Genre: contemporary romance

#BookReview: The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah by Jean Meltzer

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah by Jean MeltzerThe Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah by Jean Meltzer
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, Hanukkah romance, holiday romance, second chance romance
Pages: 368
Published by Mira on October 21, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Can these exes rekindle their love this Hanukkah?
Evelyn Schwartz has the perfect Hanukkah planned: eight jam-packed days producing the live-action televised musical of A Christmas Carol. Who needs family when you’ve got long hours, impossible deadlines, and your dream job? That is, until an accident on set lands her in the medical bay with one of her chronic migraines, and she’s shocked to find her ex-husband, David Adler, filling in for the usual studio doctor.
It’s been two years since David walked away from Evelyn and their life in Manhattan, and his ex-wife is still the same workaholic who puts her career before everything else—especially her health. But when Evelyn begins hallucinating “ghosts” tied to her past heartbreaks, and every single one leads to David, he finds himself spending much more time with her than he anticipated. And denying the still-smoldering chemistry between them becomes impossible.
As Evelyn revisits her ghosts of Hanukkah past, she and David both begin to wonder if they can have a Hanukkah future. But with a high-stakes production ramping up the pressure on Evelyn, and troublesome spirits forcing them both to confront their most difficult shared memories, it might just take a Hanukkah miracle for these two exes to light the flame on their second-chance at love.

My Review:

Everyone knows the story of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – if not from the book itself then from one – or more likely more – of the many, many TV and movie adaptations. My two favorites are still Mr. Magoo’s cartoon from the 1960s and the Muppets’ version from the 1990s.

The idea of the story is eternal, that anyone can atone, that anyone can be redeemed, that anyone can learn to celebrate the true meaning of Christmas with a big enough ‘wake-up’ call. Even if it’s not really a real wake-up call as it is in the recent A Christmas Witness. Which maybe worked even better because it wasn’t exactly real.

After all, even in Dickens’ original version, it did all turn out to be a dream. Just a very powerful one.

This is the first Hanukkah version of Dickens’ classic that I’ve ever read. (If this idea has been done before, please, please, PLEASE let me know in the comments! The original Dickens’ story is one of my favorites, but Hanukkah is my holiday so more versions of this combo are VERY tempting!)

The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah takes that old, familiar, much beloved Christmas classic and gives it both a Jewish twist and a whole lot more time to work its holiday magic. The spirits needed to work their magic on Scrooge in a single night, where the Heartbreaks of Hanukkah have eight whole nights to weave their spell.

And they’ll need every night of it, because Evelyn Schwartz is a really tough nut to crack and she has a lot of heartbreak to work her way through this Hanukkah. Which is, at its heart or hers (pun fully intended) a huge part of why Evelyn’s heartbreaks loom so large over the holidays. Because she’s managed her whole life NOT working her way through her trauma and grief.

She shoves it all down, each and every time, and buries herself in work instead of letting herself be buried in her grief. But this Hanukkah it’s time for her to pay the price of all that avoidance.

If she won’t let herself feel her feelings and grieve for her own losses, this Hanukkah, for eight long nights and eight painfully debilitating migraines, they’re coming for her. One night, one loss, one grief, one heartbreak at a time.

Escape Rating B: This is going to be one of those mixed feelings reviews – and I have LOTS of them when it comes to this book.

First, the concept behind this story is fantastic. A Christmas Carol, with its magical story of redemption, is a beloved classic for a reason. And the idea of putting a Jewish twist on it is so much genius I’m astonished that I haven’t found one before.

Howsomever, the same thing that makes the insta-love in holiday romances work so much better in a Hanukkah romance than a Christmas romance because it has more time to work with had the opposite effect here. Each of Evelyn’s individual heartbreaks was a LOT. Eight of them felt like too many. Not because they weren’t each heartbreaking, but because they were all, sorta/kinda, the SAME heartbreak.

Evelyn’s heartbreaks were ALL Bruno. Not a person, but the song from Encanto. As in “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” Evelyn Schwartz doesn’t talk about her problems, or her hurts or her worries or her griefs. She pushes them down and away so that she can bury herself in her work and push them away even more.

That Evelyn is a television producer makes her self-appointed task VERY easy. There’s always another crisis, there’s always another last minute change, and there’s always another male studio executive looking for her to fail and prove him right that TV producing is a man’s job and women just can’t cut it.

So Evelyn’s eight heartbreaks, while they have different causes, all boil down to the same thing in the end. That Evelyn buries her feelings in work every single time. To the point that when she and her then-husband had to bury their baby girl, they couldn’t grieve together because Evelyn couldn’t let herself feel her own feelings and left him alone with his.

Evelyn’s eight heartbreaks visit her, night after night, because her long-buried feelings and her lifelong ambitions have had a head on collision. Literally as the situation has sent her migraines into overdrive.

She’s the Executive Producer of a planned production of A Christmas Carol scheduled to be performed and broadcast LIVE on Christmas Eve. If the program is successful in EVERY SINGLE WAY, it’s the making of her career and the fulfillment of all her professional dreams. But if it isn’t absolutely perfect, it will mark the end of those same dreams.

Just as Evelyn is gearing up and grinding towards the final rehearsals, as her expensive, mercurial, high-maintenance star is about to arrive on set – a different issue arises in the person of her ex-husband David, as the studio’s stand-in medical doctor while the regular MD is on vacation.

Their chemistry is still incendiary – like kerosene and matches. But there’s still plenty smoldering under that white-hot surface. They’ve never gotten over each other, but they’ve also never gotten past the grief over their shared loss. And they need to – whether to make a new something together or make new lives separately – because neither of them has moved on an inch in any of the ways that matter.

In the end, just as the story is Evelyn’s redemption, or at least her path towards letting people in, letting herself feel her own feelings, a somewhat healthier work-life balance AND her acceptance that therapy might help her with all of the above, the story does redeem itself. I absolutely loved its multiple twists on the message of A Christmas Carol and the way it made me rethink the whole story at the end. But it is STILL a lot. A lot of heartbreak, a lot of grief and a lot of arguments leading to a hard-fought-for happy ending.

But this is absolutely not your typical holiday romance. It’s certainly not a romcom. If that’s what you’re looking for, or if it’s not what you’re looking for right now, it may not be the right book or the right time. Because it takes a lot of heartbreak to bring about this particular holiday miracle. A situation which will put some readers in the holiday spirit while perhaps making others reach for the holiday spirits. Your reading – and possibly drinking – mileage may vary.

A- #AudioBookReview: All Wrapped Up in You by Rosie Danan

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: All Wrapped Up in You by Rosie DananAll Wrapped Up in You (Home Sweet Holidays) by Rosie Danan
Narrator: Robert Hatchet, Andi Eloise
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, holiday romance, romantic comedy
Series: Home Sweet Holidays #3
Pages: 76
Length: 1 hour and 19 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 20, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

Holiday magic helps two oblivious neighbors discover just how close they are in bestselling author Rosie Danan’s cheerful short story about big comedy, small tragedies, and the gifts found in between.
When stand-up comedian Piper has a panic attack outside the club, it’s not funny. But Scott, a handsome ER doctor from the crowd, gives her something to smile about as he calms her down. Turns out they’re neighbors—they just don’t know it yet. When Christmas Eve presents an opportunity for them to get even closer, Scott and Piper realize they share much more than just a wall.
Rosie Danan’s All Wrapped Up in You is part of Home Sweet Holidays, a cookie-sweet collection of holiday romances sure to bring color to your cheeks. Read or listen to each story in a single heart-fluttering sitting. And to fully immerse yourself in the charm of the season, don’t miss a special message from each of our holiday heroes!

