Publisher: Berkley

#BookReview: We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat by Syou Ishida translated by E. Madison Shimoda

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> C Reviews
#BookReview: We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat by Syou Ishida translated by E. Madison ShimodaWe'll Prescribe You Another Cat (We'll Prescribe You a Cat, #2) by Syou Ishida, E. Madison Shimoda
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction, magical realism, sad fluff, translated fiction, world literature
Series: We'll Prescribe You a Cat #2
Pages: 304
Published by Berkley on September 2, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Kokoro Clinic for the Soul reopens in this delightful follow-up to the award-winning, bestselling Japanese novel We’ll Prescribe You a Cat.
It’s time to revisit the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul.
Though it’s a mysteriously located clinic with an uncertain address, it can always be found by those who need it. And the clinic has proven time after time that a prescribed cat has the power to heal the emotional wounds of its patients. This charming sequel introduces a new lovable cast of healing cats, from Kotetsu, a four-month-old Bengal who unleashes his boundless energy by demolishing bed linens and curtains, to tenacious and curious Shasha, who doesn’t let her small size stop her from anything, and the most lovable yet lazy cat Ms. Michiko, who is as soft and comforting as mochi.
As characters from one chapter appear as side characters in the next, we follow a young woman who cannot help pushing away the man who loves her, a recently widowed grandfather whose grandson refuses to leave his room, the family of a young woman who struggle to understand each other, and an anxious man who works at a cat shelter seeking to show how the most difficult cats can be the most rewarding. This moving, magical novel of interconnected tales proves the strength in the unfathomable bond between cats and people.

My Review:

I picked this up for three reasons. First and foremost, the first book in the series, the titular We’ll Prescribe You a Cat, was adorable. Second, the cover picture for this second book is just really, really cute, and two cats really are better than one. Third, I was looking for a bit of a comfort read as our trip ended – and I just missed our own cats something terrible in spite of spending the first part of the trip sharing a very insistent feline and visiting a cat cafe at the end because we weren’t getting back to our own cats quickly enough.

As is often the case with this particular type of comfort read, sad fluff book, it’s a collection of mini-stories wrapped around a place, in this case the slightly magical but borderline real Kokoro Clinic for the Soul. The stories aren’t just loosely connected by the place, but also the characters in the stories are loosely connected to each other.

One young woman uses her prescribed cat to put off the “we need to talk” conversation with the boyfriend that she’s sure is about to break up with her. Her best friend is prescribed a cat to help her deal with her resentment of her mother’s extreme favoritism towards her brother. And her brother, well, her brother Tomoya’s work at a cat rescue organization turns out to lie at the heart of the Kokoro Clinic – even if Tomoya himself isn’t aware of it – at all.

Although his cat certainly is.

Escape Rating C: Pardon me for mixing animal metaphors, but after finishing this second book in the series I’m inclined to say that We’ll Prescribe You a Cat might have been better as a ‘one-trick pony’.

Alternatively, it could be that as a cat lover myself, I’m not sure I’m willing to watch Nikké the cat – or his person Tomoya – suffer through Nikké’s very long decline just so that we can watch more people get matched up with more cats.

Either way, the idea behind this series seems like a story that was good once but loses something with repeated applications – even if some of the characters within its pages definitely NEED to be prescribed more than one cat.

As much as I enjoyed the first book, I think that this second one fell flat for me because we already know the twist at the end. The big reveal at the end of We’ll Prescribe You a Cat, as much as it was foreshadowed in the story, was still a sad but delightful surprise. That the magical realism of the setup allowed for Nikké and Chitose to pay their survival forward to others of their kind was both charming and touching. And it still kind of is, but it’s also played for laughs this time around more than was comfortable for this reader, particularly considering the price that Nikké and his person are both paying for it.

And at the same time, the idea that a cat is being mischievous even as he’s winding up his ninth life along with a whole lot of people – and cats – is very, well, cat. But this one broke my heart more than a bit, and not in a good way.

There are at least two more books in the series that have yet to be translated into English. I’m not sure whether I’ll pick them up or not. I love the idea of being prescribed a cat, but the way the overall story seems to be working out gives me the weepies in the worst way.

Your reading mileage on this one may vary, and probably varies significantly depending on how recently you might have lost a beloved companion animal. (I still miss Lucifer a LOT)

#BookReview: Something Whiskered by Miranda James

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Something Whiskered by Miranda JamesSomething Whiskered (Cat in the Stacks #17) by Miranda James
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy mystery, mystery
Series: Cat in the Stacks #17
Pages: 320
Published by Berkley on July 29, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A dead baron, an Irish castle, and an unexpected ghost . . . Charlie Harris, Helen Louise Brady, and their feline friend Diesel find themselves hot on the trail of a conniving killer in this delightful Cat in the Stacks Mystery from New York Times bestselling author Miranda James.
Charlie Harris and his wife, Helen Louise Brady, have arrived in Ireland for their honeymoon. After a few days in Dublin, they head to County Clare, ancestral home to Helen Louise’s extended family, the O’Bradys. Her cousin Lorcan runs Castle O’Brady as a bed-and-breakfast with his wife Caoimhe and their daughter and son-in-law. But upon arrival at the castle, the newlyweds are shocked to see a body falling from the roof.
The dead man is centenarian Finn, Baron O'Brady, Lorcan’s grandfather, which means that Lorcan now becomes the new Baron O'Brady. Was someone in a hurry for Lorcan to assume the title and ownership of the estate? Or is there another reason for wanting Finn dead? And why is a ghostly cat making an appearance in their room-is he trying to warn them? Charlie and Helen Louise must answer these questions and more as they realize the local garda can't solve the crime alone. And along with Diesel they will have to investigate themselves or risk something wicked coming their way…

My Review:

From the very first book in the Cat in the Stacks series, Murder Past Due, I’ve been here for Diesel, the very large and very sweet Maine Coon cat who owns the series’ amateur detective protagonist, librarian Charlie Harris. This SEVENTEENTH entry in the series is no exception.

But this entry takes Diesel, Charlie, and Charlie’s new wife Helen Louise Brady far from their usual stomping grounds in tiny Athena Mississippi to Helen Louise’s rather expansive childhood second home in Ireland.

At the end of the previous story, Requiem for a Mouse, Charlie and Helen Louise finally managed to get themselves to the altar after a several books – and years – long courtship. This trip to Ireland was intended to be a honeymoon – and a chance for Charlie to meet some of his old friend/new wife’s extended family.

The visit goes splat from the off. Literally, as the body of Helen Louise’s beloved Great-Uncle Finn crashes to the ground right in front of their car as they are pulling up the long drive to Helen Louise’s childhood home-away-from-home, her family’s ancestral Castle O’Brady, of which dear old Finn was Baron O’Brady – right up until he went splat.

Which puts Charlie right into his familiar shoes – even if they are brogues this time around  – as an amateur detective. He overhears one disgruntled family member describe him as a nosy parker, but if the shoe fits… At least this time around Charlie will be poking his nose in where it may or may not belong at the request of his recently acquired family and the even more recently ennobled new Baron O’Brady.

Helen Louise’s cousin Lorcan needs someone to figure out who pushed his 100-year-old granddad off the castle roof, and he hopes that his new cousin-by-marriage will find the answer before it tears his whole family apart.

Charlie will find the answer – he always does – but the tearing apart is bound to happen anyway. No one’s secrets EVER survive a murder investigation – not even an amateur one.

Escape Rating B: In spite of the terrible circumstances, I couldn’t help but envy Charlie and Helen Louise a bit for taking Diesel with them on what should have been a glorious trip. We ALWAYS miss the cats something terrible when we travel, but the idea of taking Diesel along – as much as I adored the concept – did strain credulity just a bit.

That Diesel was so beautifully behaved on their trip read as a bit more unreal than the delightful ghost cat, Fergal, who haunted Castle O’Brady and showed up to commune regularly with his living counterpart.

In spite of the presence of Diesel the international traveler, this story does take Charlie Harris very much out of his comfortable home ground, giving the series as well as its amateur sleuth a chance to stretch their wings rather a lot.

The case is as twisted as any that Charlie has ever faced, as the victim and all the suspects are connected to his new wife’s family. He may not yet know all the players, but he’s aware from the beginning that no matter who turns out to be guilty, Helen Louise is going to be heartbroken over every stone he overturns in the case.

