A mouthwatering romance.
Tam and Josh have been the perfect couple since high school, but not romantically—they’re best friends.
When Tam Doan arrives home from a failed business trip for the advertising job she despises, she doesn’t think her night can get any worse. That is, until she finds her boyfriend in bed with his ex and also discovers that he tossed her prized stash of Cloud City Creamery sheep’s milk cheese, which she'd special ordered from Seattle. Seven ounces of wasted cheese is precisely what pushes Tam to finally leave Brent in New York and send out an SOS to her best friend, Josh O’Malley. It’s been five years since she’s seen him, and Brent’s jealousy was the driving force behind the fact that she’d lost touch with Josh and the Nerd Herd, their close-knit group of friends. But for Josh, half a decade of minimal communication with his high school BFF proves no problem at all, and he’s more than happy to fly her back to Ponto Beach, California, to stay with him as he helps her start anew. They easily fall back into their old ways as he helps Tam “[find] her bliss” professionally, but what they didn’t expect? A newfound sexual tension neither of them can escape. Tam and Josh soon find that living together as adults is much different—and much hotter—than a teenage sleepover, and maybe it’s time for them to save their friendship by ruining it. The second book in Yardley’s Ponto Beach Reunion series welcomes back some familiar faces, including Lily and Tobin from Love, Comment, Subscribe (2021), and the Nerd Herd is back and friendlier than ever. Yardley’s prose is summery and light—“The afternoon sun was high and hot, so the cool air off the Pacific felt like a benediction”—and you’ll get swept up as Tam and Josh breezily fall right back into place as the lovably cheesy duo known as Jam.
A mouthwatering romance.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-3002-1
Page Count: 303
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An inexplicable, aimless, and troubling reading experience.
The most feared criminal in Italy blackmails a woman into working for him.
Elio Marino is known throughout Turin’s criminal underworld as “The Wicked” because if he judges someone to be a sinner, he will kill them and everyone in their bloodline as punishment. Zahra Faizan is the head of a small, scrappy crew of thieves that call themselves Street. They target and raid one of Elio’s vault houses, escaping with enough money to last for years. A furious Elio tracks them down. He shoots and tortures Zahra until she makes a desperate bargain: In exchange for their lives, Zahra and the four other members of Street will work as permanent indentured servants for Elio. From this beginning, the book spins off a series of scenes that are so loosely interconnected that it reads less like a novel than a series of vignettes with characters who happen to have the same names: Now Zahra and Elio are playing chess; now Elio is drowning Zahra in a pool; now Elio and Zahra are in a shootout and have to save each other; now Elio and Zahra are getting high and making out. Although it’s billed as a romance, Zahra is in a casual relationship with Devil, another member of Street and Elio’s long-lost brother, for most of the book. Dramatic biographical details and storylines are introduced for both Elio and Zahra to justify their feelings or behavior, but this characterization is inconsistent and fractured. Once the scene is over, that information about the character might disappear for hundreds of pages, or never appear again. There is no chemistry or spark between Elio and Zahra, just strange, wooden dialogue and a cliffhanger ending.
An inexplicable, aimless, and troubling reading experience.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781250385857
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Bramble Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
A satisfying crime novel with a side order of romance.
A TV producer and a detective try to stop a strange pattern of young women disappearing.
In “Auclair, Loooziana,” disillusioned detective John Bowie reluctantly meets in a bar with Beth Collins, producer for the true crime show Crisis Point. She needs to interview him about the disastrous case of the missing Crissy Mellin, but he refuses. The teenager disappeared three years ago on the night of a blood moon and hasn’t been found, but a suspect hanged himself in jail after signing a confession. Case closed, says John’s boss. But John is convinced that their prisoner could not have been guilty, and he’s deeply upset at his failure. “The Mellin case messed up your life,” Beth tells him. She persuades John that Crissy’s disappearance is the latest of a series that happen on the night of a blood moon, the colloquial term for a total lunar eclipse. “It’s going to happen again,” she predicts. And wouldn’t you know, another blood moon is coming in four days. Tick, tick, tick. Beth’s boss at Crisis Point insists on airing an update on the case, but Beth knows the show is going to get it wrong, and its reputation will be ruined. Meanwhile, there’s an electric sexual tension between Beth and John that the author toys with nicely—do they, or don’t they? The answer plays out in detail more than once. The characters are fun if easy to pigeonhole: the detective angry at his failure, the honest (and beautiful) outsider eager to do her job but susceptible to love, the hero’s corrupt (to say the least) boss, and the ogre who carries out said boss’s dirtiest deeds. Even John’s dog, Mutt, plays a small but vital role. When John found him, he’d been “a flea-bitten hide wrapped around a skeleton that whimpered.” Little plot devices are easy to spot, like the phone that rings at a crucial moment, or the handgun that John places in Beth’s hand for her protection. Does Chekhov’s guideline apply here? The romantic angle leavens the dark theme, and readers will have plenty of incentives to turn the pages.
A satisfying crime novel with a side order of romance.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781538742983
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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