My Review:

The thing about these holiday shorts series(es), both this year’s Home Sweet Holidays and last year’s Under the Mistletoe, is that the stories are supposed to be short in length – and they are – so they often take place over a rather short time period to make things work. But speaking of making things work, while ‘love at first sight’ is a fun idea, in real life and a romance where the happy ever after needs to feel earned, somehow a bit of time needs to be shoehorned into that short time period.

Hanukkah romances, like this year’s Merry and Bright, use the eight nights of Hanukkah to their – and the reader’s – advantage. Hanukkah lasts, well, eight nights – and generally parts of the days between those nights. That may or may not be enough time to build a lifetime on, but it can be enough to set the starring couple firmly on that path.

After all, if your new love can fit in and or tolerate – or a bit of both – your family, however wacky or over-the-top or dysfunctional they might be, that’s a good start for a relationship. Also, EIGHT WHOLE NIGHTS.

Howsomever, this story in this year’s Home Sweet Holidays collection isn’t a Hanukkah story – so it needs a different method of making a short time feel longer than it is. A problem which the author solves, and delightfully so, by using a scenario similar to the setup of last year’s Only Santas in the Building.

Stand-up comedian Piper Sadler lives in a Chicago walk-up apartment building. There are only two apartments on each floor, they share a hallway and a window and Piper lives in 3B while her neighbor and secret crush lives in 3A. They’ve never met but they do exchange text messages on a regular basis to complain about the neighbor with the leaf-blower across the street at stupid o’clock in the morning, and to share in the care of 3A’s spider plant in the hallway that 3B is watering and generally keeping alive.

Even when they do meet, they don’t. Piper is outside a comedy club, going through her usual pre-performance case of jittery stage fright – outside, in Chicago, in December, freezing – when Dr. Scott Harrison opens the outside door, hears someone breathing in a pattern that is obviously an incipient panic attack, and goes out to help. Or at least be there if she needs help.

They talk. It’s the most real conversation he’s had in years, with anyone. Not because he’s antisocial or whatever, but because he’s in his third year of residency and working, sleeping, and eating are all about all he has left in him – and he often skips the latter two of those three. He keeps telling himself it will get better but himself isn’t always listening.

She goes onstage, he goes back to the audience, and they still don’t REALLY meet. They don’t meet until she turns up in his ER after a close encounter with a very large amp and a bleeding cut on her forehead.

Even then, they only sorta/kinda meet. They recognize each other from the comedy club – but still don’t know they are neighbors.

By the time they finally do meet, he’s slumped outside her apartment door, having locked himself out of his apartment in an exhausted daze. On Christmas Eve, with no locksmiths available and no friend with a spare couch – or even a spare rectangle of floor – left available that he can beg for the night.

So they haven’t met, but they already know each other. Better than they think they do. Which makes their insta-love not so instant at all. Instead, they’ve earned their holiday season meet-cute AND their hopes for a happy ever after.

Escape Rating A-: First, I loved this for it being Chicago. (I also loved that I lived in a building that sounds very much like the one in the story.) But I could feel the snow crunching underfoot and the freezing fingers of cold fingering their way through every seam of my coat and I felt nostalgic but was really happy not to be in it.

The story does a terrific job of making their brief actual acquaintance seem like a much longer, and surprisingly real, acquaintance. They don’t know each other but they do KNOW each other, and it works. (Only Santas in the Building did too if you like this trope.)

I listened to this one, and Andi Eloise (Piper) and Robert Hatchet (Scott), did a terrific job voicing their characters. The audio versions of these original stories are the perfect length for my daily drive and these stories are a perfect way to spend that drive and get a happy, sweet, pick-me-up story into the bargain.

So I’ve enjoyed this Home Sweet Holidays collection a lot. I also got a bit caught up in the original blurb description for the series (it’s changed) that described them as a “cookie-sweet collection of holiday romances.” I think they changed the blurb because they’re all sweet so far but they’re not cookies. Snow Place Like Home was the holiday fruitcake, Merry and Bright was a donut-like Hanukkah sufganiyot, while this entry in the series is a pumpkin pie. I have no idea which sweet holiday treat the final book in the collection, You Better Not Pout, is going to turn out to be, but we’ll all find out next week, because I’m planning to review that last book on Christmas Eve.

#BookReview: Christmas at the Shelter Inn by RaeAnne Thayne

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Christmas at the Shelter Inn by RaeAnne ThayneChristmas at the Shelter Inn (Shelter Springs #1) by RaeAnne Thayne
Format: ebook
Source: borrowed from library
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, holiday romance, Romance, small town romance
Series: Shelter Springs #1
Pages: 304
Published by Canary Street Press on October 3, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Come home to Shelter Springs this Christmas, where hearts are warm and hopes are bright…
Growing up at the Shelter Inn hotel, Natalie Shepherd envied guests who could come and go as they pleased. So when it was time to finally leave for college and put the lush green mountains around Shelter Springs—along with the cloud of loss that seemed to follow her family—behind her, she swore she’d never come back. But now her sister McKenna needs a favor. On pregnancy bed rest at doctor’s orders, McKenna needs a helping hand with her two young daughters and someone to take over the inn during the hectic holiday season, and Nat can’t refuse. And just when things can’t get worse, she runs into her late brother’s best friend, Griffin Taylor…
Griff has mixed feelings about Natalie’s return. She’s just as beautiful and full of life as he remembered, but there’s a secret he’s carried for years about her brother—and the guilt is eating away at him. Still, Christmas in this small town is filled with treasured traditions and new adventures that hold the promise of something sweet and lasting. From matchmaking seniors to rambunctious nieces, it seems everyone is hoping Nat and Griff will put loss behind them and find a happy new beginning…

My Review:

Last holiday season, I kicked off my participation in the #2024HoHoHoRat with The December Market by RaeAnne Thayne. It was my first readathon post EVER, but it was the SECOND book in the Shelter Springs series. So of course the first book in that series, THIS BOOK, had to appear somewhere in my readathon reads this year. It’s only fair. Or symmetrical. Or something like that.

Besides, I needed to figure out how the Shelter Springs Inn got to BE the place it is in that second book. Because the community is just marvelous. Not just the community at the Inn, but the whole town in which the story and series are set. So I’m back, even if I’m also in front, because this story takes place before The December Market, even though some of it takes place AT the December Market.

It has to because the European-style Christkindl market has become an annual tradition in Shelter Springs, and Natalie Shepherd has rushed home to be a part of it – although that’s not precisely the reason she’s back.

Natalie’s back from her carefully-crafted life as a world-wandering freelance writer, pet-minder and house-sitter because her younger sister, McKenna, needs her. McKenna is in the last weeks of a high-risk pregnancy on mandated bedrest. But keeping the new baby inside her until the last possible minute doesn’t account for Kenna already having two children, very active (and actively bickering at every opportunity) five and three year old girls, nor does it cover Kenna’s commitments as the owner/manager of the Shelter Inn senior apartment community.

She needs help. Desperately. She also needs help in feeling not quite so desperate or so useless. So she calls her big sister – and their untrustworthy dad – to come help her out. She knows Natalie will drop everything to help her. Their dad, she’s still not sure about.

Natalie, on the other hand, is a bit discombobulated at being thrust into the role of caregiver for two rambunctious little girls, but she loves her nieces. Even though she doesn’t have a clue what she’s doing, and especially because the life she’s temporarily volunteered for is the last thing she ever thought she wanted.

