An alluring love story driven by danger but hampered by bumpy prose.
In the final installment of Mann’s Living Heavy, Traveling Light series, tech professionals start a new project on a remote island, only to discover that their past has followed them ashore.
Having left their corporate-espionage lives behind, Lewis Delfour and Suzanna Oxenburg set out to revive the Indonesian eco-destination Cantik Ni (translated as “This is beautiful” in Malaysian) on Séparée Island, where the two widowed women who inherited the resort franchise want nothing to do with it anymore. It seems like a new, safer chapter for the pair of jet-setters, but the island possesses its own unique undercurrent of isolation and threat. Lewis seems to find comfort in this new challenge, but cracks start forming: Rough Russian mobsters enter the scene, and their brutality quickly escalates, including the strangling of a pit boss’ wife, among other crimes (there are references to “Russian torture”), as they interfere with Lewis and Suzanna’s development of the resort. Mann compellingly frames lovers Lewis and Suzanna as complementary twin flames; Lewis embodies independence, calculation, and survival instincts, while Suzanna’s compassion and patience temper and complicate their dynamic. While the external threat effectively rises through action, the writing undercuts its impact with exposition-heavy passages, weak descriptors, and peculiar sentence structures: “She smiled at Lewis and said, with misgivings because it was too personal and felt like gloating, that she would feel the same way if Lewis were not the best of husbands, resolutely pushing away memories of her ex, Richard, who had often returned from travel in a bad mood and finding fault.” The surfeit of adverbs (steadily, silently) and awkward syntax (“stood with relief”) both become frustrating. Though the novel engagingly sets up international power plays and introduces high stakes, the structural issues hinder the thriller’s tension.
An alluring love story driven by danger but hampered by bumpy prose.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9798990792166
Page Count: 457
Publisher: Principle Books
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.
Best friends confront feelings for each other when they take a honeymoon trip together.
Francesca Gardiner and George Saint James have always been best friends—just like Jo and Laurie from Little Women, which they both love. Frankie has a big, complicated family and George was the boy next door who’d moved in with his eccentric grandmother. Their friendship survived childhood, awkward teenage years, and living together as young adults without ever venturing into the romantic—well, except for one kiss, but they don’t talk about that. When Frankie gets engaged to an older professor named Nate, George isn’t happy and a huge fight ensues. Despite his misgivings, George shows up to be her best man, but Nate leaves Frankie right before the wedding with only a cryptic letter. Devastated, Frankie goes to a friend’s house to recuperate, but her honeymoon is already planned and paid for—so she decides to travel to Tofino, a picturesque town on the coast of Vancouver Island, with George taking Nate’s place. Frankie wants to fix her friendship with George, but now that they’re in a romantic suite in a beautiful location, things are more complicated than ever. She’d always thought a relationship would be a bad idea, but she’s slowly beginning to realize they’ll never be able to go back to being kids. Maybe the only way forward involves forging a new kind of relationship. Fortune, the author of romances like This Summer Will Be Different (2024), returns with another love story full of longing and intense angst. The many allusions to Little Women are charming, and Frankie is a delightfully headstrong, feisty character. She and George have explosive chemistry, and Fortune manages to make the “will-they-or-won’t-they” nature of their relationship feel like life-or-death stakes.
A powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780593953242
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fun, positively frothy friends-to-lovers romance.
While on her sister’s wedding cruise, a woman enlists her childhood best friend for help as she attempts to woo her longtime crush.
JoJo Burton is bad at love. After she leaves her terrible fiancé, Pearce Richmond, at the altar, she’s convinced she might never settle down. But during her sister’s wedding, which is being held on an eight-day cruise to the Bahamas and Cozumel, she and her family concoct a plan that will help her seduce her recently divorced childhood crush, Finn Turner. The two of them once shared a blindfolded kiss that might have ruined JoJo for all other men, and she’s never forgotten it. But then JoJo’s best friend, Cooper Watts, shows up. Cooper and JoJo were inseparable as children but didn’t talk for years after she got engaged to Pearce. She doesn’t know why he suddenly disappeared on her, but it doesn’t matter—he’s here now, and she needs him to help her get Finn to reenact that long-ago kiss. But after she and Cooper share a cabin, get thrown together for every wedding week activity, and even engage in the classic friendly flirting meant to make another man jealous, JoJo starts to realize that Finn might not be the man she’s been waiting for, after all. Center keeps things light, focusing on humor even when the subject matter veers into family drama. JoJo and Cooper find themselves caught up in the sort of tropes that are catnip for romance fans—he takes care of her when she has a sunburn, for instance, and they participate in a slow-dance contest. As Center reveals in an author’s note at the beginning, “Spoiler: This book will end well.” The destination may not be a surprise, but the journey is a delight.
A fun, positively frothy friends-to-lovers romance.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781250408051
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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