Another satisfying installment of a romance series with a lot of heart and plenty of heat.
An intelligent and shrewd lawyer sets his sights on a sexy and successful businesswoman.
In this fourth installment of a series, Carter Sloane has reached a major milestone in his impressive career, moving his firm, Sloane & Partners, to a prominent new office building. He enjoys the trappings of his success, including a black Porsche and positive press coverage in Forbes magazine, but his heart belongs to his nieces, April and Peyton. Their guardian since the tragic deaths of their parents in an avalanche, Carter is committed to giving them a stable home life. He is not looking for love until he meets Valentina Connor at a popular coffee shop. She runs Valentina’s Laboratories, a cosmetics and fragrances company across the street from Carter’s office. Although Valentina is wary of falling for the wrong man, she is intrigued by the sexy and self-confident Carter. What begins as a playful flirtation soon turns into a passionate romance. Carter falls in love with Valentina, especially after she bonds with his nieces, but when her company is sued by a competitor, the couple wonder if their relationship can withstand the pressures of an instant family and two high-profile careers. The latest entry in Hagen’s (Meant for You, 2018, etc.) Connor Family contemporary romance series delivers a sweet and charming love story bolstered by winsome characters, fast-paced storytelling, and a healthy dose of sexual chemistry between the protagonists. Valentina and Carter are appealing lead characters whose relationship is built on a strong mutual attraction and similar family backgrounds. They narrate the story through chapters that alternate between their first-person perspectives. This technique allows the author to explore their joy over their strong connection and their need to offer Carter’s nieces a stable home. Although Valentina and Carter’s steamy romance drives the story, their love of family lies at the heart of the narrative, from his devotion to his nieces to her weekly dinners with her large extended clan. Like the other volumes in the series, this book can be enjoyed on its own, although family members from the previous novels are part of the supporting cast of characters.
Another satisfying installment of a romance series with a lot of heart and plenty of heat.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79501-533-2
Page Count: 311
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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