Of course, that’s the story. The life that teenaged Natalie imagined for herself in the wake of her mother’s death from cancer, her father’s subsequent abandonment, followed by her brother’s death from a combination of grief, substance abuse and misadventure, left the younger Nat planning to leave Shelter Springs and all its memories behind her. 30something Nat, however, is on the cusp of recognizing that she didn’t leave that pile of trauma back in Shelter Springs. She’s been dragging it around with her, and she’s keeping that world she travels through so adventurously at arm’s reach because of it.

Coming back home immerses her in all the connections she left in Shelter Springs. And even though it forces her to finally feel her own feelings, it still warms her heart and plugs her soul into the love she left behind.

Natalie finds herself immersed in her very own ‘road not taken’ – even though it’s the road that has led her back to the last place she thought she’d ever want to be – back in Shelter Springs. That coming home has also given her a chance to see if the crush she always had on her brother’s best friend Griffin Taylor – himself just back in Shelter Springs as a newly fledged physician and dealing with his own mixed memories of the place he grew up in – adds a delightful touch of second chance romance – to this delicious holiday treat of a story.

Escape Rating B: I enjoyed Christmas at the Shelter Inn quite a bit, and for many of the same reasons that I loved The December Market. The town of Shelter Springs is just so inviting, to the point where I enjoy reading about it because I’d love to live there – in spite of the cold, snowy winter. The welcome is MORE than warm enough to make up for the weather!

The characters are a delight, just quirky enough to be fun without ever going over-the-top. That the two families central to the story, the Shepherds and the Taylors, are linked by childhood friendships and deeply felt shared tragedies adds just the right note of bitter to the sweet to keep the whole thing from being too cloying.

Also, those tragedies felt real and felt like they should have real consequences – and they do. There are no misunderstandammits here, the crisis points in the relationship happen because they are exactly the sort of things that end up standing between couples in real life and I’m there for that.

(I also wouldn’t mind finding a place like the Shelter Springs Inn to live. It just seems so wonderful and I’m kinda hoping its real-world equivalents exist.)

I’ll admit that I do have a quibble, and it’s what’s keeping this story from matching the A- grade I gave The December Market. There’s a lot of this story and about the obsessive desperation of McKenna’s pregnancy and especially Natalie’s second and third thoughts about her life and where she wants it to go from this point that are wrapped around her very young nieces and her own biological clock. I didn’t need her second thoughts to be so wrapped up in the possibility of her own children for those second thoughts to power the story, but I recognize that’s very much a ‘me’ thing that might not be a ‘you’ thing. While part of the story in The December Market is wrapped around Rafe Arredondo’s son Isaac, Isaac is a bit older and that made that part of the story work better for me.

Your reading mileage may definitely vary – and I hope it does, because so far the Shelter Springs series is utterly charming and I’ll certainly be back for more with Snow-Kissed – probably for the OMG #2026HoHoHoReadathon, this time NEXT year!

A- #AudioBookReview: Merry and Bright by Ali Rosen

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: Merry and Bright by Ali RosenMerry and Bright (Home Sweet Holidays) by Ali Rosen
Narrator: Barrie Kreinik, Eric Nolan
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, Hanukkah romance, holiday romance, romantic comedy
Series: Home Sweet Holidays #2
Pages: 63
Length: 1 hour and 19 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 20, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

What starts as a Hail Mary fake romance scheme turns into the real deal in this delightful story of holiday deception from Ali Rosen, author of Alternate Endings and Recipe for Second Chances.
Miriam Brody is dreading Hanukkah with her overbearing family in Charleston. Ditto for dreamy pro football player Cal Durand and Christmas. After sharing a few flirty drinks on the flight there, the strangers conspire to tackle the holidays together, posing as a couple. But as shenanigans unfold, Miriam realizes her feelings are anything but fake. Uh-oh. Are they headed for a holiday miracle—or a holiday disaster?
Ali Rosen’s Merry and Bright is part of Home Sweet Holidays, a cookie-sweet collection of holiday romances sure to bring color to your cheeks. Read or listen to each story in a single heart-fluttering sitting. And to fully immerse yourself in the charm of the season, don’t miss a special message from each of our holiday heroes!

My Review:

Merry and Bright was every bit as delightful as last week’s Snow Place Like Home, and not just because of the cute title.

I am seeing that one of the treats of this year’s collection is the way that the stories extend the time the featured couple knows each other in order to make the instant romance seem not quite so instant. So far, it’s working for me.

But of course, with Merry and Bright, that’s at least in part because this is a Hanukkah story every bit as much – if not a bit more – than it is a Christmas story. This particular fake romance has eight nights to perform a Hanukkah miracle before it’s all set up to be fulfilled on Christmas.

It also helps that even though Miriam Brody and Cal Durand don’t know each other, they sorta/kinda do. They certainly know all the same people, and even the same neighborhood. They seem to have grown up within walking distance of each other in Charleston even though they must be just far apart enough in age to have not been in the same cohort growing up.

But that childhood proximity leads to some much more interesting adult proximity in the first class section of an airplane on its way to Charleston from New York City. It’s just over a week before Christmas, Hanukkah is about to begin, and neither Miriam nor Cal are looking forward to their family holidays.

Miriam was a VERY unexpected late-in-life child, and her parents, sisters, and in-laws all interrupt her, talk over her, ignore her, and generally treat her as though she’s still TWELVE when she’s nearly 30 and the owner of a VERY successful business. That she is almost the only introvert in a family of extroverts makes being home for the holidays less than fun no matter how much she loves her family. Which she does.

Cal isn’t looking forward to going home to his parents for his holidays because he’s been avoiding it and them for four years for reasons that he just doesn’t want to get into with ANYONE.

They both need buffers from their well-meaning but clueless families, even if those families are clueless for entirely different reasons. They’re both single, and they’ve had a grand time on the plane keeping their various hurts and tender places at bay.

So why not keep going? Why not be each other’s buffer with each other’s family? It’s only to get through the holidays, and then they can go their separate ways back in New York. They can help each other out. It’ll be fun!

Unless all that fake dating turns into real feelings. Dealing with THAT won’t be any fun at all. Unless they can somehow, in spite of their respective holiday baggage, work their way toward an even happier New Year.

Escape Rating A-: Just as in Snow Place Like Home, I got into this because I really, really felt for Miriam and her family dilemma. They do love her, and she does love them. But she’s been the only introvert in a family of extroverts all her life, and it’s only recently that one of her young nephews has joined her in the introvert section of the party.

(Also like Snow Place Like Home, the narrators for this story, Barrie Kreinik as Miriam and Eric Nolan as Cal, did a marvelous job of bringing these characters to life.)

Miriam’s family is loud and boisterous, and she doesn’t fit. That’s uncomfortable but okay. The way they treat her is teeth-grittingly unconscionable, but what works is the way that Cal instantly gets it – and her – the moment he steps into the room. (I did want her to have a big, pardon me considering which holidays we’re talking about, come to Jesus moment with her oblivious family, but, well, baby steps on that score are way more likely to work. Dammit.)

I loved seeing all the Hanukkah details and celebration in a story that is tailor-made for a Hallmark movie. (The delights of feeling seen are very real.) AND the eight nights of Hanukkah provide just enough time for the relationship between Miriam and Cal to get a firm hold on their – and the reader’s – hearts.

Which is when the story runs right into Cal’s family Christmas and the reason he’s been avoiding it. Everyone in that family is on pins and needles, walking on eggshells, living in stasis, all of the above, because Cal’s young wife was killed in a skiing accident four years before and everyone is waiting for Cal to start living again – even though he doesn’t feel like he deserves to.