That Diesel comes under threat – even more so than his people – adds a frisson of dread to what is otherwise a cozy – if deadly – mystery.

But the heart of this mystery, just like the mysteries that Charlie can’t resist solving back home in Athena, is wrapped up in the relationships among the people who live and/or work in and around the Castle, many of whom are Helen Louise’s family and friends.

Baron O’Brady is dead. He died on his one hundredth birthday, so he had plenty of time in which to amass both friends and enemies. Everyone says they loved the old man, but no one is universally loved no matter how good they are. Either he stood in someone’s way, or he made someone angry enough to murder him. Or both.

But the setting for the murder is even more intimate than Charlie’s usual stomping grounds. Everyone knows everyone, everyone seems to tolerate or forgive everyone’s foibles, and everyone protects each other – often without meaning to. He’ll have to take the place – and its people – apart in order to put all the clues together.

There were parts of this story I absolutely loved. It’s ALWAYS great to see Diesel again, while Fergal the ghost cat was a very nice addition. I did find Diesel’s behavior in this circumstances to be a bit too good to be true, but I was still happy to see him.

The travel parts of the story were lovely, and brought back fond memories of my own trip just a few years ago even as it gave me a list of more places to see if we ever get back.

I was completely caught up in the mystery and the ties that bind and strangle – in some cases literally – among the people at Castle O’Brady. But I found the ending a kind of muted, a bit sad, and not nearly as cathartic a wrap up as I expected.

So many of those involved in the murder seem to have died ‘offstage’. We do know how it ends, but we don’t see it ending nearly as much as I had hoped for. I like a good gathering of the suspects and arrest of the killers but this story didn’t work out that way. But I did come into this hoping for a comfort read and I absolutely did get one!

Summing things up, I loved catching up with Diesel. I wouldn’t mind seeing Fergal again. But I’m looking forward to Charlie’s next adventure, back home in Athena where he – along with Helen Louise and especially Diesel – belong.

#BookReview: The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant by Liza Tully

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
#BookReview: The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant by Liza TullyThe World's Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant (A Merritt & Blunt Mystery) by Liza Tully
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy mystery, mystery
Series: Merritt & Blunt #1
Pages: 400
Published by Berkley on July 8, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A great detective's young assistant yearns for glory, but first they have learn to get along in this delightful feel good mystery.
Olivia Blunt doesn't want to be an assistant detective for the rest of her life. She's determined to learn everything she can from her mentor and renowned investigator, Aubrey Merritt, but the latter is no easy grader.
After weeks of fielding phone calls from parties desperate for the world-renowned detective’s help, a case comes across Olivia’s desk that just might be worthy of Merritt’s skills. On the evening of her sixty-fifth birthday party, Victoria Summersworth somehow fell over her balcony railing to her death on the rocky shore of Lake Champlain. She was a happy woman—rich, beloved, in love, and matriarch of the preeminent Summersworth family. The police have ruled it a suicide, but her daughter Haley thinks it was murder.
Merritt is ever the skeptic, but Olivia believes Haley. Plus, she’s desperate to prove her investigative skills to her aloof boss. But the Summersworth family drama is a complicated web.
Olivia realizes she might be in over her head with this whole detective thing... or she might be unravelling a mystery even bigger than the one she’d started with.

My Review:

This one grabbed me by the title. No, seriously, when I saw that title I had to see what the actual story was all about. And what a story it is!

Aubrey Merritt, at least in this 21st century setting, IS the world’s greatest detective. Whether others have held that title before her, or will afterwards, at this moment in time, she’s definitely it. Really, truly.

That she seems like the love child, or at least the book baby, of Sherlock Holmes at his most condescending and that Devil who wore Prada – with the ego and the manners to match – just adds to her reputation and makes her that much more formidable when she’s on the case.

But this isn’t actually Merritt’s story – not that we don’t get hints of what made her the irascible but effective private detective that she is today.

This is Olivia Blunt’s story. Olivia is that ‘just okay assistant’ of the title. Which is actually a step up from what Olivia believes her new boss thinks of her – and not without some justification.

Olivia, former fact-checker for an unnamed news organization, begins her first mystery with her knees knocking, already on the back foot for being one whole minute late, interviewing for her dream job as Merritt’s assistant. The interview is NOT going well – or so it seems from Olivia’s impostor syndrome tinted point of view.

But she gets the job anyway. Quite possibly because Merritt is extremely difficult to work for – putting it very, very mildly. She’s not actually mean, but she’s frequently both demanding AND demeaning. To her clients as well as to her ‘just okay’ assistant. And she goes through assistants like tissue paper – for any image of that description you care to imagine.

All of which comes into play on their first actual case together, after Merritt is hired by the grieving daughter of Victoria Summersworth, owner of a beautiful – and exclusive – resort on Vermont’s Lake Champlain.

Haley Summersworth can’t accept the way that the police have taken the easy way out of ruling her mother’s death a suicide. Her mother was happy, healthy and making plans for the future right up until the moment she died. Something about the verdict is not right. Plausible, but not right. Haley wants answers – in spite of her family’s willingness to accept the conclusion the police have come to.

What Haley doesn’t count on – and what Olivia Blunt doesn’t expect – is that a murder investigation turns over a lot of rocks in the lives of every single person even on the periphery of the case. The ugly things that crawl out from  under those rocks are going to crawl over everyone’s lives – whether they are guilty or innocent of anything at all. Nothing will ever be the same – especially their relationships.

And neither will Olivia Blunt, the just okay assistant, whose heart is a bit too open and accepting – while her eyes aren’t nearly as wide open as they need to be. This case will be just the beginning of the making of her – if she just manages to live long enough to learn from it.

Escape Rating B: At first, I thought this was a debut novel – but it’s not. The author has previously written dark thrillers under the name Elisabeth Elo and literary fiction as Elisabeth Panttaja Brink. So not a debut author, but still first in a new direction and a series.

For the first book in a series, this does a terrific job of both setting up the characters and telling the story of their first real case. I’m a bit on the fence about it being truly cozy, as the case is a sordid mess that reminds me a LOT of Moonflower Murders, possibly with a touch of Knives Out. While the relationship between Merritt and Blunt is anything but cozy or even properly master and apprentice.

What this is, however, is a traditional mystery in the vein of Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of Mystery, updated to a contemporary setting. Complete with the traditional gathering of the suspects for the big reveal at the end – along with one final twist in the tale.

An ending that has more than enough threads and layers that, while I saw some of it coming, I certainly didn’t see all of it coming until that big finish.

I’m also facepalming a bit at the series title, a Merritt and Blunt Mystery, because their names are a really big clue about their characters and their relationship. Aubrey Merritt expects her assistants to find their way because of their ‘merit’ – their ability to follow along her methods and her process with no actual teaching and very limited clues.

She’s also extremely ‘blunt’, both to her assistant and to her clients, in a way that should get her tossed out on her ear an awful lot, but mostly doesn’t because tossing a well-dressed 60-something woman out of anywhere physically is going to look bad for whoever does it. Whether Merritt deserves it or not.

The case is very much Moonflower Murders, in that it takes place on a family owned and operated resort, that there are lot of seething resentments and family rivalries lurking just under the surface, that there is a lot of money at stake, and that Olivia Blunt at least knows about as much about what she’s doing as an investigator as Susan Ryeland does.

In the end, I had a lot of fun with this one but the partnership isn’t fully baked yet. Although, by that end Aubrey Merritt seemed a bit more like Lillian Pentecost in Fortune Favors the Dead than she did The Devil Wears Prada, particularly her unwillingness to admit her own weaknesses and her testiness when those weaknesses get poked. Which leads this reader to the sense that the relationship between Merritt and Blunt has room and respect to grow into.

Finally, I have questions about the viability of Olivia’s romantic relationship back home with her fiance because that felt a bit tacked on to the story. Leaving this reader curious to see where both those relationships – and the investigations – go in later books in the series. I’m looking forward to reading them.

