Sex and Christian warmth to ring up cash-register rhapsodies.
Regency fluff that might be retitled The Seduction, since at heart its greatest allure is sex, not the Christmas season.
The publisher is puffing Lindsey’s 37th romance, many of its predecessors (54 million copies in print around the world) having rung the New York Times’s #1 bestseller bell, as a sentimental Yuletide heartwarmer. Few of the author’s most ardent fans, though, will see it as other than a piece of pale eroticism with an ending more forced than miraculous. Vincent Everett, Baron Everett of Windsmoor, a canny trader, feels that his brother Albert has been driven into exile, if not to death, by shipping trader George Ascot, who’s gone to the colonies to find new markets. Widower Ascot leaves behind his virgin daughter Larissa and ten-year-old son Thomas to care for their large London house. But Ascot has been gone too long, and panicked creditors demand and take all the funds Larissa has for caring for the house. Lord Everett, meanwhile, bent on avenging his brother, buys up the Ascot property from the realtor who holds the family’s mortgage and instantly forecloses. At his first sight of Larissa, however, he seeks an even stronger vengeance on Ascot by seducing his ecstatically beautiful daughter. So the ravishingly handsome and muscular Everett, 29, clearly a rake who has had numberless bed partners, offers the penniless Larissa and Thomas lodgings at his own fancy digs—her bedroom, in fact, now adjoins his. Not only does Everett want to deflower Larissa in his late brother’s memory, but he finds her seduction much to his own vile taste. When news comes that Larissa’s father is dead, Lord Everett makes his move, and the grieving but bewitched Larissa is soon, well, “feeling him buried deep within her.” With no intent to marry, mind you. And if, miraculously, this rake should marry her, promising fidelity eternal, what reader will believe him?
Sex and Christian warmth to ring up cash-register rhapsodies.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-380-97856-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-written women’s weepie from the author of many, now with her first hardcover.
Blindness, babies, bathos.
When photojournalist Jessie Ryder finds that she’s losing her sight to a rare retinal disease, it’s time to take stock—and, at last, meet the child she gave away years before. She rails against her cruel fate as she leaves New Zealand for the Texas town where she grew up. After all, she’d stayed away, kept her distance—and kept her side of the bargain she made with God. She’d provided the best possible home for her newborn by handing her over to her sister Luz and her husband Ian. Even now that she’s a teenager, Lila has no idea that she was adopted (and there’s another thing even Luz doesn’t know). Lila escapes serious injury during a joyriding car accident that shakes the family out of its complacency and forces them to grapple with the Big Questions. Why does Ian, a Death Row lawyer, always have time for his clients but not for his family? Must Luz always shoulder most of the burden of raising the kids and running the house? Luz pines for what she perceives as her sister’s freedom, but Jessie, of course, isn’t really free. She’s always been haunted by what she never told Luz: Lila is the product of a long-ago, whirlwind affair with Ian. Her vision dimming day by day, Jessie wonders whether she’ll ever find happiness. There’s hunky rancher Dusty Matlock, father of an adorable toddler, still fending off media attention ever since his pregnant wife, comatose after a stroke, gave birth by Cesarean and expired a couple of years ago. Should Jessie give in to Blair LaBorde, tabloid reporter, and photograph Dusty? Perhaps. But will Jessie even admit that she’s losing her sight? Yes, once she shares her story yet again at the world-famous center for the blind not far away.
Well-written women’s weepie from the author of many, now with her first hardcover.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55166-673-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Limited drama, minor angst, and mediocre writing.
There are too many packs of werewolves in the same Colorado mountains.
The Silver pack, well-manned and well-resourced, runs Silver Town and its surrounding territory. Eric Silver, park ranger and cousin to the pack leader, is on the hunt for a second pack, which may have been growing huge tracts of marijuana on the grounds of the local national park. But instead, he encounters a small, more agreeable pack led by the most beautiful she-wolf he's ever seen. Pepper Grayling is a perfectly capable alpha who's not interested in a mate, but she has to call on Eric and his family when a new danger threatens both of them. While Spear (SEAL Wolf in Too Deep, 2016, etc.) has written 18 prior books in the series, the worldbuilding is thorough enough that a reader can follow the pack structure and nature of the lupus garous without prior knowledge of the universe. There are certainly things a new reader can only guess at, but most of it is irrelevant to the story. A questionable number of alphas in various packs notwithstanding, the story is...readable. It's certainly a page-turner, but the entire story arc is little more than lukewarm. This is unfortunate considering the promise and importance of introducing an alpha female who is also a good pack leader. How many female alphas are there in paranormal romance? But the execution, from meeting to mating, as well as conflict and denouement, is just OK.
Limited drama, minor angst, and mediocre writing.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4926-2186-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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