Just as Cal made her feel seen among her family, she helps him feel heard among his own. Again, he loves them and vice versa, but he and his late wife grew up together and memories of her are EVERYWHERE in that house. Miriam gives him space to breathe and not just start to move on, but accept that it’s okay for him to do so.

If the stories in this Home Sweet Holidays collection represent holiday treats, just as Snow Place Like Home was the holiday fruitcake, Merry and Bright is a Hanukkah sufganiyot, a pillowy donut filled with a sweet jelly center, just as this story is has a lot of holiday light and a big, soft, sweet heart at its own.

I’m having a great time with this collection – and it’s just the perfect length for my daily drive! So I’ll be back next week with the third story, All Wrapped Up in You, and finishing up with You Better Not Pout on Christmas Eve. I’m looking forward to figuring out which holiday cookies match the themes of those stories!

#BookReview: Burn the World Down by Anna Hackett

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Burn the World Down by Anna HackettBurn the World Down (Unsanctioned) by Anna Hackett
Format: eARC
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: contemporary romance, holiday romance, romantic suspense
Series: Unsanctioned #1
Pages: 290
Published by Anna Hackett on December 3, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble
Goodreads

I’ll burn the world down for her.
NashI left my hometown behind. I joined the military, disappeared into black ops, and became a weapon for my country. I have no regrets.
Except one with pretty hazel eyes.
Now I’m retired, living a quiet life hiding in plain sight in Las Vegas. I still think of her. The prettiest girl I ever knew. My best friend’s little sister.
But I swore to leave her alone to live a normal life. That I wouldn’t drag her into the darkness.
Then I find out her life isn’t golden.
She’s in danger and I have the right set of skills to save her.
GeorgieYour life can change in an instant. One second, you have a happy family and a crush on your brother’s best friend.The next, you’ve lost everyone you ever loved.
My family is dead and my sister fell prey to a predator. A rich, connected man who promised her the world.
And gave her hell instead.
Now, I have nothing left but a burning need for vengeance.
Until I collide with the boy who left me behind. A boy who’s now a tough, dangerous man.
He says he’ll protect me. He says he’ll help me take down my sister’s killer.
I might survive my revenge, but will I survive when he walks away from me again?

My Review:

From a certain point of view, this is a bit of a forbidden fruit kind of romance. Once upon a time, Georgie was just the little girl who followed her older brother and his best friend around their small town – and Nash was that ‘big brother’s best friend’. She had a crush and he thought she was too young for him.

Until she wasn’t. And he noticed.

But fate intervened when Nash and Elliott enlisted in the Army, Elliott was killed in action and Nash and his grief were recruited into the kind of operations that get blacked out in someone’s service record. The kind of operations that Vander Norcross used to run. (I expect Norcross Security to show up sooner or later, as that particular match is delightfully obvious even from this first book in the series.)

By the time we meet Nash, and he meets Georgie again, the good, golden life he’s always imagined for her is nowhere to be found. She’s all alone in the world, not just her brother but also her parents and her sister have died. Her parents’ long drawn out illnesses took the family savings and both her and her sister’s dreams.

Her sister Viv died in Las Vegas, the victim of a serial user who took advantage of her dreams to make her life a nightmare. Now it’s Georgie’s turn for that nightmare – unless she gets him first. Permanently.

At least that’s her plan.

A plan that her old crush, Nash Oakley, now a retired assassin, can make come true for Georgie and the families of this particular scumbag’s victims – and his posse of scumbags because like calls to like. All he has to do is just get his head out of his daydreams to get behind (or in front, or wherever she’ll have him) the woman who has always haunted his dreams.

She’s ALREADY come to the dark side. It’s up to Nash to provide the help (and the cookies) she needs to make her dreams of vengeance come true. With the help of his very own posse of retired assassins who won’t care that this particular job is unsanctioned – because it’s righteous all the way down to the bone.

Escape Rating B: I wasn’t expecting this to be a holiday story. I just picked it up because I read ALL of this author’s work. Lo and behold, it IS a holiday story, so it fits right in with my #2025hohohorat reads! Serendipity for the WIN!

Nash Oakley has the world’s worst case of the “I’m not worthy’s”. Or he’s so wrapped up in his vision of who Georgie should be and the life she should have had that he’s initially utterly unable to deal with the woman in front of him. And I wanted to reach through my iPad and slap him with a clue-by-four for his self-serving idiocy. Because it IS self-serving and absolutely NOT Georgie-serving and he is being an idiot about it.

Not that Georgie doesn’t have her own share of problems, issues, and emotional baggage. Her attempts to get her sister out of the clutches of a serial abuser, Georgie’s ultimate failure to prevent that death along with nearly a year of chasing down every lead and walking down every blind alley in her desperate search to track her sister down in the first place steadily eroded her health, her nerves and most of all, her trust in anyone other than herself.

Her recent beating at the hands of that scumbag’s posse may fuel her resolve but also destroys her sleep with nightmares. She’s on her last nerve and everything else that goes along with it when she learns that Nash is somewhere in Vegas.

At first, he turns her down. None of his dreams of her include her walking on the dark side with him, to the point that he can’t get out of his own head to see that she’s already there. As I said, the application of a clue-by-four is required – and it gets delivered in the form of another beatdown. Nash does get his head out of his ass to run to her rescue. Finally.

Once he’s in, he’s all the way in. And so are his buddies, his fellow retired assassins who may be a bit bored with retirement but got out with at least a bit of their souls. Souls that are perfectly willing to commit an unsanctioned hit to help Nash get Georgie the vengeance – and the closure – that she’s more than earned.

Burn the World Down turned out to be a good reading time for my post-Turkey coma Thanksgiving evening, and it does a terrific job of setting up the author’s new Unsanctioned series.

One caveat that isn’t exactly fair, is that I haven’t liked most of the author’s recent series covers, and I’m not all that fond of this one, either (picture at right for comparison). OTOH, the Special Edition paperback covers have been gorgeous. I want to say that your reading mileage may vary, but the book is the same regardless of the artwork on the cover. This time around at least we get to see the cover model’s whole, entire head and face, which wasn’t true for Team 52, Norcross Security OR Sentinel Security. Perhaps I should say that ‘your ogling mileage may vary’.

Another niggle that is ‘fair’ in that it is about the story, but is probably a ‘me’ thing is that the alternating first person perspectives doesn’t work as well for me as either a single first-person POV or a third person perspective whether or not that POV is omniscient or not. Your reading mileage may definitely vary on that, but once Nash got his act together I liked his perspective more than Georgie’s.

(Ironically, on multiple counts, the trope that powers this book, older brother’s best friend crush, is the same as the trope in Snow Place Like Home, which is also an alternating first-person perspective story and I LIKED it there. So now I have to figure out whether I liked that one better because of the particular audio narrators, or just that I listened to the book instead of reading it myself, or that I liked it because the story was shorter, or whether it’s something less obvious that I need to get a handle on. C’est la reading vie and all that.)

Nevertheless, and in spite of creating a bit of a research project for myself, I’m all in on finding out what happens – or who happens – next in the Unsanctioned series. Based on the shenanigans at the very end of THIS book, the next book in the series, No Matter the Cost, will feature Bastian and the rogue assassin who keeps trying to kill him, and we’ll get to find out how THAT situation manages to work itself out sometime in January.

