A sexy read that doesn’t quite reach its potential.
Relationship-shy Rosie Herpin becomes embroiled with Devlin de Vincent despite her best intentions, helping him unravel family secrets and open up his emotions.
Despite the fact that one of her best friends is involved with a notoriously wealthy and scandalous de Vincent, Rosie has not yet met one, though she’s always been intrigued. Fascinated by the supernatural, she’d love to step foot on their haunted estate, and she’s secretly attracted to the eldest son, Devlin, thanks to all the local and national news and magazine photographs she sees. Dubbed The Devil, “the man was stunning, yet there was something cold about him, almost detached and a bit cruel about how he was pieced together.” When she first meets him, she thinks they share a moment, but when they’re thrown together again soon after, not only does he not remember her, but he insults her home and her interest in the paranormal. Still, as their paths continue to cross, their blistering physical attraction and banter-as-foreplay become too hard to ignore. Giving in to sexual attraction raises their intimacy, and soon Devlin realizes that Rosie’s ability to stand up to him may also mean she’s willing to stand by his side as he uncovers dangerous secrets and must be honest with his brothers about his family’s past. Armentrout (Moonlight Seduction, 2018, etc.) writes a good story, and you can depend on her sexy romances to sizzle with wit and tension. However, beyond the romance, the suspense and gothic factors are clunky. The villain is nearly comic-book nefarious; interesting hints of the paranormal kind of disappear without fulfilling their promise; and one big reveal feels obvious while the other feels far-fetched. Also, a string of grammatical errors detracts from the overall quality of the writing.
A sexy read that doesn’t quite reach its potential.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-267457-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Three bridegrooms for three sisters: Roberts (True Betrayals, 1995, etc.) stylishly moseys into Big Sky romance. Jack Mercy was a mean son of a bitch when he was alive, and as a corpse, buried with his Stetson and his bullwhip, he's not much better. According to his will, his three daughters, who've never met and whom Jack had by three different wives, must live together for a year at his big Montana ranch house in order to win their inheritance. During the long winter, the women bicker and bond and get entangled with three sexy, strapping fellows. Roberts has always been a winner at sexual tension and sexy dialogue, and so the reader gets to see not one but three couples get past the preliminaries and into the sack. The youngest sister, cowgirl Willa, manager of the Mercy ranch and daughter of an Ute mother, matches wits and strong wills with Ben McKinnon, lusty part owner of the Three Rocks spread. Lily, from Virginia, is a delicate, bird-boned creature who's been battered by her husband, but is now taken under the wing of Adam Wolfchild, Willa's Indian half-brother. And, finally, Tess, a sharp-dressing, wisecracking screenwriter from Hollywood who couldn't wait to get back to Rodeo Drive, stays to marry Nate, a frontier lawyer who raises horses, graduated from Yale, and loves Keats. Providing the usual Roberts suspense is a serial killer who guts and scalps his victims—not only humans but (in the newest romance-novel manifestation of evil) calves, cats, skunks and deer. (Why would anyone do that to Bambi's mom? wails Tess.) Roberts also includes a genuine, successful red herring, virgin territory for most romance writers, and incorporates all the important rituals of the genre with her customary skill and humor. A good read on a long winter's night.
Pub Date: March 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-399-14122-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
Completely unbelievable, lacking any artfulness.
With none of the thick variety of The House of the Spirits (1985), only sharing that better book’s political zeal, Allende returns with a damp-Kleenex papier-mâché construction that pits a conventionally unlikely love duo against the fierce bloodthirstiness of an unnamed Latin American Society (Argentina, Chile, take your pick).
Irene Beltran is a journalist for a popular but nervy urban magazine, and her upbringing in the society of the rich and indolent leaves her little ready for what dawns on her apropos the political situation in her land. What’s worse, she’s engaged to a straight-arrow military man; but when she’s paired on assignment with a leftist journalist, Francisco Leal, in investigating the disappearance and murder of a teenaged girl, the light is seen – and fiancé and old habits of thinking are whisked away. She and Francisco fall in love (“…he had lived until then only for this miraculous night when he would plunge forever into the depths of intimacy with this woman, Irene, honey and shadow, Irene, peach, sea foam, the seashell of your ears, the perfume of your throat, the doves of your hands…” – the nausea of this prose), and seem together to provide the fulcrum by which the whole rotted social fabric is tipped over and destroyed.
Completely unbelievable, lacking any artfulness.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 0553383833
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1987
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