#AudioBookReview: First-Time Caller by B.K. Borison

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews
#AudioBookReview: First-Time Caller by B.K. BorisonFirst-Time Caller (Heartstrings, #1) by B.K. Borison
Narrator: E.J. Bingham, Hathaway Lee
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: borrowed from library, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, romantic comedy
Series: Heartstrings #1
Pages: 420
Length: 11 hours and 54 minutes
Published by Berkley, Penguin Audio on February 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A hopeless romantic meets a jaded radio host in this cozy, Sleepless in Seattle-inspired love story from beloved author B.K. Borison.
Aiden Valentine has a secret: he's fallen out of love with love. And as the host of Baltimore's romance hotline, that's a bit of a problem. But when a young girl calls in to the station asking for dating advice for her mom, the interview goes viral, thrusting Aiden and Heartstrings into the limelight.
Lucie Stone thought she was doing just fine. She has a good job; an incredible family; and a smart, slightly devious kid. But when all of Baltimore is suddenly scrutinizing her love life-or lack thereof—she begins to question if she's as happy as she thought. Maybe a little more romance wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Everyone wants Lucie to find her happy ending... even the handsome, temperamental man calling the shots. But when sparks start to fly behind the scenes, Lucie must make the final call between the radio-sponsored happily ever after or the man in the headphones next to her.

My Review:

Lucie Stone and Aiden Valen make real magic in the radio booth – but first they have to get there. And that takes some doing on the part of practically every single person in Lucie’s life – including her twelve-year-old daughter.

Which is pretty much the dichotomy that powers this entire grumpy-sunshine romance.

The first part of the story is the setup. Aiden Valen – who broadcasts as Aiden ValenTINE, is the host for a romance hotline on an independent Baltimore radio station. A station he is literally tanking, all by himself, because he’s fallen out of love with love and is spreading his disillusionment all over his show.

Obviously, Aiden is the grump in this pairing.

Lucie, on the other hand, is the sunshine, even though her life doesn’t have quite as much sunshine as it ought to have. At least not according to her daughter Maya, her daughter’s dads, her coworkers, her bestie, and seemingly everyone else in her life.

And that’s where the conspiracy comes in, the fun begins, and the magic happens. Because Lucie is all about the magic of love, even if she’s never managed to find it for herself. Which is why her daughter concocts a scheme to call into Aiden’s radio show on her mom’s behalf, in the hopes that Aiden can help Lucie find what she’s looking for.

Lucie hears her daughter on the phone in the middle of the night talking with a man. From under the covers, the better to muffle the sound. At first, Lucie goes ballistic on both of them, not unreasonably so. But it’s late and she’s tired and she’s more tired of being lonely than she wants to admit.

So she ends up talking with Aiden for the rest of his shift, and she’s honest about life, dating, the universe and pretty much everything. And it goes VIRAL. Lucie’s struck a chord with the entire Eastern Seaboard. With Aiden along for a ride he never thought he’d EVER want to take.

Because Lucie still believes in magic, while Aiden doesn’t even believe in love. Until he does.

Escape Rating B: I ended up with an epic amount of mixed feelings about this one. The second half of the book – once they get into the booth together and start talking to each other and to the people of Baltimore who are shipping it like mad – it really is magic.

But getting there, that first half of the book, was a bit of a slog. It seemed as if every single person in Lucie’s inner circle was a boundary-stomping jerk. While this setup may have been exactly what Lucie needed, the way it happened and the way they all, collectively, went about it was absolutely NOT what she wanted or how she wanted it.

The relationship that Aiden and Lucie develop once they get into the booth – and out of it – was all about consent. Specifically hers. But getting her there was the absolute opposite, a campaign conducted by the people who did love her and did mean the best for her with their interference. But does that mean it’s okay to ignore someone’s expressed wishes because you ‘mean well’ and where does that end? It’s a situation that I find triggering and others may as well, but your reading mileage hopefully varies.

Once they interact directly with each other, the whole thing is utterly magical. I adored their banter, I loved the way they played off each other, and it was extra fun that it seemed as if even though we were experiencing this story through their alternating first-person perspectives, that Aiden didn’t have a clue about his own feelings, while Lucie steadfastly avoided getting a clue that the entire city was shipping the relationship that neither of them recognized they were having.

I also adored that Lucie was in a male-dominated profession (she’s a car mechanic), that she’s doing it well and is well respected by her co-workers, and that all four of her somewhat grumpy, older, male coworkers are shipping it along with the rest of Baltimore just added to the fun – and to the magic.

Speaking of magic, the audiobook is magical, and it’s also a terrific medium for experiencing this particular story. The experience is all the better because the alternating perspectives are voiced by not one but two narrators, Hathaway Lee for Lucie and E.J. Bingham for Aiden. Because we’re so deeply inside their heads for this, it worked so much better that each had their own narrative voice to go along with their own internal voice.

In the end, the good outweighed the ‘less good’ parts of this story, although I have to confess that I’d probably have bailed if so many friends hadn’t talked both the book and the author up so much. It also helped that the radio show parts of the story reminded me very fondly of Turn It Up by Inez Kelly, a story I read a while back that was also about co-hosts on a radio program that talk their way into romance with the same kind of banter.

Which leads to one last comment. According to the author, this book is meant to invoke fond memories of the movie Sleepless in Seattle. Whether it does or not is certainly in the eye of the beholder. Howsomever, a second book in this Heartstrings series has been announced, And Now, Back to You, inspired by When Harry Met Sally. I can’t wait to see if the iconic scene from that movie is replicated – and how!

A- #BookReview: It Takes a Psychic by Jayne Castle + #Excerpt

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> blog tours> book reviews> Excerpts
A- #BookReview: It Takes a Psychic by Jayne Castle + #ExcerptIt Takes a Psychic (Ghost Hunters #17) by Jayne Castle
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: action adventure romance, paranormal romance, romantic suspense, science fiction romance
Series: Harmony #17
Pages: 316
Published by Berkley on June 3, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Two unlikely allies search for the secrets of their pasts while on the run within the Alien world of Harmony in the thrilling new novel by New York Times bestselling author Jayne Castle.
Leona Griffin is at the height of her career as a para-archeologist thanks to a recent Underworld discovery. Her high profile attracts the attention of an organization of elite, secretive collectors. They want her to authenticate the artifacts that aspiring members submit as evidence to join their group. The ceremony takes place at a glittering reception where Leona is shocked to discover that one of the relics is a powerful Old-World object known as Pandora’s Box. But she’s not the only one interested in that artifact.
Oliver Rancourt, a man with a unique talent—they say you never see him coming—is also there. Leona knows she must not underestimate him. Attempting to make a discreet exit, she stumbles over the body of a waiter wearing the emblem of a dangerous cult. Before she can alert authorities, a police raid sends the reception into chaos. To avoid being arrested, Leona slips away with Oliver—a risky decision that gets her fired.
Now forced to work together, Leona and Oliver pursue an investigation that leads them to the town of Lost Creek where the locals are obsessed with a chilling legend involving a long-dead cult leader and illicit paranormal experiments. But Leona knows the real danger may be the irresistible attraction between herself and Oliver.

My Review:

Leona Griffin KNOWS she’s in the middle of a setup, she just doesn’t know what the setup is supposed to set her up FOR.

The job seemed on the up-and-up, for select definitions of up all the way around. Leona is at the height of her career as a para-archaeologist, as well as temporarily famous for rescuing herself and her colleagues from conducting and/or being part of an experiment, trapped in the mesmerizing, mysterious and above all psionically powerful section of planet Harmony’s Underworld known as the Glass House.

She assumes that the university where she works as a researcher is just using her temporary fame to get more donations. Which would work for her – even if she hates this part of the work – as Leona IS a researcher and would hopefully get some of her own research funded by at least some of those donations.

But that would be too simple. Also not nearly as distasteful, not to mention dangerous, as the actual setup she’s stuck on stage participating in.

Her talent – or at least the one that is publicly known – is her ability to determine whether an artifact is a fake or the ‘Real McCoy’, assuming that old idiom is still in use centuries in the future. However, the elite collectors’ society that strong-armed her employer into providing her services for this dog and pony show has a different agenda. They’re just testing her, hoping that she’ll miss a fake so they can embarrass her in public. Not because they know her, but because entertainment value of one sort or another is all that the hired help is there for – and that’s all she is to the rich and entitled no matter what her professional qualifications are.

While the person pulling the society’s strings has a third, nefarious reason for setting Leona up. It’s a reason that reaches back into the darkest period of Harmony’s history and hopes to repeat it. No matter how many deaths the notorious Vincent Lee Vance caused in that chaotic past.

Or how many deaths his self-appointed heir needs to cause in their here and now to achieve their insane goals. Starting with Leona Griffin’s.