A- #AudioBookReview: Snow Place Like Home by Laura Pavlov

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: Snow Place Like Home by Laura PavlovSnow Place Like Home (Home Sweet Holidays) by Laura Pavlov
Narrator: Abigail Reno, Sean Masters
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, holiday romance, romantic comedy
Series: Home Sweet Holidays #1
Pages: 57
Length: 1 hour and 8 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 20, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

After a devastating breakup, a sunny veterinarian goes home to the mountains to lick her wounds—and savor a holiday snack—in this heartfelt story from Laura Pavlov, author of the Blushing series.
At her brother’s wedding, Goldie Jacobs brushes shoulders with Ace Bonetti, his childhood best friend turned Hollywood hotshot. Ace has been crushing on Goldie ever since high school, and seeing her again reminds him exactly why. They spend one toe-curling night together, then part ways, expecting nothing more. But when those moments under the mistletoe felt so right, how can they ever let each other go?
Laura Pavlov’s Snow Place Like Home is part of Home Sweet Holidays, a cookie-sweet collection of holiday romances sure to bring color to your cheeks. Read or listen to each story in a single heart-fluttering sitting. And to fully immerse yourself in the charm of the season, don’t miss a special message from each of our holiday heroes!

My Review:

The blurb for this year’s series of Amazon’s holiday originals collection, Home Sweet Holidays, proclaims that what they have in store for readers – and listeners, is a “cookie-sweet collection of holiday romances.”

This series opener, Snow Place Like Home, is plenty sweet – but it’s definitely the fruitcake of the collection. It’s a bit crazy, a bit spicy, and has more than a bit of whatever it will take to make the reader/listener a bit tipsy with delight.

Goldie Jacobs’ brother Jack, his fiancée Holly, and, in fact, the rest of her family, are what Goldie calls “those people”. Not in a bad way, not at all, but maybe just a bit much and over-the-top for Goldie.

Jack and Holly are getting married on Christmas Day, because they’re names are, well, Christmas-y. Every single thing about the wedding, from the date to the theme to the OMG costumes required for the rehearsal dinner, all have to be holiday-themed and all have to be pre-approved by the happy couple.

This isn’t bridezilla-ness, they’re like this for every single possible occasion all the time. They’re just that picture perfect and happy about it and want to share it with everyone around them. Whether the people they’re sharing with, like Goldie or Jack’s best friend Ace, are remotely into that sort of picture perfect planning and presentation or not. In Goldie’s case, definitely not.

It’s not that everyone, including Goldie, doesn’t always have a good time and won’t this time. Jack and Holly – and also Goldie’s parents Suzie and Joe – are really good at this kind of thing. But it’s not what Goldie would choose and she certainly wouldn’t choose to be in the spotlight – which is inevitable at least for a bit, because people who love the spotlight don’t always get that not everyone does.

As much fun, perversely fascinating, and often laugh-out-loud worthy the setup of this story is, the heart of the story is about the maid of honor and the best man, Goldie Jacobs and her brother’s lifelong bestie, Ace Bonetti. Back in the day, they had crushes on each other, never admitted it for real-life reasons, but equally never got over it.

Now they’re both adults, they’re single at the same time, and Ace’s brief visit back home is a chance for both of them to finally put their cards on the table. If they have the courage to take that chance to see if the dreams they’ve each kept so close to their hearts can turn into a real-life happy ever after.

Escape Rating A-: If this had been told from Jack and/or Holly’s perspective, I wouldn’t have enjoyed the story half as much as I did. Because I’d be on the sidelines with Goldie in this one, snarking at the over-the-top-ness of it all. What made it work for me is that both Goldie and Ace think the whole thing is ridiculous but they love these people and they’ll deal to be part of their celebration. But it’s not their thing and they both think it’s crazy. And it is crazy that their approved costumes were Rudolph for Goldie and The Grinch for Ace. (At least they’re both warm enough on this very cold and snowy Christmas Eve!) I loved their commentary, and also loved that they both let themselves go with it even if it’s definitely not their style.

It helped a LOT that I listened to this one, because the story is told from Goldie and Jack’s alternating first-person perspectives. It felt like I was perched on their shoulders, listening to their voices, telling me their thoughts. And Abigail Reno as Goldie and Sean Masters as Ace both did terrific jobs with the characters.

While the setup of the story is what earns the fruitcake, the heart of the story – what’s been in both Goldie’s and Ace’s own hearts all these years – is what makes the story such a sweet treat. While the romance straddles the line between two romantic tropes beautifully, specifically the best friend’s little sister taboo and the friends into lovers storylines, what makes this one special is that it’s the friends into lovers trope that wins the day. Back in high school, Ace did see Goldie as off-limits because he didn’t want to involve her in his family’s mess. She didn’t try to cross the line from friends into more because Ace is already an unofficial member of her family and she didn’t want to ruin that with a possible rejection.

Also, of course, they were teenagers and clueless, but it’s the friendship angle that sticks. HER family is HIS primary support, throwing a messy rejection into that wouldn’t have been fair to him. Now that they are adults there’s a real chance but her reluctance to rock the boat feels very realistic.

Which made the happy ever after just that much more delicious when it happens! Snow Place Like Home turned out to be the perfect holiday story to kick off this year’s collection. Now I can’t wait to start the next story, Merry and Bright, and not just because, in spite of the title, it’s a HANUKKAH STORY!

A- #BookReview: Second Chance Romance by Olivia Dade

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Second Chance Romance by Olivia DadeSecond Chance Romance (Harlot's Bay, #2) by Olivia Dade
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, small town romance
Series: Harlot's Bay #2
Pages: 400
Published by Avon on November 25, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In the second installment of USA Today bestselling author Olivia Dade’s Harlot’s Bay series, a mistaken obituary leads to the reunion of two former high school crushes. Sparks fly in this hilarious grumpy/grumpy romance, packed with Dade’s signature body positivity and a delicious amount of spice.
Karl and Molly were never together. There was a time, right after high school, where it seemed like they might finally cross the line from friends to lovers…but instead, a foolish misunderstanding meant they never spoke again. Molly went to LA and got married. Karl stayed in Harlot’s Bay and bought a bakery.
The only connection the pair has shared over the years is painfully one-sided: Now divorced, Molly narrates monster romance audiobooks, and Karl is an ever-diligent listener, clinging to his only piece of the one that got away.
Still, Molly hasn’t totally left Harlot’s Bay behind. When she hears that Karl’s obituary has run in the local paper, unexpected grief prompts her to hop on the next flight to Maryland…where she finds Karl very much alive, the victim of nothing but an accidental obituary.
As the pair reunite, they finally hash out their missed connection. True, Molly isn’t quite ready to trust again, but Karl is determined to prove himself worthy of her faith and devotion. And as her remaining time in Harlot’s Bay ticks down, Molly, the habitual cynic, just might find that Karl, the cranky town curmudgeon, is impossible to leave behind a second time.

My Review:

There are towns named Climax in Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia, and those are just the ones that are officially incorporated. There are towns named Intercourse in Alabama and Pennsylvania. Why couldn’t there be a town named Harlot’s Bay in Maryland? Why shouldn’t there be come to that? And why shouldn’t the town lean ALL THE WAY into their name? Think of the opportunities!

The first book in this series, At First Spite, definitely put the ‘harlot’ in Harlot’s Bay. Literally. Into the air, as the FMC (female main character) broadcasts her love of extremely spicy romance over the rooftops of Harlot’s Bay by playing erotic audiobooks at high volume through the open window of her ‘Spite House.’

