or two).

South of Surrender ends with a bang that pulls out all the stops, tissues and heartstrings. I am looking forward to East of Ecstasy, because I really want to see whether Eurus goes down or gets redeemed.

A version of this review was originally posted at Book Lovers Inc.

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

Review: SEAL of Honor by Tonya Burrows

Posted on June 10, 2013December 1, 2013 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | 3 1/2 Stars> book reviews> Originally published at Book Lovers, Inc.> The Rocket Lover

SEAL of Honor by Tonya Burrows Format read: ebook provided by the publisher
Series: HORNET, #1
Genre: Romantic Suspense, Military Romance
Release Date: May 28, 2013
Number of pages: 352 pages
Publisher: Entangled Select
Formats available: ebook, paperback
Purchasing Info: Author’s website | Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Book Depository US | Book Depository (UK) | Goodreads

It’s a good thing Gabe Bristow lives and breathes the Navy SEAL credo, “the only easy day was yesterday,” because today, his life is unrecognizable. When his prestigious career comes to a crashing halt, he’s left with a bum leg and few prospects for employment that don’t include a desk.

That is, until he’s offered the chance to command a private hostage rescue team and free a wealthy American businessman from Colombian paramilitary rebels. It seems like a good deal—until he meets his new team: a drunk Cajun linguist, a boy-genius CIA threat analyst, an FBI negotiator with mob ties, a cowboy medic, and an EOD expert as volatile as the bombs he defuses. Oh, and who could forget the sexy, frustratingly impulsive Audrey Van Amee? She’s determined to help rescue her brother—or drive Gabe crazy. Whichever comes first.

As the death toll rises, Gabe’s team of delinquents must figure out how to work together long enough to save the day. Or, at least, not get themselves killed.Because Gabe’s finally found something worth living for, and God help him if he can’t bring her brother back alive.

My Thoughts:

This team is a mess. The story, however, isn’t totally although it does have a few moments that are sticky when things shouldn’t be. And not-sticky when they should be.

<sigh> Let me explain…

But it’s not Quinn’s book.

Bristow’s the one with the leadership qualities. He’s the guy who can make a SEAL team, or the bunch of highly qualified misfits that gets recruited by “HumInt Consulting Inc.” to become a private hostage rescue team, follow anybody’s orders willingly.

Part of that acceptance comes in the package of Audrey Van Amee. She is the sister of the man his team is supposed to recover. She is also an asset. She speaks Spanish like a native, her brother was kidnapped in Colombia, and half of Bristow’s team doesn’t have any language skills.

Verdict: On the sticky where it shouldn’t have been side, the heroine was not in the least bit squeamish about having sex with the hero in a hut in the jungle in the midst of being kidnapped at gunpoint by a bunch of drug-running thugs that she had seen murder several cops. And again in the house of a known drug-dealer, admittedly in more plush surroundings. On the not-sticky where it should have been side, she wasn’t willing to let Gabe use the violence necessary to let them escape from said murderous drug-running thugs.

The romance between Gabe and Audrey had a little too much insta-love in it for my taste. And the whole business where he decides that she doesn’t really love him, that it’s all just the intensity of the situation, drove me nuts. That is one of my least favorite misunderstandammit tropes.

One of Gabe’s team members is a Cajun named Jean-Luc. No, just no.

But the teambuilding aspect of the story, or rather the fact that they do one hell of a lot of fumbling and screwing up, that part was fun to read. It was great to read about a para-military team that does not have its act in gear.

The suspense part was pretty decent. There was so much double-faking going on, it took most of the book to figure out who was on first. All the bad guys blamed each other, and they kept the good guys (and the reader) plenty confused.

3-one-half-stars

I give SEAL of Honor by Tonya Burrows 3 and ½ stars!

Review: A Riveting Affair by Candace Havens, Lily Lang, Patricia Eimer

Posted on June 6, 2013December 1, 2013 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | 2 1/2 Stars> 3 Stars> 4 1/2 Stars> book reviews> Originally published at Book Lovers, Inc.> The Rocket Lover

Book Blurb:

Beauty and the Clockwork Beast

Rose Verney wants to fulfill her father’s dying request: to complete construction of the teleportation device he designed. Knowing just who can help her succeed, she seeks out Sebastian Cavendish, her father’s brilliant former student.Sebastian hasn’t left his home since he returned from the Civil War. He’s a broken man, his prosthetics a reminder of the terrible destruction his inventions brought to the battlefield. He wants nothing to do with Rose and her father’s masterpiece, but when she barges into his abandoned lab and begins construction, it’s everything he can do to resist getting involved. Especially when she charms her way into his monstrous heart.