Escape Rating A-: This was one of those cases of the right book at the right time. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, even if the right time was several weeks before I could post this review. I love this series so much that I just couldn’t resist the siren song of dust bunny chortles a minute longer. And I’m not in the least bit sorry about that!

If you’ve never visited Harmony, you’ve never met a dust bunny. Which means you are really missing something special, because the native dust bunnies pretty much steal the show in every single adventure.

That’s particularly true in this latest story, as Roxy starts out by persuading Leona to rescue a bunch of caged dust bunnies in a clandestine research lab (and we all know where THAT was heading), then stealing a suspiciously specifically tuned crystal as well as a psionically powered dildo, moves on to picking up a fancy hat at a bridal store, and ends up by stealing Leona Griffin’s heart along with an entire floating fantasy amusement park thrill ride.

Dust bunnies are ALL adrenaline junkies at heart, and Roxy is no exception. Not that she can’t throw down when danger is near. Dust bunnies are predators, after all. By the time you see their second set of eyes, it’s too late for whoever has endangered them or the human they’ve decided to adopt.

And never, for a single second, think that it’s the other way around.

This particular entry in the Harmony/Ghost Hunters series, hearkens back to its immediate predecessor in this series, People in Glass Houses, where we were first introduced to the Griffin Sisters and their dangerous family secret. It also reaches way back into the connecting Arcane Society series and its Fogg Lake offshoot – back to Harmony’s literal and literary ancestors in Lightning in a Mirror.

I’ve read the whole interconnected series, both the historical/contemporary Arcane Society and the futuristic Harmony series and ALWAYS had a ball – and not just because of the dust bunnies although they certainly ‘help’. As they generally do. But I love the great interconnected, interwoven web of the whole thing. And I’ll confess that I’m not sure this one is a good entry point – especially with the web of connections linked to it.

But I DO love this whole thing and want to share it, so if you’re looking for a way in, try starting at either the first Fogg Lake story, The Vanishing, or the first Griffin Sisters story, People in Glass Houses. Be advised, once you get hooked you’ll want to read them ALL! (Speaking of sharing, there’s an excerpt below so that you can get a taste of this book!)

I know that I’ve talked more about the series as a whole than this particular entry in it, but that’s how I felt about this one. I read it because I was looking to be comfortably immersed in a world I knew and loved, even if – or especially because – I knew that the characters IN the story would have to go through some uncomfortable experiences and revelations along the way. As they did.

But the happy ever after was earned, the dust bunnies DEFINITELY got their just reward, and the latest evil was successfully vanquished. I don’t know which of her many interconnected worlds the author will be visiting next, but whichever it is, I will absolutely be there!

Excerpt from It Takes a Psychic by Jayne Castle (aka Jayne Ann Krentz)

The psi-lock was relatively simple. It had been designed to keep the dust bunnies inside, not to keep humans from opening it. She touched it with her fingertips, rezzed her senses, and unlocked the door.

The dust bunnies tumbled out. They bounced up and down in front of her-she got the feeling she was being thanked, and then all of them-including the one that had gotten her attention in the gallery and led her to the lab-dashed out the door and vanished into the dark hallway. Evidently they didn’t need her help to escape the mansion.

“Guess my work here is done,” she said under her breath.

But the discovery of the imprisoned dust bunnies put a new light on the Society. She had been well aware that the organization was one of the university’s major donors-that was why she had been sent to the gala-and she’d suspected that several of the members dabbled in the gray market. Avid collectors were obsessive by nature. They rarely went out of their way to ensure the legal provenance of valuable artifacts.

But discovering that the Society was conducting research using dust bunnies as test subjects was too much. It could not be overlooked. She would report the news to the director of the para-archaeology department when she met with him in the morning. Morton Bullinger might be willing to ignore issues of sketchy provenances, but even he could not ignore this. He would have to take the information to the university’s board of directors and they would be forced to confront the endowment fund people. There was no way the institution could continue to accept money from the Society.

She started toward the door. She was tempted to examine some of the more interesting artifacts on the workbenches, but she had taken enough risks. She could not afford to get caught inside the lab.

She changed her mind when the beam of her flashlight swept across a gracefully curved black crystal bowl in a glass case. She could feel the disturbing vibe of power in the object from across the room.

Curious, she went closer and rezzed her senses a little. The bowl was definitely Alien in origin and there was a lot of energy locked in the object. Fascinated, she put her fingertips on the lock of the glass case.

A sharp frisson of awareness sparked across her senses, rattling her already tense nerves. She was no longer alone. She whirled around, struggling to come up with a believable explanation for her obviously illicit presence in the lab. She was good at thinking on her feet but there were not a lot of options here. Something along the lines of the classic I was looking for the restroom would have to do. It was weak, but combined with her temporarily famous status and her connection to the university, it might work.

She opened her mouth to start talking very fast but she went blank when the beam of her flashlight illuminated the man in the slightly rumpled tux standing in the doorway. She recognized him immediately. She had picked him out of the crowd earlier in the evening when she realized she was being watched. Somehow she had known he was the one who had been keeping an eye on her. She had concluded that he was either undercover security or a professional antiquities thief. The one thing she had been certain of was that he was not the boring, harmless-looking collector he was pretending to be.

Oh, shit.

“Good evening, Dr. Griffin,” he said. He adjusted his black-framed glasses. “I thought I’d lost you. Are you selecting a little souvenir to take with you when you leave tonight? I don’t blame you. There are some very nice items in the Society’s collection.”

***

He thought she was a thief.

Under the circumstances, that made sense-after all, she was not supposed to be in the lab. But that left his own status unclarified. Was he a security guard, or did he plan to steal one of the artifacts himself? If she were a betting woman, she would have put her money down on the latter possibility. She was quite sure she was dealing with a professional thief. He probably saw her as competition and, maybe, a threat.

There was nothing notable about him-nothing at all-and that was precisely what had given her goose bumps. A man like this one ought not be the sort who got overlooked in a crowd, yet that was exactly what had happened out there in the ballroom. He had moved through the throng of well-dressed guests as if he were a ghost.

Not that he went completely unnoticed. On a subconscious, psychic level, people were aware of him. She had watched, intrigued, as individuals moved out of his way when they sensed his aura. A powerful energy field had that effect on others.

As far as she could tell, she was the only one who had really paid attention to him. She was pretty sure there was only one explanation for his near-invisibility-he possessed some serious talent. Yet he was going out of his way to try to conceal it. His ability to do that was even more interesting.

At one point he had cruised past her while she sipped a glass of sparkling water and pretended to admire a statue of the Society’s founder. She’d caught a glimpse of specter-cat eyes behind the lenses of the black-framed glasses and picked up the vibe of his powerful energy field. It would be very easy to underestimate this man. She would not make that mistake.

Excerpted from It Takes a Psychic by Jayne Castle Copyright © 2025 by Jayne Castle. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

A+ #BookReview: Who Will Remember by C.S. Harris

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Who Will Remember by C.S. HarrisWho Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr, #20) by C.S. Harris
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, regency mystery
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr #20
Pages: 384
Published by Berkley on April 15, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The gruesome murder of a prominent nobleman throws an already unsettled London into chaos in this electrifying new historical mystery by the USA Today bestselling author of What Cannot Be Said.
August 1816. England is in the grip of what will become known as the Year Without a Summer. Facing the twin crises of a harvest-destroying volcanic winter and the economic disruption caused by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British monarchy finds itself haunted by the looming threat of bloody riots not seen since the earliest days of the French Revolution. Amidst the turmoil, a dead man is found hanging upside down by one leg in an abandoned chapel, his hands tied behind his back. The pose eerily echoes the image depicted on a tarot card known as Le Pendu, the Hanged Man. The victim—Lord Preston Farnsworth, the younger brother of one of the Regent’s boon companions—was a passionate crusader against what he called the forces of darkness, namely criminality, immorality, and sloth. His brutal murder shocks the Palace and panics the already troubled populace.
Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, learns of the murder from a ragged orphan who leads him to the corpse and then disappears. At first, everyone in the dead man’s orbit paints Lord Preston as a selfless saint. But as Sebastian delves deeper into his life, he quickly realizes that the man had accumulated more than his fair share of enemies, including Major Hugh Chandler, a close friend who once saved Sebastian’s life. Sebastian also discovers that the pious Lord Preston may have been much more dangerous than those he sought to redeem.
As dark clouds press down on the city and the rains fall unceasingly, two more victims are found, one strangled and one shot, with ominous tarot cards placed on their bodies. The killer is sending a gruesome message and Sebastian is running out of time to decipher it before more lives are lost and a fraught post-war London explodes.

