An engaging mix of bucolic mystery and the enigmas of the writing life.
A middle-aged woman trying to heal from a divorce retreats to an isolated cabin in this novel.
In Smith’s tale, 50-year-old Maggie Raines arrives at an old cabin off Patterson Road the day after Christmas, fresh from a divorce. Tom, her husband of 30 years, had revealed to her that he impregnated his receptionist, 26-year-old Bethany, and intended to help raise the child. This left Maggie reeling, “wondering if the next chapter of her life was to be an epic tragedy…a horror story…or maybe a suspense.” Packing her things from the house she and Tom shared all those years, she decided to become a writer and impulsively rented an old cabin in the woods of Marston County, 70 miles from Nashville, leaving her old life and her grown twins, Robbie and Cal, for a little isolation. Now, settling in that solitude, Maggie meets Zeke Thompson, a mysterious stranger who “looked like a fair-haired version of one of her teen idols.” He shows up at her door the same day a prisoner escapes from a nearby penitentiary. He quickly comes to seem unreal somehow—Maggie begins to wonder if she’s just imagining him. She confides all this to Marston County’s hardworking sheriff, Canon Dale, who listens sympathetically but privately notices that there are no extra tracks outside Maggie’s cabin, no evidence that anybody else has been there. Smith deftly presents Dale’s story parallel to Maggie’s in order to set up narrative momentum. He’s a workaholic who hasn’t taken a day off in 30 years, but he’s quickly attracted to Maggie—and almost immediately drawn into the mysteries that begin to deepen around her stay in the cabin. The author cannily crafts all of this in knowing and occasionally overlush prose, and she handles the unfolding mystery of Zeke with a great deal of skill. The romance between Dale and Maggie feels heavy-handed, but the rest of the intriguing tale works smoothly.
An engaging mix of bucolic mystery and the enigmas of the writing life.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-57-892723-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Haphazard and undemanding.
A sports agent’s first official client is the man she dumped years ago in college.
After two years of hard work as an underling, Nora Mackenzie is finally being promoted to full-time sports agent. She’s worked hard, kept quiet, and allowed men in the office to call her Mac—a nickname she hates—all to show she’s a team player and “one of the guys.” Unfortunately, her boss instructs her to sign Derek Pender, a football player coming off an injury, who happens to be the man she heartlessly dumped in their senior year of college. Derek signs with her for revenge, seeing it as his opportunity to pay Nora back for callously breaking his heart eight years earlier. He insists she be at his beck and call: answering his emails, running his errands, cooking dinner for his dates. He also refuses to let her explain why she broke up with him without warning or explanation. Nora feels she has no choice but to acquiesce to Derek’s humiliating demands, since she’s worked too hard to let him ruin her dream job. She hopes he’ll thaw and they might become friends, but Derek’s bad behavior is designed to hide the fact that he’s still in love with her. Nora’s characterization is uneven, veering between anger at how she’s treated in the male-dominated field to immature bickering and bantering with Derek. Although Adams likely meant for Derek and Nora’s interactions to have an enemies-to-lovers vibe, the characters instead seem juvenile and stuck in the past. The novel is fueled by a string of tropes—second chance romance! married in Vegas! only one bed!—each randomly deployed to keep the book going despite thin characterization and wan plotting.
Haphazard and undemanding.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593723678
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dell
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Sink your teeth into this delightful paranormal romance with a modern twist.
A vampire and an Alpha werewolf enter into a marriage of convenience in order to ease tensions between their species.
As the only daughter of a prominent Vampyre councilman, Misery Lark has grown accustomed to playing the role that’s demanded of her—and now, her father is ordering her to be part of yet another truce agreement. In an effort to maintain goodwill between the Vampyres and their longtime nemeses the Weres, Misery must wed their Alpha, Lowe Moreland. But it turns out that Misery has her own motivations for agreeing to this political marriage, including finding answers about what happened to her best friend, who went missing after setting up a meeting in Were territory. Isolated from her kind and surrounded on all sides by the enemy after the wedding, Misery refuses to let herself forget about her real mission. It doesn’t matter that Lowe is one of the most confounding and intense people she’s ever met, or that the connection building between them doesn’t feel like one born entirely of convenience. There’s also the possibility that Lowe may already have a Were mate of his own, but in spite of their biological differences, they may turn out to be the missing piece in each other’s lives. While this is Hazelwood’s first paranormal romance, and the book does lean on some hallmark tropes of the genre, the contemporary setting lends itself to the author’s trademark humor and makes the political plot more easily digestible. Misery and Lowe’s slow-burn romance is appealing enough that readers will readily devour every moment between them and hunger to return to them whenever the story diverts from their scenes together.
Sink your teeth into this delightful paranormal romance with a modern twist.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780593550403
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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