Demon Express

Professor Maisy Clark, professional demon hunter, is on the trail of an evil scientist responsible for the deaths of hundreds. Julian is worse than the monsters he creates, but he’s also obsessed with Maisy and willing to kill anyone who gets too close to her. Just when she thinks she has Julian cornered, the sexy marshall Jake Calloway insists the investigation is his, and everything goes to hell. Maisy came to Texas to corner the scientist whose macabre experiments have taken so many lives, and Calloway is just another distraction she doesn’t need. Julian is her responsibility, one she’s not about to share. Even if Calloway can help, Julian will know Maisy is falling for the marshall, and she’s not willing to risk his life.

The Clockwork Bride

When engineer Aida Mulvaney attends a masquerade ball at the home of a staunch Luddite earl with a personal vendetta against her father’s company, she doesn’t expect to end the night married to the earl’s son Julian Capshaw, a brilliant engineer in his own right. The marriage will allow both of them to pursue their love of science, without interfering parents and ridiculous social stigmas. Though they escape to the Continent to start new lives, Julian’s father will have none of his heir’s disobedience. Before long, a marriage begun for the sake of convenience becomes a union of passion, but will it survive the machinations of an earl determined to destroy everything they love?

My Thoughts:

Beauty and the Clockwork Beast by Lily Lang

This retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” was definitely my favorite story in the book! For one thing, this one was just the right length, not too long and not too short (more on that later). It began and ended within its frame.

This is a redemption story, as all the best reworkings of Beauty and the Beast generally are. Sebastian feels that the only way he can repay the world for all the killings done by his war machines is to suffer physical and mental anguish and to never create or use another machine again. Rose needs him to be her partner, to help her finish her father’s legacy. She remembers how he used to be when he was her father’s student. She doesn’t care about how he looks, what she cares about is his spirit, his desire to create and invent…the sharp mind that was the equal of her father’s.

Rose engages his mind, and brings him back to the land of the living. She brings his house back to life, too. They become partners first, and friends. Even though the very first scene is Sebastian being extremely beastly, in the end, they fall in love because they know each other well.

The story never drags. I almost got sucked into reading it again writing the review!

I give Beauty and the Clockwork Beast by Lily Lang 4 and ½ stars

The Clockwork Bride by Patricia Eimer

Master Engineer Aida Mulvaney reluctantly goes to a masquerade ball with a friend and ends up eloping with Julian Capshaw, the son of a Luddite Earl,who also happens to be an engineer. Their fathers also happen to be long-standing enemies, to the point that maybe the M and C last names could be Montague and Capulet instead of Mulvaney and Capshaw.

And this is Victorian-era steampunk, so anti-Irish prejudice is in full-flower. You guessed it-Aida Mulvaney is Irish, or her family certainly is. The elopement part was actually fun, they don’t pretend this is a love match. But when things go downhill, Capshaw’s father’s schemes and machinations come off as too bwahaha evil when we don’t know enough about his motives.

Julian and Aida’s stay in poverty because of said machinations took up too much story, especially since we don’t know enough. That part of the story dragged. Then a whole lot of melodramatic froth got ladled on at the end.

I give The Clockwork Bride by Patricia Eimer 3 stars

The Demon Express by Candace Havens

When I read The Demon Express I had the feeling that I had been dropped into the middle of a story that had been started somewhere else. It felt like there was a whole lot more story going on than what I was reading in that one story. I want the rest of it.

I was left with a lot more questions than I had answers. Actually, the story didn’t end so much as it stopped. Maisy is clearly more than human, but in what way? Julian is some kind of monster, but what kind? What happened between them? More important, how does he track her? Does he really know what she’s feeling, or is he just a master manipulator?

The Demon Express felt like the teaser for a “real” story that I hope is coming later. I don’t like being teased this way without knowing that there is a full-length novel on the horizon. For certain.

I give The Demon Express by Candace Havens 2 and ½ stars.

Interview with Author Seleste deLaney + Giveaway

Posted on June 5, 2013June 2, 2013 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Author Interviews> blog tours> Book Giveaway> ebook giveaway> Giveaways

Today I’d like to welcome Seleste deLaney, the author of the tremendously fun contemporary romance Gaming for Keeps (read my review here).

Marlene: Welcome Seleste! Can you please tell us a bit about yourself?

Seleste: Hi! Let’s see… I’m a former lab rat turned high school science teacher turned stay-at-home-mom turned author. It’s quite the pedigree, but I assure you there’s a marginally logical progression from one career to the next. I’m in the process of moving to the Detroit metro area with my two crazy kids and two very loyal attention hounds (er…my dogs. The kids are attention hounds too but in a different way.)

Marlene: Describe a typical day of writing? Are you a planner or pantser?

Seleste: I’m a…a…an in-betweener? I call what I do road-mapping. I know where I start and where I’m going to end and I plot a couple sights to see along the way, but I wing how I get from one to the next and sometimes what order they happen. Every once in a while I veer completely off the map too. Luckily that happens less now since my editors like me to stick to the synopses I give them.