My Review:

One of the things I utterly adore about this series is the way that each book is firmly fixed in its time and place, and that that foundation in its there and then shows the exact opposite of ANY vision we might have in our heads about what the Regency period was like. Especially if that vision owes its glitter and sparkle to Bridgerton, Georgette Heyer or even Jane Austen.

Weymouth Bay with Approaching Storm. Painting by John Constable (1816)

This particular entry in the series shines a light in darker places than usual, as it takes place in the summer of 1816, which, basically, wasn’t. Not that the summers of 1817, 1818 and 1819 were all that summer-y either. Although the sunsets were spectacular for years afterwards.

What made the situation so much darker and chillier, as this book explores rather, well, darkly, is that they didn’t know WHY clouds and storms blotted out the sun for days and weeks on end. It’s not totally unreasonable for people to have thought the world was coming to an end.

Because they were freezing and starving and it seemed like it would never end.

Not that already weren’t entirely too many people starving and shivering because Britain’s post-Napoleonic War economy was a wreck. The war was over – YAY! BUT, the soldiers were demobilized and thrown back into the population without pensions. The government was going through a period of austerity – for everyone but themselves, of course – and jobs were scarce.

And the government – and so many of the upper classes – were just so certain that it was the fault of the poor themselves that they were poor, and if they were just forced to be good, upright citizens who knew their place and didn’t question their betters that conditions would miraculously improve.

(And doesn’t that sound so very familiar?)

So when Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, gets called to the sight of the gruesome murder of one of those upper class so-called reformers, it’s clear exactly which rocks he’s going to be turning over to find out whodunnit. Because he’s certain that whoever the killer might have been, it’s not going to be the easy solution that the Crown demands in order to, well, keep order among the lower classes while hoping to satisfy the upper classes that justice is being done.

Even if it isn’t. And won’t. Unless Devlin gets his hands dirty with yet another investigation that some members of his own family would prefer he left well enough alone. Even if that well enough isn’t well at all – and they know it.

Escape Rating A+: I’ve not been remotely coy about the fact that I love this series, and this entry absolutely did not change my mind one iota. Over the course of 20 books in 20 years – and counting – it just gets better and better.

Over the course of the series I’ve realized that I’m mostly here for the historical fiction aspects of the series. Not just the way that the author illuminates this time and place that we think we know, but also the way that we walk London’s streets with Devlin and feel the cobblestones under our own feet.

At the same time, the mystery is always important and not merely in the sense of figuring out both whodunnit and why it was done. Murder is a disruption to order – to the way things ought to be. The Regency period, with its incapacitated king and its overly self-indulgent regent who will be king, was a period where order was already disrupted. And that’s before one factors in the disruptions of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

Meanwhile, the seeds for the Industrial Revolution have already been sown, and revolt and rebellion are bubbling up from the so-called lower orders who have seen their disruptions and results in nearby France and in the far away but less bloody and more successful United States. Change is in the wind – even if that wind is not blowing the skies clear enough to grow crops.

The disruptions caused by murder in this series, particularly this murder, are intended to show what’s lurking in the depths that is usually covered over by government propaganda and social expectations.

Because the victim in this particular case was believed to be a ‘good’ if somewhat priggish man who was working for the ‘betterment’ of the country even if he was a bit overbearing about it all. But someone knows that facade was just that, a false front that they are determined to strip away. This is a fascinating case because the point of it is NOT to capture a villain, but to expose exactly how much of a villain the murder victim really was – and to uncover his confederates in that villainy.

Justice, such as it turns out to be in this case, has already been had. And this entry in the series is all the more interesting for its purposes to have been so turned around and yet resolved as satisfactorily as possible.

I was all in on this one from the very first page, and finished the story in a bit of a sad catharsis because I was glad to see it resolved but that resolve is equivocal in exactly the way that it should be and that was marvelous in its way.

One final note about this story. I’m surprised to have a readalike for this that is not historical fiction or mystery, but if you’re interested in the effects of the year without a summer, there’s an award winning science fiction short story, “The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer, that deals with the effects of a similar situation on one small community and its lovely and hopeful in ways that make it a good follow up to Who Will Remember.

A- #AudioBookReview: Kills Well With Others by Deanna Raybourn

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: Kills Well With Others by Deanna RaybournKills Well with Others (Killers of a Certain Age, #2) by Deanna Raybourn
Narrator: Jane Oppenheimer, Christina Delaine
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Killers of a Certain Age #2
Pages: 368
Length: 10 hours and 19 minutes
Published by Berkley, Penguin Audio on March 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

“Much like fine wine, battle-hardened assassins grow better with age.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner

Four women assassins, senior in status—and in age—sharpen their knives for another bloody good adventure in this riotous follow-up to the New York Times bestselling sensation Killers of a Certain Age.

After more than a year of laying low, Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie are called back into action. They have enjoyed their time off, but the lack of excitement is starting to chafe: a professional killer can only take so many watercolor classes and yoga sessions without itching to strangle someone...literally. When they receive a summons from the head of the elite assassin organization known as the Museum, they are ready tackle the greatest challenge of their careers.

Someone on the inside has compiled a list of important kills committed by Museum agents, connected to a single, shadowy figure, an Eastern European gangster with an iron fist, some serious criminal ambition, and a tendency to kill first and ask questions later. This new nemesis is murdering agents who got in the way of their power hungry plans and the aging quartet of killers is next.

Together the foursome embark on a wild ride across the globe on the double mission of rooting out the Museum’s mole and hunting down the gangster who seems to know their next move before they make it. Their enemy is unlike any they’ve faced before, and it will take all their killer experience to get out of this mission alive.

My Review:

The wifi wasn’t THAT bad. No, seriously, I took the same trip on the MS Queen Mary 2 last summer, the one that the team from Killers of a Certain Age takes from New York City to Southampton in the early stages of this caper – and the wifi honestly wasn’t that bad. The rest of the ship, at least the parts we saw of it, were very much as described.

No murder though. At least, not as far as we heard!

Then again, Billie and company are very, very good at their jobs, and the whole point of sending in an elite team of assassins is for them to make the murder look like it never happened. Not that Pasha Lazarov isn’t very, very dead when Billie’s done with him and his teddy bear, but that his death doesn’t look like a murder at all.

Don’t worry, the teddy bear is fine. Pasha, not so much, but then that was the point. Even if, as Billie suspects, he was the wrong point.

Still, contract complete, case closed. Right? Wrong, as the team discovers when they make their way to their safe house and discover that the house isn’t safe at all. In fact, it’s on FIRE.

And suddenly, so is this story. Because someone in their organization has sold them out, put a target on their backs while aiming them at the wrong villain for the wrong reasons even as the real monster plans to toy with them as they chase the true mastermind around Europe while that mastermind plots revenge, mayhem and a gigantic payday steeped in blood and decades in the making.

It’s all about the ‘one that got away’. For the traitor, it’s about a future they let slip out of their hands. For the villain, it’s payback for the murder of their father – who truly was an evil bastard – at the righteous hands of Billie and her team. For the team, it’s about a case they were never able to close and a luminous piece of looted Nazi art that they were never able to restore.

Until now. If they survive. If, instead of age and treachery beating youth and skill, age and skill can manage to beat youth and treachery one more time.

Escape Rating A-: The first book in this series, Killers of a Certain Age, was both an absolute surprise and an utter delight. Just as “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” – a catchphrase whose origins Billie and her team are just the right age to remember and appreciate – nobody expects a quartet of sixty-something women to be an elite team of assassins. Not unless they remember the movie Red with Helen Mirren playing a character who could easily have been one of Billie’s aliases, or who have fallen in love with The Thursday Murder Club series, whose main character is also quite a bit like Billie and is also played by the same actress in the upcoming TV series.

While that was not as big a digression as it could have been, that digression is a bit on point for this story.

The main story here, as it was in the first book, is told from Billie’s first-person perspective as she and her team are in the midst of the case at hand – even as that case goes utterly off-kilter and entirely out-of-whack. Not that even at the outset it was as ‘in whack’ as it should have been.

