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HERO

An absorbing and alluring love story.

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In Sykes’ (Stealing Beauty, 2019, etc.) erotic romance, a writer becomes entangled with an FBI agent and his BDSM lifestyle.

Journalist Chloe Martin leaves her four-year marriage after her controlling husband, Neil Hollins, rapes her. Three years later, she’s in New York City, shadowing FBI agent Sharon Silverman for a story on the Latin Kings gang. However, when her friend Carina, an investigative journalist, invites her to local BDSM club Decadence, she accepts. Although she doesn’t regularly partake in that lifestyle, she knows enough about it to maintain a second career as an author of BDSM romances. Apparently, many New York City–based feds are into BDSM, and one, Agent Dexter Scott, shows Chloe around the club. The two play out a scene—for “research”—in which she submits to Dex, who’s a dom. Dex’s boss later assigns him to escort Chloe as she pursues her Latin Kings story. The fed and the writer initially butt heads because the assertive Chloe isn’t at all submissive outside the club. But they’re eventually drawn to each other, and Dex brings Chloe into BDSM with his “subtle dominance.” Chloe’s been celibate ever since Neil’s assault, and she doesn’t desire the intimacy of sex aside from oral pleasure. Dex will have to earn her trust if they hope to sustain their relationship. This book is part of a series, and many of its characters have appeared in Sykes’ earlier tales. However, the author’s concise descriptions of her characters and their backstories make it work well as a briskly paced stand-alone. Sykes alternates sensual, edifying BDSM scenes with others of Dex and Chloe connecting in other ways, such as binge-watching episodes of the TV show Supernatural. The two face numerous hurdles, such as the arrival of Neil, who tracks down his ex-wife, and Dex’s struggle to get over a previous dom-sub relationship. As a result, Chloe’s journalistic endeavors only occasionally crop up in the story, often leading to scenes of brawny Dex protecting her from gangsters. But the main romance plot is thoroughly engaging, and Sykes respectfully and enticingly highlights a lifestyle with which some readers may not be familiar.

An absorbing and alluring love story.

Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-72755-754-1

Page Count: 280

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019

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SUMMER ISLAND

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

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LAST ORDERS

Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.

Pub Date: April 5, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-41224-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996

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