A typical day? (We’ll go with pre-summer-vacay since typical is about to fly out the window.) Mornings are generally for taking the kids to school, working out, running errands and doing business-y stuff like emails and whatnot. Afternoons I either do blog posts/interviews or try to get some words in. Once I pick up the kids, it’s a wash as to whether or not I get work done until their bedtime. Generally my most productive writing hours are after the two of them are in bed and quiet. I like to turn off most of the lights and disappear into my laptop.

Marlene: Gaming for Keeps has a lot of marvelous geeky, nerdy in-jokes. What’s your favorite science-fiction universe?

Seleste: Firefly. Whedon is my god and if I could afford to make another movie happen, I’d hand him the multi-million dollar check personally.

Marlene: Are you a gamer? What do you play?

Seleste: I played EverQuest and EQ2 for quite a few years. It became like a drug for me though and I had to quit. I heard about a game (Bioshock Infinite) at a convention (Up in the Aether) recently though that makes me want to start playing again. I’m just terrified that it will eat into my writing time. 🙁

Marlene: ConDamned reminded me of a lot of cons I’ve been to. Was it modeled on any particular experience of yours?

Seleste: Not really. One of the things I didn’t want to do was make it a specific con (that I hadn’t ever attended) and end up getting things wrong. So it’s bits and pieces of my experiences at ConFusion, FanExpo (in Canada), and even RT (the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention). I mushed it all up, shook it like a martini, poured and hoped for the best.

Marlene: Would you like to introduce us to your hero and heroine in Gaming for Keeps?

Seleste: Penelope (Megara) is almost a quintessential geek girl. She’s a computer guru who works at a college library, a book lover, and a gamer. Her luck with men has been shoddy at best and her last boyfriend has been screwing up her gaming life since they split. She’s gunshy to say the least.

Cal (Lohonas) is geek, but he’s also an incredibly sexy spy for an organization called TRAIT (they take all the “rejects” from the FBI, CIA, etc). He’s a gamer (which is how they first “meet”) and also heavily into cosplay since he likes to “disappear” at cons.

Marlene: And what’s your favorite scene from the book? And why?

Seleste: There is a shower scene that was added in edits that I love. The exchange between the characters is so fun, and the situation so real that I giggled every time I worked on it. It’s the drama, sexy, and silly all rolled up into one scene.

Marlene: Will there be more books in this series? What is next on your schedule?

Seleste: I have more for the people of TRAIT in the works and will share news as soon as I can! As far as other books, the second in my steampunk series (Clockwork Mafia) just came out at the end of April. And I have a new book in Entangled’s Brazen line (Seducing the Enemy) as well as the next book in my urban fantasy series (Kiss of Life) coming before the end of the year for sure.

Marlene: What was the first book that made you love reading?

Seleste: The very first book I remember devouring over and over again (my parents had to buy me a new, hardcover, copy as a kid because I ruined the previous one) was The Velveteen Rabbit. To this day, it’s a favorite of mine and I’ll occasionally snuggle up with it. I think it was the combination of tragic beauty and magic that drew me in and kept me coming back for more.

Marlene: Please name a book that you’ve bought just for the cover.

Seleste: Oh wow. This is a tough one. Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan is one that was sort of like that, but I’d read The Uglies and enjoyed it, so that’s not a horribly fair answer. I will say that the cover for Eclipse always snagged my attention and made me pick it up, but I ended up buying the Twilight books more to see what all the fuss was about and never actually ended up reading Eclipse.

Marlene: Tell me something about yourself that I wouldn’t know to ask.

Seleste: I actually had to go to Twitter for this, so I’m going to answer all the questions they presented.

What color panties are you wearing? White with tiny black leopard prints.
What is directly to your left? A wall. After rearranging my office to sell the house, a blank wall is all I’ve got 🙁
Dream cosplay? If I could get a group together for it, I’d love to do steampunk versions of all the bad girls from Batman. I know it’s been done, but I love it every time I see it.
If someone wrote a fanfic with your characters, what characters do you think the author would pair up? Not from this series, but I’m pretty sure there’s probably Remy fanfic out there somewhere, and if he’s not with EVERYONE in it, I’d be horribly disappointed 😉
Can I have a video of you singing “Gitchee Gitchee Goo” on Youtube? No. In fact, hell no. Unless someone clandestinely films that while I’m at a con and being silly. Then I might have to kill them.
Can you swallow an entire…bottle of water without putting it down? 😉 I see what you did there. And the answer is yes. Apparently there will now be a test of this at RT next year.
Something about corsets…? Okay, I have mad love for corsets, but my normal daily uniform is jeans and a t-shirt, preferably with some sort of character on it. (Today, it’s an Avengers one.)