But the case does itself digress on occasion, to cases and contracts and errors and omissions in some of the team’s earlier contracts, told from an omniscient third-person perspective. At first, it seems as if those trips down memory lane are for context about their past and their skills, but as the net closes in so too do those memories as various nooses tighten and the past catches up to the present.

At the same time, the case in the present is a wild thrill ride, interwoven with a whole lot of tips and tricks about hiding in plain sight and escaping without a trace and the way that even their oldest tricks still work fantastically well because the weakest point in ANY security system, even the most technically advanced and supposedly unbreakable, is always the human factor. And those haven’t changed at all.

Initially, the story moves just a bit slowly, as, well, cruise ships are wont to do. But the reader catches Billie’s nagging suspicion that something isn’t right fairly early, and we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop right along with her.

When it does – or actually when it catches fire – the story is off, not just to the races but to a whirlwind tour of both sides of the Mediterranean in pursuit of a dead woman with a plan for revenge so cold that she’s willing to take out her own family to see it done.

And still, and yet, and at the heart of it all is the ride or die sisterhood of these four women who will and have, killed and nearly died for each other over the course of four decades – and their bickering willingness to argue and fight and still protect each other and the hostages to fortune they have all gathered along the way – sometimes in spite of themselves.

Just as I wasn’t expecting that first book, I wasn’t expecting this to turn into a series. Hoping, certainly, but not expecting. Which means I’ve been waiting for this with the proverbial bated breath, was absolutely thrilled to get it, and was utterly absorbed by it in both text and marvelous audio – switching back and forth so I could find out how they got out of this mess that much sooner.

All of which means I’m left in the exact same place I was at the end of Killers of a Certain Age. I had a ball with Billie and her found family, and I would love to ride with this crew again. But the story ends in a way that could BE the end. They all do sound like they’ve found the respective happy ever afters that none of them thought they would live to see. Or in Billie’s case, even want.

Howsomever, the first book started because there was something rotten at the heart of their organization that, let’s say, interfered with their pending retirements. They got dragged into THIS case because there was something that was rotten at the heart of their organization that interfered in an entirely different way with their retirements.

When this case gets wrapped up, they make a new and better deal for the retirements they all actually seemed to want this time around. Which doesn’t mean that they got all the rot out of the organization this time around. In fact, I’d kind of be surprised if they had. And very happy about it – possibly much happier than they’ll be if I’m right.

#AudioBookReview: I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming + #Excerpt

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews> Excerpts
#AudioBookReview: I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming + #ExcerptI Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I'm Trapped in a Rom-Com (Cosmic Chaos, #1) by Kimberly Lemming
Narrator: Hazel Addison
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Libro.fm, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: alien abduction romance, Romance, romantasy, science fiction romance
Series: Cosmic Chaos #1
Pages: 304
Length: 9 hours and 23 minutes
Published by Berkley, Penguin Audio on February 18, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A hilarious and sexy romance about a woman who gets dropped on a strange planet only to fall for not one, but two, aliens, from the author of That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf.

Dorothy Valentine is close to getting her PhD in wildlife biology when she’s attacked by a lion. On the bright side, she’s saved! On the not-so-bright side, it’s because they’re abducted by aliens. In her scramble to escape, Dory and the lion commandeer an escape pod and crash-land on an alien planet that has...dinosaurs?

Dory and her new lion bestie, Toto, are saved in the nick of time by a mysterious and sexy alien, Sol. On their new adventure, they team up with the equally hot, equally dangerous Lok, who may or may not be a war criminal. Whether it be trauma, fate, or intrigue, Dory can’t resist the attraction that’s developing in their trio....

As this ragtag group of misfits explore their new planet, Dory learns more about how and why they’ve all ended up together, battles more prehistoric creatures than she imagined (she imagined...zero), and questions if she even wants to go back home to Earth in this hilarious and steamy alien romance adventure comedy romp.

My Review:

Today is Valentine’s Day, which screamed for a romance to be today’s book. I really want to claim that aliens made me do this book to celebrate the day, but that’s not my story.

However, it is, it oh so definitely is, Dory’s story. It’s right there in the title, I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com. Because Dory was abducted by aliens, and she is trapped in what the aliens believed was a rom-com.

Dory’s mileage definitely varies on that. Her story definitely turns into the ‘rom’ part of that phrase. It also, certainly does have plenty of humor in it. But part of that humor is that the aliens intended to set up a rom-com without having an actual feather of a clue as to what either ‘rom’ or ‘com’ truly mean to humans. Or, for that matter, to the Sankado, the species they’ve already abducted.

So Dory isn’t trapped in a rom-com. She does, however, totally and absolutely, get ensnared in the romance part of that equation. Times two.

And it’s a screaming ‘O’ of a blast every wild and crazy step of the way.

Escape Rating B: I picked this one up because a) that spoileriffic title and b) the author’s Mead Mishaps series was incredibly fun (start with That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon and be prepared to both blush furiously and ROFL while doing so.) Not to mention c) the book comes out on Tuesday, today is Valentine’s Day and the perfect timing of the whole thing could not be ignored. At least not by moi.

The trope this story wallows in is a familiar one. Of course it’s the ‘Aliens Made Them Do It’ ™ plot device – the one that the author is using and not the aliens making them do it. Also, the author is using it correctly while the aliens flubbed nearly all of their attempts – which is part of the fun of the thing.

The thing about this particular trope is that it screams for a ‘dubcon’ (that’s dubious consent) warning that can literally be seen from outer space. Dory, along with her partners Sol and Lok, clearly do consent to everything in the moment, but the reader can easily get hung up and thrown out of the story on the question of whether it’s true consent because the aliens have drugged all of them to create that consent at the outset.

Dory occasionally throws herself out of her own story because her desires in the moment and her resulting behavior are contrary to everything she ever knew about herself.

Some readers will be totally squicked out. Some will be all into the scene. Because I was listening to a chunk of the story, I was both blushing furiously (listening to a third party describe a sex scene is just weird) and getting a bit weirded out by just how much the way her partners talked sounded like grooming her to accept things she otherwise wouldn’t.

(BTW the audio narration was FINE, I only switched to the ebook because I was all in and reading is just plain faster.)

In the end I concluded that Dory was just discovering that she was really into the kink of it all and that was okay. But your reading mileage may go through some rough patches along the way and it may definitely vary.

The part of the story that’s just purely funny – in a very wry and totally satirical way – is the way that the particular aliens who got them ALL into this mess created said mess through bureaucratic insanity, academic pomposity, and shoddy research. They created the initial mess, dug themselves a hole and threw the first results of that mess into it, realized that they’d screwed up and then dug some more and made the hole bigger.

Anyone who has ever done research or worked in either a big bureaucratic organization or in academia is going to see the situation for the hilarious and rueful set up that it is and just laugh until tears run down their face because it’s true and awful and truly awful and so very much more common than anyone wants to admit.

But this is still Valentine’s Day so I need to get back to the romance. While the aliens may have been trying to set up a rom-com, in truth this is a sex-into-love romance times two. Dory and her partners create a really hot triad. And in an entirely different kind of warning, while this trio does set fire to the sheets, there is actual fire but no actual sheets. The sexytimes, as Dory herself would say, are “hot as balls” and the scenes never, ever fade to black.

Whether or not that’s your thing, it certainly turns out to be theirs. Even if it’s not you’ll still want to slap the alien meddler who is not just watching, he’s taking notes. Dory certainly does – and who can blame her?

In the end, there are multiple facets to this wild romp of a romance. There’s the meddling aliens who screw up and set off the whole entire mess. There’s the incredibly hot romance between Dory and her two sexy partners, who fall in love while an incompetent research intern meddles with their lives every step of the way.

Last but not least, there’s the two sets of sentient beings, alien to each other, who have been thrown together against their wills trying to make the best of it – in spite of yet more alien meddling. That’s clearly going to be the throughline for the entire Cosmic Chaos series, as this story ends with that incompetent research intern failing upwards into a promotion that Dory and her friends are sure to make certain he regrets at every turn. Or at least I certainly hope so and am looking forward to finding out.

The true level of Cosmic Chaos in this story has to be experienced to be believed, so I’m going to leave you with this excerpt from the opening of I Got Abducted by Aliens… so that you can experience a bit of Dory’s voice for yourself. One last thing, that lion, to quote Dory, “THE FUCKING LION!” turns out to be the very best wingman a displaced human could EVER have.

