A hit-and-miss erotic fantasy with sharp writing but underemployed characters.
Psychic lovers wrangle with each other—in and out of bed—in this paranormal period romance.
Piper Scott and Jules Alexander seem like perfectly matched English aristocrats with scruffy Victorian backstories. He’s the eighth Viscount Beauchamp, she’s the granddaughter of an earl; he fled his abusive father to live as a London street urchin, and she spent her youth accompanying her wastrel dad to gambling dens. However, Jules is also head of the League, a secret organization that shelters misfits with psychic powers at his country estate, and he has visionary trances that debilitate him; she perceives people’s auras and can heal mystic maladies with a touch. They’re also both so gorgeous that they spend half the book tremulously ogling each other. However, vague contrivances stymie their passion. Jules rebuffs Piper because he thinks his psychic gift might overwhelm her if they get close; meanwhile, she’s pursued by an unbalanced Frenchwoman with ESP who’ll use violence to access Piper’s healing touch. This first installment of Sumner’s League of Lords series is weakened by the fact that the lady isn’t trouble enough: Piper has a background in gambling but never gambles, and she enters the novel posing as a fake clairvoyant but never cons anyone; throughout, she’s mainly just a woman in love who helps people. She’s surrounded by potentially interesting supporting characters whose entertainment value is similarly wasted, such as her maid Minnie, a sex worker’s daughter who can throw knives with her mind but never uses her telekinetic powers in the narrative. The action set pieces are mainly in the bedroom, where Piper and Jules get up to intense, if slow-paced, antics: “He swallowed her moan as he captured her lips, his lids sweeping low the last thing she saw before she crested, her body bowing off the bed and into him.” Still, Sumner has a knack for snappy dialogue and Austen-esque drollery: “A week passed before Piper concluded that her rejection of Julian’s pitiable but heartfelt proposal might have been an unintentionally deceptive feminine ploy.”
A hit-and-miss erotic fantasy with sharp writing but underemployed characters.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-65920-208-3
Page Count: 420
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A book that will wolfishly appeal to the most heated fans of omegaverse erotica.
Tess Covington is a talented, successful contractor who just learned that she’s a late-in-life omega wolf shifter. Her new boss, surly innkeeper Hunter Barrett, is an alpha who’s opposed to the remodeling she’s there to do.
Tess hasn’t made it public that she’s being considered for her own HGTV makeover show, but she runs her career like a well-oiled machine. She posts a lot of her remodels on social media, granting her a certain level of celebrity, and leans on her brothers to help run the business she took over after a stroke made it impossible for her father to keep working. Hunter’s last serious relationship with an omega 10 years ago left him deeply wounded, ending when his parents were killed in a car accident and he moved back home to take care of their lodge—hence his resistance to change. With few exceptions, Tess keeps her newly diagnosed omega status to herself. Unfortunately, as an alpha, Hunter sniffs her out and seems to be the only person capable of helping her with her sudden heats, so there’s a lot of very smutty caretaking. The specificity of omegaverse hierarchy might be new to some readers, but Ferguson’s worldbuilding is quick, easy, and deeply horny. General romance readers might enjoy the grumpy-meets-sunshine and stranded-in-a-snowstorm tropes, although for a book about shifters, the characters spend surprisingly little time in wolf form. There’s not much danger of character development or surprising plot elements here, but for fans excited to read about animalistic mating, that might be enough.
A book that will wolfishly appeal to the most heated fans of omegaverse erotica.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780593953693
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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