A sexy and satisfying read from beginning to end.
A spirited Chicagoan enlists a tech superstar to protect her from scandal in this romance.
Tess Greene has everything: a successful career in “disaster recovery” at a tech firm; close friendships with her younger sister, Kat, and vivacious older neighbor Roz; and a fulfilling sex life of brief flings with handsome men. But soon life gets complicated: Kat announces she’s moving to San Francisco in a matter of weeks. Tess’ beloved boss, Paul, is retiring, and she is in line for a promotion, but only if she can land an especially challenging prospective client for the firm. Worst of all, an anonymous man with a website full of amateur sex tapes is teasing out his next big release—which happens to feature Tess. Unashamed of the video she consensually made but unsure of her one-night stand’s identity and aware of the major humiliation she could endure, Tess finds Max, a friend of her quirky employee Abigail and a qualified hacker—and extremely attractive. He’ll help her make sure the video never sees the light of day on one condition: She help him land the open senior programmer position at her firm. As Tess and Max grow closer, she must face her past—a traumatic adolescence with a struggling single parent and her former engagement, mysteriously broken the morning of her wedding—and decide whether Max can be a part of her (hopefully sex tape–free) future. Dayton crafts a terrific hero: Tess is both independent and vulnerable, unapologetically work-driven and sex-positive, with a lot of love to give. Max has a rich backstory of his own, involving an ex-fiancee–turned–platonic pal, a Robin Hood–esque deed that wreaked havoc on his professional reputation, and a desire to connect with Tess that results in sweet romantic gestures and genuine devotion as she gradually lets her guard down. Each member of the protagonist’s personal network of supportive women—not only Abigail and Kat, but also Tess’ mother and the hero’s favorite local bartender—is memorable in her own right.
A sexy and satisfying read from beginning to end.Pub Date: May 20, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Tule Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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