Excerpt from I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming

“Fuck, I’m dead?” I snarled, gazing down at the desert. A bright light was pulling me farther into the sky. Which was probably good, right? I’m not the religious type, but I think the general consensus is that up is good.

“All right, not all bad, I guess?” I turned to have a look around, taking in the sights before— “THE FUCKING LION!” I screamed, trying to kick away my murderer. The sandy-brown fur of its mouth was stained a telltale red. I put a hand to my throat, flinching when pain erupted. My hand came back covered in blood. “All right, so you definitely didn’t miss. What is going on?”

The lion ignored me; instead his eyes remained transfixed by what he saw above us. I stilled and looked up to see the clouds shimmering. A darker spot opened up in the sky. A greenish light sparkled out of it until the force pulling me sped up to a breakneck pace. The light became blinding, and I . . . I must have fainted.

The next thing I knew, I was in a tank. My body felt too heavy to move. There was a tickling sensation on my neck. Reaching out, I tried to touch the glass front of the tank but couldn’t reach it. When I cried out, bubbles floated uselessly out of my mouth. I wasn’t sure how long I was floating as I drifted in and out of consciousness.

Muffled chirping met my ears. I struggled to open my eyes, but the room was so damn bright.

Why . . . why do I smell cotton candy? Am I having a stroke? I thought that was burnt toast. Dammit. I knew I should have taken that CPR class. What smell meant you were having a stroke?

A sharp zap to my neck shocked me awake. Birds were chirping all around me. I struggled to get up. Something dug into my arms, so I thrashed. Strings lined with suction cups snapped off my arm with little pops. The birds’ chirping grew angrier as I pulled my other arm free. I blinked and looked around to see what looked like . . . owls?

“What the fuck?” I asked. Mutant-looking owls with large fluffy ears fluttered around me, chirping and fussing. Their feathers ranged in color from simple blacks and grays to the colorful blue and orange plumage you would normally find on a tropical bird. Which, frankly, is a wild range of colors for one species to have. I wonder if it’s gender-based.

Focus.

Macaw-like beaks took up a third of their face. Their flapping wings ended in tiny three-fingered hands. One of them was dressed in a white robe and it was trying to probe me with some horseshoe-looking gun thing.

I smacked it away from me and got to my feet. “One of you better start chirping in English,” I warned. Fear and rage caused the threat to come out in a stuttered shout.

The birds were unaffected.

Unfortunate.

I touched my neck, unsure if I’d truly died and gone to some bird hell. But all I felt was smooth skin. When I inspected my hand, not a drop of blood was found. I checked the other side; still nothing. “If I’m not dead, how am I healed?”

The room was lined with rows of cylindrical tanks filled with green liquid. I peered closer at their contents to see the face of a sleeping woman floating in the tank. Her round face looked serene. Long braids fanned out around her face. A few tapped their beaded ends against the glass. The hair rose on the back of my neck as I took in each tank, noting that every one of them held a person. I rubbed my eyes, trying to wake up from the nightmare. Yet when I looked around again, the pods and their occupants remained. Worse still, I noticed that all of them were women.

Reality sank to the pit of my stomach. I was on an alien spaceship. Those aliens only felt the need to capture women, and I’d just woken up on an operating table. If this wasn’t hell, it was about to be.

Screaming, I stumbled away from the nearest alien, then snatched a tray off the counter next to the table where I’d woken up. Glass vials and unsettling-looking tools crashed to the floor when I flung it at the nearest alien. Two slightly bigger Owlish came at me with what looked like cattle prods. I grabbed hold of one and kicked off its owner, then swung wildly at its partner. The bird’s squawk was cut short when my stick hit the side of its head, sending the creature flying back. Not knowing what else to do, I just swung at any of the little aliens that came within striking distance.

Farther into the room was a dome-like door leading to a hallway. I leapt over two of the Owlish, caught my foot on one, then tripped and fell on my ass. The fall knocked the stick out of my hand; it ricocheted off the ceiling and slammed into a glass case lining the wall. Blue goop spilled out all over my hair. It weighed down my wild red curls until they felt like rivers of slime. “No! No strange alien goop in my hair, dammit!” I wailed, scrambling back on my feet. “Fuck, my ass is gonna die. I’m so gonna die.”

One of the Owlish squawked like a penguin and stomped closer to me. I jumped up, shoving it aside before I sped down the hallway. My vision blurred, causing me to stumble against the wall. The slime dripping down my head grew hot, and the skin where it touched tingled. “Oh, gross. This better not be poison,” I said, wiping it away quickly.

I burst into the first room I encountered to see that it was full of bigger penguin-looking bird aliens and slammed the door shut. “Nope.”

I swore all the way down to the next room and locked myself behind the door. Then I looked around to see that I had made a poor, poor decision, as this room was full of so many more Owlish, some with the cattle prods, and, of course, the motherfucking lion.

My murderer was floating in a ray of light on a table, completely unaware of its surroundings. Flapping noises beat on the door at my back and the Owlish in the room began chattering angrily. Those with cattle prods advanced.

. . . Fuck this.

“You know what? If I have to die”—I raised a finger to all the bird fuckers in the room—“we’re all gonna die.” I grabbed the nearest Owlish and threw it at the others charging forward.

Excerpted from I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming Copyright © 2025 by Kimberly Lemming. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved.

#BookReview: Beast of the North Woods by Annelise Ryan

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> C Reviews
#BookReview: Beast of the North Woods by Annelise RyanBeast of the North Woods (A Monster Hunter Mystery, #3) by Annelise Ryan
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery
Series: Monster Hunter Mystery #3
Pages: 320
Published by Berkley on January 28, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

When a local fisherman is mauled to death, it seems like the only possible cause is a mythical creature in the latest puzzling entry in this USA Today bestselling series.
An ice fisherman is savagely mauled to death in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and an eyewitness claims the man was attacked by a hodag. There's just one problem with it's well known that the creature is not real and was created by a local hoaxer. So how could an imaginary creature be chomping on local sportsmen? 
The suggestion that a hodag killed someone isn’t well received by the townsfolk because of its beloved ties to the town and the money it generates from tourist dollars. Due to this, people begin to suspect the witness is the real killer, especially when it’s discovered he has a tangled past with the victim. 
The witness to the attack happens to be the nephew of Morgan Carter’s bookstore employee, Rita Bosworth, who convinces the professional cryptozoologist to travel to Wisconsin to prove that a hodag not only exists but killed the victim. 
Clues may be hard to come by, but one thing's for something killed that man, and that something now has its eyes focused on Morgan.

My Review:

I picked this up because I liked the first book in the series, A Death in Door County, and I really enjoyed the second, Death in the Dark Woods. I started this third book hoping that the upward trend continued.

It didn’t. At least not for this reader. As always, your reading mileage may vary.

What mostly worked in the first book – and definitely worked in the second – was the way that bookstore owner, budding amateur detective and professional cryptozoologist Morgan Carter uses her actual professional credentials for hunting monsters to find actual monsters, even though – or especially because – the monster she starts out hunting is absolutely not the monster she finds.

In other words, she’s usually on the track of Bigfoot. Or something like Bigfoot. Or Nessie. Or in the case of the Beast of the North Woods, a Hodag. Now the Hodag is a proven hoax – because the person who supposedly captured one in 1893 eventually confessed to the deception.

Not that the town of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, which really does exist, hasn’t made plenty of hay (or at least tourist dollars) out of being the home of the Hodag. But no one expects to see a living, breathing beast in the area.

The Hodag in its ‘natural’ habitat.

Except that someone claims they have, and that the beast they saw mauled a man to death in the woods. The local police are sure the dude who reported the body is attempting, badly, to cover up a murder. One that he committed himself, of course.

Morgan is 99% convinced he didn’t see a Hodag. Which doesn’t mean the guy is guilty of the murder. Even if the dead man seems to have been his lifelong rival if not outright enemy.

In Morgan’s previous adventures, she hasn’t found Bigfoot, or Nessie, or any other cryptids. She certainly doesn’t expect to find a Hodag in this case. That she actually DOES find one this time around is more than a bit of a surprise. That there are human monsters hiding in the shadows behind the cryptid is no surprise at all.

That her EvilEx™ seems to be messing with her head from the very beginning very nearly has Morgan running through the woods in terror LONG before the Hodag EVER makes the already messed-up scene in a way that threw this reader all the way out of a story that I was really hoping to love.