Marlene: Are you a morning person or a night owl?

Seleste: Definitely night owl. I prefer people don’t talk to me or even look at me funny in the morning. I was at that convention I mentioned earlier and had a 10:30 panel on Saturday. I had…imbibed late into the night on Friday. One of the girls I’d been hanging out with (who had imbibed less) saw me on my way to the panel in the morning and basically said hi. I had to check myself otherwise I might have snarled at her. From now on, I’m putting in a “no panels before noon” request when I sign up for cons.

About Seleste deLaney

Seleste started on her career path as a young child. Stories of talking animals soon gave way to a love of superheroes and science fiction. Her first foray into the world of romance came at age twelve when she envisioned a sweeping epic love story of two people thrust together and torn apart again and again by fate. As she recalls, the plan was for them to admit their love on his deathbed. But, as is often the case with pre-teen girls, a story of that depth gave way to other pursuits, and sadly it is completely lost other than vague memories.After that, she occupied herself with short stories for a while, and then poetry until after she had earned a degree in chemistry, spent time as a high school teacher, and became a mother of two. Then she delved into writing fiction once more.

She never lost her love of the fantastic, and her stories now always reach into other realms. The worlds and people she creates occupy as much of her time as the real world, and she is most fortunate to have a family that understands her idiosyncrasies and loves her anyway.

To learn more about Seleste, visit her website and blog or follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

GIVEAWAY

One ebook copy of Seleste deLaney’s Gaming for Keeps will be given away to a lucky winner. To enter, use the Rafflecopter below:

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Review: Gaming for Keeps by Seleste deLaney

Posted on June 5, 2013June 1, 2013 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

Format read: ebook provided by the publisher
Formats available: ebook
Genre: Romantic suspense
Length: 112 pages
Publisher: Entangled: Ever After
Date Released: June 10, 2013
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo

Pen Holloway’s done with men—in real life. Guys in game are so much less drama. But when her partner from　Heroes of Fallen Gods　invites her to the convention of the year, she panics. What if he’s another jerk? What if he’s not?

Cal Burrows is living his dream of being a spy. One of TRAIT’s misfit spies, but still a spy. It’s the perfect job… until an arms dealer with a taste for blood invades his not-so-secret geek haven. All Cal wanted from ConDamned was to meet his on-line girl. Now, with the threat of mass murder looming, he’s forced to choose between keeping his mission a secret and protecting the girl of his dreams.

Despite their attraction, Pen can’t help but suspect Cal’s hiding something. She also can’t shake the feeling he’s not as much of a stranger as he seems.

My Review:

For a gamer and sci-fi geek, reading Gaming for Keeps was sort of like reading crack. I loved the in-jokes and con jokes. The whole idea of a science fiction convention romance was a trip down memory lane, and then to add on the whole spy game gone bad on top of the romance was just sheer bliss.

Games are the black holes into which weekends fall. It’s true for a lot of real-life gamers, and it’s also true for Pen (short for Penelope) Holloway. She’s been spending too much of her non-work life playing the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) Heroes of Fallen Gods. It used to be fun, but since she broke up with her ex-boyfriend–but still fellow guild-player–Aaron, gaming isn’t what is used to be.

Enter Lohonas, well, sort of. They’ve never met in real-life, only in-game. In-game he’s a sweetheart, always saving her when Aaron (nearly) lets her die. Pen (known in-game as Megara, from, you guessed it, Disney’s Hercules) has spent hours online talking with Lohonas, but has no idea who he might be in real-space.

He might be ugly. He might still live at home with his mother. He might be another girl, although that wouldn’t be so bad, at least she’d have made a friend.

Then he invites her to meet up with him at ConDamned, the con of the year. They could become more than friends. Or it could be a complete disappointment, and she’d lose her gamer-buddy.

It’s just too bad that Cal Burrowes, AKA Lohonas, can’t tell Megara, the girl of his dreams, that he suddenly has to work that weekend, and get her to stay away from the con. Because Cal is a real-life, not in-game, spy. And the forces of evil are planning to commit mass mayhem and murder in the middle of thousands of unsuspecting (and unarmed) science fiction fans.

And he’s just lured the woman he wants to fall in love with into the middle of the destruction.

Escape Rating B: I’m not sure how much of this story would work if you didn’t understand either the in-jokes or anything about either gaming or cons. And it’s too short to get the backstory on Cal’s (Lohonas’) government agency or why he’s got problems working in the field. There’s obviously something not quite right on both those fronts, but I didn’t get enough to figure it all out.

That being said, for someone who is into everything, the story is a blast! It read a lot like a superhero story, with Lohonas being Cal’s alterego or secret identity. And I wouldn’t mind finding out more about TRAIT, his agency, or seeing more stories about the other agents. Gaming for Keeps ended up being super geek fun!

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

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