The FMC of THIS second book is the professional narrator of those audiobooks, Molly Dearborn, who once upon a time managed to stick a couple of years in Harlot’s Bay, long enough to graduate high school and actually make friends and put down roots. Roots that were ripped out by the, well, roots when her father’s wandering everything caught up to the family and she had to leave.

She left behind some unfinished business in the person of Karl Dean. Not an ex, not the one that got away – but more of a best friend and definitely an opportunity missed. Missed like an aching limb in spite of the twenty years and 2,500 miles that lay between them, along with her seventeen year marriage and acrimonious divorce, as well as Karl’s on-again, off-again relationship with one of their classmates.

They have history – just not the type of history or as much of it as either of them wished way back when. Still, it’s more than enough to make the news of Karl’s death hit Molly like a punch to the gut – or a kick in the head. She doesn’t even try to confirm it all that hard, she just gets on a plane from LA to Harlot’s Bay to attend his funeral.

Which is when she discovers that reports of Karl’s death, to paraphrase Mark Twain, were greatly exaggerated.

Discovering that Karl is alive after all just about brings Molly to her knees – and her heart into her sneakers. Even though they never were, he’s still the one she never got over. And very much vice versa.

Karl has a month to convince Molly that he’s worth her trust. She has a month to get this famously taciturn man to use his damn words for once in his damn life – although those cusswords wouldn’t be “damns” if Karl had even thought that sentence.

Their 20-year high school reunion is coming up, and the scene is going to be epic one way or another. The question is whether it’s going to be epic like a 90’s high school romcom or epic like a 90’s teen slasher movie.

Everyone in Harlot’s Bay has their cameras poised just waiting to capture the moment. Whatever it turns out to be.

Escape Rating A-: I wanted to say this was a romance featuring a ‘cinnamon roll’ character who also bakes delicious cinnamon rolls. But Karl is a bit too salty for that. Or it’s true if the recipe not only overdid the cinnamon but maybe included some pumpkin pie spice that went a bit too heavy on the ginger, cloves and allspice.

On the inside Karl is a marshmallow. Or, as one of his friends describes him, a Cadbury Creme Egg – “hard shell, gooey innards, very sweet, albeit somewhat off-putting to many and widely unavailable most times of the year.” That Karl is hesitant to let anyone close enough to even BE a friend, as well as his reluctance to admit that he even has actual friends, is definitely the icing on this particular cinnamon roll.

The title of this book doesn’t lie, this is very much a second chance romance. Even if they technically didn’t back in high school, they both knew that’s where they were headed if they could manage to get out of their own way – or get over their individual fears about trusting themselves and each other.

The central conflict is both freaking HUGE and totally real. Molly knows Karl can’t tell a lie to save his life, so whatever comes out of his mouth is the absolute, honest, well, everything. But he doesn’t EVER talk about his own emotions. While Molly, OTOH, has been lied to and betrayed by both her father and her douchecanoe ex-husband. Even though she admits they did – and in the case of her ex still very much DO – all their lying and betraying with words, she still needs to hear them from Karl if she’s going to uproot her whole life.

Women, in particular, are all too prone to trying to read a partner’s mind through their actions and being taken in by even scraps of affection and care. Molly’s not doing that again and Karl isn’t giving her what she needs, even though he’s damn good at giving her everything else she needs.

(I’ll fully admit that this part of the story, as important and real as it is, made its point way a whole lot faster than the page count devoted to it. It’s what made this an A- read instead of an A for THIS reader. Your reading mileage may vary.)

Still and all, I do like Harlot’s Bay quite a lot, both the town AND the people in it. At First Spite was a lot of fun and Second Chance Romance absolutely was too – even if, or especially because, it’s another book NOT to read when you’re hungry. I also adored the positive, realistic, body images AND aches and pains, not just that neither Karl nor Molly is a size zero or the male equivalent, but also the realism of pushing 40 – or 50 in the epilog – and the way that 40 and 50 push back, but that love has neither a size nor an age even when the lovers have a bit of a backache or a twinge in the knees.

In the end, I enjoyed the romance and LOVED the characters (in multiple senses of that word) in Harlot’s Bay. (I have a big soft spot in my heart for the Nasty Wenches Book Club.) I really hope we get to go back.

OMG it just hit me that the author’s paranormal romances, Zomromcom and the upcoming World’s Okayest Oracle (Reluctantly) Seeks Demon, are awfully close to the kind of books that Sadie Brazen, the monster romance author featured as a side character (so far) in the Harlot’s Bay series, writes. (Minus the finned cocks and beakgasms [not a typo, I swear].) Maybe, possibly, hopefully, one of these days we’ll have Sadie Brazen’s very own Harlot’s Bay romance to look forward to. She’s earned it, she deserves it, she’s entitled to it – and so are we!

#BookReview: Saving Mr. Norcross by Anna Hackett

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Saving Mr. Norcross by Anna HackettSaving Mr. Norcross (Norcross Security) by Anna Hackett
Format: eARC
Source: author
Formats available: ebook
Genres: action adventure romance, contemporary romance, romantic suspense
Series: Norcross Security #11
Pages: 130
Published by Anna Hackett on October 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

She’ll stop at nothing to save him.

She didn’t think anything could scare her husband, the most dangerous man in San Francisco, but she’s found the one thing that terrifies him.

Fatherhood.

When Detective Brynn Norcross discovers she’s pregnant, she knows her overprotective husband needs time to adjust. When she’s injured on the job, Vander is tense, on edge, and distant.

She decides they both need a vacation. They head to Italy for some rest and relaxation.

But their vacation doesn’t quite go according to plan…

When Vander and his brother Rhys are abducted by the local mafia, all hell breaks loose.

There is no way Brynn can do nothing when the life of the man she loves is on the line. She’ll do whatever it takes to rescue him.

There is no way Vander wants his wife in danger, and he knows she’ll come for him. He’ll do whatever it takes to escape.
Oh, and he also plans to make the people responsible pay.

My Review:

“A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.” And neither is Brynn Norcross.

Considering that Vander Norcross first met his future wife, then-SFPD Detective Brynn Sullivan, when she was undercover in a motorcycle gang (their story is The Powerbroker), it’s not as if he doesn’t know that. Her innate badassness is one of the things he loves about her. That she can go toe-to-toe with him and/or against the bad guys every bit as well as he can.

He KNOWS that. And whether he likes or not, because the answer to that is a bit of an emotional muddle for a man who tried – and failed – to wall off his emotions. He knows that he can’t wrap her up and keep her safe at home, off the streets and away from her job, because it would break them. Even if worrying about her safety 24/7 is breaking him.

But the only way he knows not to spill all his caveman instincts all over her is to keep his mouth shut. Which means he’s shutting her out and that’s doing much too much damage all by itself.

Their vacation in Italy is supposed to be giving them time to relax and reconnect – but it’s not exactly working.

At least not until Vander takes on a bit of ‘work’ helping out a former Ghost Ops teammate who needs a couple of extra hands to put the fear of, if not exactly God at least the fear of retribution, into a man who thinks he doesn’t have to take ‘no’ for an answer from any woman he wants.

Vander, his brother Rhys and their buddy Jasper can certainly fix THAT.

But when someone takes the opportunity to fix Vander, and grabs his brother Rhys along for the ride, it gives Brynn an opportunity she really didn’t need right now. Just as Vander rescued her in the previous Norcross Security short story, Mr. & Mrs. Norcross, this time it’s her turn to rescue him from kidnappers who clearly had no idea who they’d taken or just how much retribution is about to rain down on their heads – along with bits of the building they only THINK they’re keeping her husband away from her in.