Escape Rating C: For this reader, the second book in this series, Death in the Dark Woods, was the one that hit the sweet spot. The first book went into just a bit too much detail about the flora and fauna of Door County, although that served as great background for just how Morgan approached her cryptid hunting. That first story also introduced the best character in the whole series and a very good boi, Morgan’s dog Newt. If I continue to read this series – and at the moment that issue is seriously in doubt – it’ll be to see how Newt is doing because he’s just awesome.

Unfortunately, that first book also introduced us, at least in absentia, to Morgan’s EvilEx™, David Johnson. David murdered her parents, framed her for his crime, disappeared into the wind and has been stalking her ever since. I have to confess that the stalker ex is one of my least favorite plot devices, so having him lurk over this particular entry in the series from not very far away at all just took me right out of the story. (I know this is a ‘me’ thing and may not be a ‘you’ thing and your mileage may vary, etc., etc., etc.)

This series, by its nature of starting out hunting mythical monsters, is always just a hair away from ‘jumping the shark’ and for me the frequent references to David Johnson – or whoever he really is – sent the whole thing right over the top of the shark and its wake.

And Morgan spends entirely too much of this story not thinking clearly, mostly because of David but not completely, that she seems to miss all the clues until its too late and she’s briefly in the frame for yet another murder she didn’t commit. Poor Newt has his work cut out for him this time around.

(I LOVE Newt. He’s a very good boi and don’t worry, he’s just fine throughout this story. It’s his human who keeps ending up in serious trouble.)

So this is the point where I’m going to admit that I’m seriously thinking of bailing on this series. I was hoping for something like Death in the Dark Woods, a cozy monster hunting mystery – as much of a contradiction in terms that should be but wasn’t. I needed a comfort read and that’s not what I got at all, so this was the wrong book at the wrong time and relied heavily on a plot device that makes me cringe. Color this reader disappointed.

I know I keep saying this, but it bears repeating, YOUR READING MILEAGE MAY VARY.

Grade A #BookReview: Remember When by Mary Balogh

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Remember When by Mary BaloghRemember When: Clarissa's Story (Ravenswood, #4) by Mary Balogh
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical romance, regency romance
Series: Ravenswood #4
Pages: 368
Published by Berkley on January 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Discover the beauty of second chances at love and life in this heartfelt new novel from New York Times bestselling author Mary Balogh.

The Dowager Countess of Stratton, Clarissa Ware, née Greenfield, has just presented her younger daughter to the ton, and the rest of her life belongs only to herself. She returns to Ravenswood, intending to spend the summer alone there. But the summer has other plans for her.

Born a gentleman, Matthew Taylor has chosen to spend his life as the village carpenter. Growing up, he and Clarissa were close—dangerously so, considering his family’s modest fortune. As a young man, he never would have been a suitable match for the daughter of the wealthy Greenfields. Clarissa married Caleb Ware, the Earl of Stratton, so Matthew married another, though he was widowed soon after.

Now everything is different—Clarissa has already lived the life expected of her by society. And Matthew is as attractive and intriguing as he was when they were young. As their summer friendship deepens into romance, they stand together on the precipice of change—essentially the same man and woman they remember being back then, but with renewed passion and the potential to take their lives in an entirely new direction.

My Review:

The Ravenswood series began with Remember Love, when the shit quite spectacularly hit the fan in the Ware Family. Caleb Ware, the Earl of Stratton, brought his latest mistress to his family seat at Ravenswood, and expected everyone to just, well, look the other way. Just like all the people in London did when he spent the Parliamentary season philandering.

He miscalculated – or frankly never calculated at all, because that wasn’t the way things usually worked for him.

Because at Ravenswood, his wife Clarissa is the one who holds everyone’s hearts and keeps everything together. Especially their family. Which means that when his adult son and heir discovers his father in flagrante delicto with his latest paramour, Devlin Stratton rings the curtain down on his father’s shenanigans.

Devlin gets exiled for his inability to “rug sweep” the transgression. The series so far, Remember Love, Remember Me, and Always Remember, has dealt with the fallout of the scandal through the eyes of the adult children whose expectations got upended in the aftermath.

The one person whose perspective we have not really explored until now is that of the now-Dowager Countess of Stratton, Clarissa Ware née Greenfield. This is her story, six years after that scandal broke all their illusions and four years after the death of the philandering Earl.

Clarissa’s story turns out to be the story of what happens when one takes what poet Robert Frost will refer to, nearly a century after the events of this story, as, instead of “The Road Not Taken”, rather the road more travelled by. Clarissa chose the life expected by her class and gender. She married a wealthy man, lived a privileged life of position and ease and was fortunate enough to have five children live to adulthood. Her marriage was reasonably contented and often happy even if her husband was unfaithful practically from their wedding day.

After all, that was also part of that more travelled road.

But as this story opens, Clarissa is in the process of recognizing that her expected path has come to an end. She is on the cusp of her 50th birthday. Her children are all grown and have been successfully launched into the world. Her oldest son is now the Earl, and his wife is the Countess. No one NEEDS her for anything. Not that her family doesn’t love her and isn’t willing to surround her with love and care and entertainment – but she has no purpose of her own.

Which is why she comes home to Ravenswood, alone, to be by herself and sit with herself – or mostly walk with herself – and figure out who SHE is and what SHE wants for this new chapter of her life.

What she learns is that the road LESS traveled, the one she turned away from when she married Caleb Ware, has wound back around to meet her in the person of the best friend she ever had, the then young man who stood and watched as she walked away.

Escape Rating A: This is the book in this series that I was hoping for – and it absolutely was worth the wait!

The story here is all about second chances. Not just a second chance at love, although it is certainly that. But also about second chances at life. They say that it’s never too old to become the person you were meant to be – and this is that kind of story as well.

(It is also very reminiscent of Someone to Care in the author’s Westcott series. So if you liked that you’ll LOVE this! I promise)

What made this entry in this series so satisfying – well, there’s more than one thing. I always adore a story where the would-be romantic partners are a bit more mature because the stakes are in some ways much higher and in others much lower, and that is certainly true here.

Clarissa Greenfield and Matthew Taylor grew up as best friends. They were, to use a more 21st century phrase, each other’s person. The depth of their friendship was certainly turning towards romantic love when they went their separate ways. While they were both of the same class as children, both children of landed gentry, Matthew’s family was at the lowest rung of that scale and Matthew was a second son who would have to make his own way. Clarissa’s family was at the high end, with more than enough wealth that Clarissa would have plenty of money in her own right and was expected to reach even higher in her inevitable marriage.

Also, Clarissa was very willing to do the expected thing, while Matthew marched to the beat of not just his own drummer, but to a cadence that he hadn’t even identified yet. His family expected him to follow one of the traditional paths for second sons, and he rebelled at every turn.

But that was then. Meanwhile, in their now, while their circumstances have diverged even further they have also come back to the same place in similar positions. Both have lost their spouses. Both have reached places in their lives where they do not HAVE to care quite so much about what other people think.

And the friendship that has lain dormant for 30 years is still there, just waiting for a spark to bring it back to life. They are still each other’s person and time has not changed that at all. Even if the entire neighborhood, as well as nearly all of Clarissa’s family, balk at her intimate friendship with a man who has gone rather down in the world – Matthew is the village carpenter after all – while she has gone even further up.

Unlike the story in Someone to Care, Clarissa and Matthew don’t lie about their relationship. They don’t pretend they are not friends, they don’t hide that they are seeing each other after they both decide that they are – whether they should or not.

What made the story work so well was the way that Clarissa makes the decision to live for herself in this latest chapter of her life. She proceeds to take on pretty much all comers, including most of her family, as they question and cajole and attempt to manage her and her relationship with someone who initially seems unsuitable but who is the only truly suitable person for Clarissa to spend the next chapter of her life with in whatever manner she chooses to spend it.

I loved this entry in the series because I was able to identify with Clarissa and the choices and decisions she had to make without feeling like she was out of her time. Her story about second chances and second choices resonated well, as even in her privileged position her problem of what to do and to be now that she has reached the end of the road well traveled but still has plenty of life left to live is something that many of us face even if we’re not in quite such plush circumstances as we face it.

This was also very much the right book at the right time as I was looking for a comfort read this week and I certainly found a lovely one in this book and this series. A series which I sincerely hope continues as there are plenty more Ware cousins and neighborhood acquaintances who could use their own happy ending!