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Ellie Blix seems to see herself as the next coming of Mrs. Marple when she starts to investigate a former friend’s suspicious death. That is all well and good. Unfortunately, she appears to be on the verge of a mental breakdown throughout most of the book. Nevertheless, a fun small-town cast keeps things interesting, with Sylvia as a standout that makes up for Ellie’s shortcomings.
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Like many anthologies, I found Naked City to be a mixed bag. Of the twenty short stories, I only liked/loved six. As a result, I would have rated this lower, except those six were well worth slogging through the others to read.
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If you are looking for a Gothic, Regency novel like Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, Beneath His Silence is worth checking out. The haunting atmosphere is captured perfectly. Unfortunately, the continuing melodrama got to me and moved it down the list of books I would revisit.
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After the high of Dark Song, Dark Tarot felt like a let-down. This felt like a reunion book without it truly being a reunion. Too many locations and faces detracted from the leading pair, and I never came to like Adalasia.
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It has been years since I last read this book, and it has not aged as well as I remembered. However, it is still a great introduction to the world of the Carpathians, their struggles against infertility, and this world’s version of vampires.
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The Abduction of Pretty Penny is the first book by Leonard Goldberg that I have read, and that may be why I struggled with this book since it is the fifth book in the series. While it was readable, I felt that I lacked background information that I should already know from how some characters and situations were introduced.
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Four In Hand is one of the weaker Stephanie Laurens’ novels that I’ve read. Four romances, plus the chaos that the Twinning sisters create, leaves the character development lacking.
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This book never really drew me in. The plot is uncomplicated as two people from different classes and with drastically different personalities are thrust together and come to love each other. I found it hard to stay engaged due to an excessive number of adjectives, abrupt time shifts, and disappearing items.
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Ransome’s Honor has a lot in common with one of my favorite books, Persuasion by Jane Austen. The main characters are both older with the maturity experience brings. The navy plays a large part as it is central to both Julia and William’s families. A close-knit group of family and friends are easy to fall in love with, and an engagement that never happened is in their past. It’s truly a pity that Julia and William were such frustrating characters who acted the opposite of their established backgrounds.
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I think this book had a massive case of overhyping, and I expected better than what I got. This world is exciting, and an intriguing concept, but the characters fell flat. I can easily see it getting better, but this book was not exceptional.
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