In spite of, or really, truly, because of, the danger they’re in and the bullets literally flying all around them, when Brynn breaking into the Mafia Don’s compound meets up with Vander breaking out, he finally figures out what he’s subconsciously known all along. That they not only belong together, they are stronger together, and that they are each just as much of a badass as each other – and that that is EXACTLY what they need each other to be.

They’ll need to be to raise and protect the child that’s coming, because that kid is going to be a badass from their very first breath.

Escape Rating B: At first, I had a bit of time getting into this one. It’s hard for me to get into a story when everyone is talking inside their heads but not saying much of anything important to each other, even though there’s one hell of a lot to say.

I mean, I got it. I got what was going on and it’s important. But he’s stonewalling and she’s trying to break that stone wall – or his stone head – and they’re both withdrawing and it’s no fun at all. I was glad that he didn’t ACTUALLY go all caveman, but the scene of her knowing he wants to and him knowing he wants to but can’t and neither of them talking about it is well done but seriously messed up.

As contradictory as it sounds, once Vander and Rhys get kidnapped the story kicks up into the gear I want this series to be in, and from that point it’s action and adventure and drama and romance all the way.

The rescue/breakout scenes were a whole lot of adrenaline-fuelled fun, as Vander is breaking out because he knows Brynn is coming to get him and he’s figured out what’s going on and thinks he can negotiate his way out. Not that he’s not willing to make a mess and take down a lot of bad guys, but he’s figured out what’s behind the whole thing. While someone is definitely going to go down for this, it’s not going to be him and Rhys if they can just get out of the way.

Unless Brynn comes in guns blazing – which is going to make negotiations a whole lot harder. Which it definitely does. Even if they do all manage to walk away from this mess relatively easily.

But it brings home to Vander that dodging bullets, chasing bad guys and blowing up drug labs and hidden dungeons is how they both roll. And that they’re both better off doing it together. That they finally get it together while literally caught in the crossfire made for a terrific, and terrifically explosive, even more happily ever after of an ending. And that was fantastic.

We might get more Norcross Security short stories like this one and Mr. & Mrs. Norcross. Which is lovely if it happens because it’s always fun to see how the gang is doing now that they’re all settling down – at least as much as they ever will.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to the author’s next book, Burn Down the World, which will be the first in her new action/adventure romantic suspense series, Unsanctioned. I can’t wait to see where she’s taking me next, sometime this December.

A+ #BookReview: The Most Unusual Haunting of Edgar Lovejoy by Roan Parrish

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: The Most Unusual Haunting of Edgar Lovejoy by Roan ParrishThe Most Unusual Haunting of Edgar Lovejoy by Roan Parrish
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, ghosts, Halloween, paranormal romance, queer romance
Pages: 384
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on September 9, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Jamie Wendon-Dale may design haunted houses, but they don't actually believe in ghosts—until they meet Edgar Lovejoy, who is tall, clever, beautiful…and 100% haunted.

A COZY, GHOSTLY LGBTQIA+ ROMANCE

Jamie Wendon-Dale creates haunted houses for a living. Haunting is their life—but nobody working New Orleans' spooky circuit actually believes in ghosts.

Edgar Lovejoy is 100% haunted. No, really. Ghosts have tormented him since childhood and he's organized his life around attempts to avoid them.

Opposites? Get ready to attract. But while Jamie's biggest concern is that Edgar sometimes seems a bit distracted, Edgar's fears are much greater. Not only is he scared of encountering the dearly departed whenever he leaves the house, but he's terrified of making himself vulnerable to Jamie. After all, how do you tell someone who believes ghosts only exist as smoke and mirrors that you see them everywhere you go? And how can you trust in a happy future when you can't even believe in yourself?

A little spooky, a little magical, and a whole lot The (Most Unusual) Haunting of Edgar Lovejoy will leave you feeling like you've found a brand new bookish family of your own.

My Review:

This isn’t exactly an ‘opposites attract’ romance – or it is from a certain, slightly magical, just a teensy bit paranormal point of view. Or at least in a kind of ‘laissez les bon temps roulez’ perspective. Because the ability to see ghosts is exactly the kind of thing that New Orleans is famous for.

Edgar Lovejoy, as it turns out, comes by his ability to see spectres the old fashioned way. He inherited it – as did his sister Allie and his brother Poe (and yes, that pun is laying there just waiting to be picked up, (n)evermore). The Lovejoys are descended from an old New Orleans dynasty that has always had something spooky going on.

Edgar just got the hard end of that legacy, as it’s not just that he SEES ghosts everywhere (it’s New Orleans, ghosts ARE everywhere whether the rest of us can see them or not). Edgar sees the ghosts as decaying bodies who literally make him sick when they touch him. Which they do, frequently and often, every single time he leaves his apartment, which is painted in ‘haint blue’ specifically to ward them out.

Edgar’s life has been self-limited by his fear of the ghosts – and it’s crippling him emotionally and psychologically in ways that he can’t even see from his self-imposed prison.

Jamie Wendon-Dale’s life-work is creating haunted houses. They fund that creative but seasonal and not terribly lucrative calling by doing more mundane jobs to pay the rent. Being a ‘haunter’ is what they feel they were born to do. Just as transitioning and figuring themselves out as nonbinary is who they were born to be, in spite of an overbearing family who refuses to accept them as they are and seems determined to shove them back into a box they even more strongly refuse to go back into.

Jamie fights their own corner at every single turn – because they must. Edgar has refused to fight his way out of his. When they meet, it’s magic – and tragic at the same time. Jamie, as a part-time burlesque performer, is as far out of his comfort zone as a person could be. Edgar wants to let Jamie into his in every way possible.

All he has to do is let Jamie in on the secret that he’s kept all his life. Not just the secret that he sees ghosts. But the real secret. That he’s afraid, everywhere, all the time, of pretty much everything. That he’s particularly, especially, and just about catatonic with fear that if he lets himself love anyone except his sister, in any way at all, they will leave him. Because except for his sister Allie, every single other person he’s ever loved has left – including their brother.

But with Jamie in his life, showing Edgar a world that he has isolated himself from, there’s a way for all that love – and more – to come back into his life. All Edgar has to do is let it in. If he can. If his ghosts will let him.

Escape Rating A+: I’m going to TRY to tone down the ‘SQUEE’ in this review, but it’s NOT going to be easy. This turned out to be a single-sitting read for me – and an utterly rapt one at that – because I loved this story EVEN MORE than I expected to. And I came into it expecting a LOT, because of just how much I enjoyed the author’s previous ‘holiday’ romance, The Holiday Trap.

I fell hard for the story because I adored the characters, and watching them navigate a relationship where both parties are constantly wondering whether they are too much complication for each other or just right was marvelous – especially with the differently but equally effed-up family dynamics on BOTH sides.

What got me, and got to me, was the way that they gravitate to each other – but that this isn’t a ‘love conquers all’ kind of story. Jamie can help Edgar figure out what his increasing fear and paranoia is about, Jamie can hold the door open, but Edgar has to be the one to step through and he’s conditioned himself to stay inside. And Jamie is hopeful but realistic that Edgar might not manage it and that they don’t have a chance together if he doesn’t.

So a lot of the story is about navigating trauma and their very different responses to it. And it’s heartbreaking and affirming at the same time that Edgar has kind of done this to himself, and he breaks his own heart when he finally figures that out – that his life didn’t have to be the way it was. And that he can’t let the regrets that are now drowning him isolate him yet again..

