Tilly is great at writing suspense and creating strong heroines, but her book deserved a better ending.
Mary, the mysterious character from Hidden Cove (2019), the third volume of Tilly's Solace Island series, unmasks herself as Sarah Rainsford, a wealthy heiress running away from her violent, abusive husband.
Sarah and her cat, Charlie, are on the run and stuck in Los Angeles with no money. Sarah's parents were killed in a car crash. In their will, they left her hundreds of millions of dollars sewed up in a trust her brutal husband, Kevin, cannot touch. In a black rage, he beats pregnant Sarah until she begins to hemorrhage and loses her baby. Because of a fairly unbelievable complication, Sarah can't get a divorce because she has no personal papers to prove her identity. Her old family lawyer, the increasingly pernicious Phillip, has never sent her the documents she needs. Four years later, Kevin is viciously pursuing her, hoping to take Sarah alive and submissive. Sarah's a survivor. Using a fake ID, dyeing her hair, and calling herself Rachel Jones, she's hired as a live-in personal assistant to Mick Talford, a famous young Hollywood director and notorious hell-raiser living in an exclusive LA canyon mansion. Tilly, a Golden Globe–winning actress, has firmly established herself as a romance writer, and though she's been away from the Hollywood scene for a long time, she clearly knows the territory. Mick might be living the dream, but he grew up with his grandmother, a madam who ran a brothel in the Nevada desert. And he knows that Sarah, who is clearly a class act from the East Coast, is in trouble. He also starts to enjoy having someone around. But one day, while Sarah is out getting the fixings for apple pie, she sees police officers checking out her license plate, and she knows that Kevin, also a cop, has found her. Mick gains Sarah's trust, and the pair set off to repair her life as Kevin the villain, who has now drowned a friend of Mick's, pursues them. Tilly has a skillful way of interweaving a suspenseful thriller with the growing love that Sarah and Mick have for each other. But even with a plot twist at the end, the happily-ever-after is trite and contrived.
Tilly is great at writing suspense and creating strong heroines, but her book deserved a better ending.Pub Date: July 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-20108-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
A smart, steamy romance.
Tomforde’s sports romance pairs boardroom power plays with dugout drama.
As the youngest and only female owner of a Major League Baseball team, Reese Remington is used to pressure. Even though Reese is the granddaughter of the Windy City Warriors’ former owner, the men around her still question her position; she’ll “most likely have to work twice as hard and make [the] club’s success twice as noticeable to have any hope of being viewed as the right person to operate this team.” It doesn’t help that the franchise is bleeding money, the result of her grandfather’s hands-off approach in the years before his retirement. Reese must use her razor-sharp intelligence and fierce business sense to not only prove herself in a role in which the public is eager to see her fail, but also to make unpopular financial decisions to get the team out of the red. Enter Emmett Montgomery, a former All-Star turned field manager whose priorities lie firmly with people rather than profit. A man devoted to his team and his adopted child, Emmett has long since closed the door on romance, despite gentle nudging from his loved ones. His empathetic team-first mentality puts him immediately at odds with Reese’s pragmatic agenda, and with his contract up at the end of the year, Emmett worries he’ll be on the chopping block if he speaks out too much. Told from the perspectives of the leads, the novel gives equal page time to Reese and Emmett. Their concerns––the scrutiny Reese must endure as a woman in a male-dominated industry, and Emmett’s worries over his contract renewal––are tangible and add a sense of urgency to their every decision. While the novel includes some unavoidable exposition dumps to orient readers, it more than compensates by establishing clear stakes and a sense of momentum from the outset. The narrative successfully introduces credible barriers to the romance, which largely follows recognizable genre beats. The baseball setting is also used effectively, with the season-long arc mirroring the couple’s romantic and professional journeys.
A smart, steamy romance.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781649379795
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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