In the end, it’s a lot more about Edgar’s learning to step outside of his fear bubble and starting to deal with the traumas that created that bubble than it is about the ghosts that both cause and represent that fear. In other words, the paranormal elements aren’t the focus of the story. Edgar’s healing and his relationship with Jamie, along with Jamie’s standing up for themselves in the face of their family’s coercions – and making it stick this time no matter the cost – are the focus(es). Foci. Whichever word is correct the story’s focus is on the living and not the haunting dead.

The contrast between Edgar’s wacky but supportive siblings versus Jamie’s manipulative and passive-aggressively unsupportive parents gave me vibes of The Stand-In Dad (which I also loved), especially in the way that Edgar’s family and Jamie’s found family band together to support and celebrate them both.

The romance between Edgar and Jamie does turn out to be steamy hot, but the overall vibe of the story is delightfully cozy. That combination turned out to be exactly what I was looking for to end this week’s reading with a terrific story that made me look forward to the upcoming spooky season – whether or not there’s a haunted house in my future!

#BookReview: Love at First Fright by Nadia El-Fassi

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B- Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Love at First Fright by Nadia El-FassiLove at First Fright by Nadia El-Fassi
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: age-gap romance, contemporary romance, ghosts, paranormal romance, spicy romance
Pages: 360
Published by Dell on September 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this cosy and spicy paranormal romance, a successful horror author whose novel is being adapted into a movie clashes with the actor cast as the male lead, all in a spooky mansion filled with ghosts, from the author of Best Hex Ever.
Rosemary is a successful horror author with a secret: she can see ghosts. So when the set of her hit novel’s film adaptation turns out to be a haunted countryside manor, she’s unfazed. What she’s less prepared for is the maddeningly handsome, completely miscast actor playing her leading man.
Ellis is a Hollywood heartthrob tired of his action-hero persona. Instead, he dreams of being a serious actor, and having free time to spend gardening with his dog. Landing the lead in a historical horror movie is his chance to start fresh… until he discovers the author tried to have him replaced.
But as filming progresses, and the manor's ghosts make their presence known, the chemistry between Rosemary and Ellis becomes undeniable. With secrets being spilled, sparks flying, and spirits stirring up trouble, can they face their demons and write themselves a happily-ever-after before it's a wrap?

My Review:

The blurb for this book, while it isn’t exactly wrong, isn’t right either. Those elements are all there, but, if I were saying this aloud I’d be saying that the “accent is on a different syllable” but with “syllable” pronounced with its accent in the wrong place. Verbally, the difference is clear, even though it sounds like it might be subtle in description.

That’s true of the blurb for this book as well. The picture of Rosemary Shaw that we get from the blurb is exactly right as far as it goes – although it’s just the surface. She IS a successful horror writer and she CAN see ghosts. She’s certainly unfazed by the ghosts that haunt the haunted filming location. But she is plenty fazed by being part of the filming of her novel. And not just because of the maddeningly handsome Ellis Finch.

Ellis’ description is the one that gets shortchanged – by a lot and by all the important bits. Rosemary believed that he was miscast because her protagonist is a brooding Victorian, and she was expecting someone a bit thin and weedy – at least in her head. Ellis’ career has been confined to and defined by his action hero roles. On screen he doesn’t appear to have either the looks or the range for the part, but then he’s an actor and both looks and actions can be deceiving with the right costumes and lighting.

He’s also being blackmailed by his agent to take all those action-hero roles, no matter how much he’s come to hate them. AND just how much he needs to start branching out now that he’s over 40 and the clock on him credibly being an action hero is starting to tick fairly loudly.

The chemistry between Rosemary and Ellis IS absolutely undeniable – no matter how much they each try, and ultimately fail, to deny it. However much they are utterly perfect for each other, in ways that neither of them is initially willing to even reveal in the early stages of their attraction, the private little bubble they manage to create around themselves in their semi-isolated filming location is sure to burst once the real world intrudes.

And it does, with the kind of vengeance that seems designed to tear them apart – only because it is. There’s a money-grubbing devil Agent whispering into Ellis’ ear that if he doesn’t publicly give Rosemary up – for her own good – that damaging publicity will be unleashed to do it for him.

Escape Rating B-: First of all, it was driving me crazy that I was sure that I recently read a book where the writer protagonist had the same variety of writer’s block that Rosemary has in this story – and I had and it’s Stacy Sivinski’s The Witching Moon Manor (Which I loved and HIGHLY recommend). I was equally certain that I recently read an entirely different book where the male protagonist is being blackmailed by his agent/or boss in a similar way to what Ellis is going through. I think it might be First-Time Caller by B.K. Borison but it if is, HIS workplace manipulator isn’t evil, just persistent and honestly does have the character’s best interests at heart along with their own – and not just their own as occurs in this story. (If it isn’t First-Time Caller, and you know what the book really is, please let me know!)

Now that I’ve got THAT off my chest, so to speak, let’s talk about the book. Initially, I enjoyed this A LOT. Rosemary, with her writer’s block, her social anxiety, and her positive but still sometimes hiding under the covers attitude about her life, her perfect-for-her but not size 0 body, her quirks, her kinks, and just everything about her, including her ghosts, was just terrific.

I loved the way that she felt the fear and did so much anyway, including being a fish out of water at the shoot for the movie made out of her book. And her besties are to die for in all the best ways.

Not to mention, the romance between Rosemary and Ellis is seriously smoking hot. When they manage to keep the world and all of its villains out of their business, they are fantastic together, in bed and out.

The story also hits on some lovely themes and side stories, especially the sidebar about the two Regency-era ghosts who, even after literal centuries of friendship, need a bit of an intervention as well as a package of 21st century sapphic romances to finally admit that the reason they’re still haunting the house is because they’ve been in love with each other all along.

While the ghost dog hanging around Ellis Finch and still playing with his best doggie buddy even from the afterlife was adorable and gave me the weepies.

Which leads us right back to Ellis, because that’s where my issues with the story come in. They’re not the same issues Rosemary had with his casting, but they are all about the reasons that Rosemary had such issues.

Ellis is taking all those action-hero roles that he hates BECAUSE he is being blackmailed into the roles with the biggest paycheck by his agent, who is an abusive bastard of the first order. He’s even worse because he does all his manipulations from the sidelines and never appears in person. He’s such a slimeball that calling him a slimeball is insulting to other slimeballs because he’s giving them a worse name than even slimeballs deserve.

Howsomever, just as much as Ellis is being manipulated by this asshat – and EVERYBODY in the industry seems to know it – Ellis is, OMG I can’t even with his attitude. He just keeps letting it happen and going along and I just didn’t buy the whole thing. Ellis is the one who makes the money – not his agent. His secret, that he’s bisexual, isn’t all that big a deal now that his career is well-established. And, more importantly, Ellis is the one who makes the money, not Agent Brody the douchecanoe. That arsehole is too selfish to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, even out of spite.

But Ellis is a doormat, and he blows the whole thing up in his head so BIG that I got just-plain tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop but when I finally reached the end to see WTF it turned out to be a big buildup to not very much and that downgraded the story for me.

Not that Brody doesn’t try to do his damndest to keep Ellis under his control, and not that he doesn’t turn out to be really evil about doing it. But even at that extreme point his evil is about keeping Ellis working for him and not burning the career that is paying his fat percentages into the ground.

That letdown at the end, which was entirely too close to shifting the story into a misunderstandammit, is the reason why I’m still really bummed about it all because I started out liking it quite a bit and now my feelings are very mixed.

Your reading mileage may, and hopefully will, vary.