An equally silly and serious Georgian-era romance.
An antiquarian climbs out of the pit she’s excavating and finds more than she’s expecting aboveground.
Miss Georgina Harrington is frustrated with her cousin Percy Pendergrast, even though he’s the best of all her relatives. It’s not his fault she’s forced to stay hidden in Essex while he presents her discoveries under his name, but it still stings. When he disappears with her greatest find yet, she’s irritated and then worried, and she heads to London to find him. Instead, she finds Alexander Lovett, the gentleman who accompanied Percy on his last visit to her dig. When he begins to helps her search, and just as they’re enjoying a little flirtation, she learns that Alexander is better known as the Marquess of Heathford and that she’s been engaged to marry him by his stuffed shirt of a father and her detestable brother. Georgie is upset and Alexander refuses to do anything his father thinks is a good idea, but they’re both anxious to find Percy, so they come back together to look for him. They discover that there’s a dark conspiracy behind his disappearance—and that although their families arranged their marriage for all the wrong reasons, they may be meant for each other after all. Fans of Lady Charlotte Always Gets Her Man (2024) will be excited to see the notorious pub the Black Sheep pop up early on, as it signals certain chaos and cameos from beloved characters. The entire story is immensely entertaining, though it’s uneven in places, caught as it is between suspense, goofiness, and a great deal of spice. For those who like the combination, it will be exciting, but it can also lead to a bit of whiplash. Alexander has a clubfoot, which allows Marsh to respectfully depict life with a disability in the 1750s. And no reader will be able resist the joy caused by the unexpected number of chickens in this story, found both outdoors where they belong and in nice parlors.
An equally silly and serious Georgian-era romance.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781538739631
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forever
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.
A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way.
Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn’t been able to get her head together, and it’s affecting her performance. Plus, she’s trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction—until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it’s something neither of them can stop thinking about. It’s Lukas who suggests they have a fling—purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett’s friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas’ relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood’s latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms.
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641057
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
A satisfying crime novel with a side order of romance.
A TV producer and a detective try to stop a strange pattern of young women disappearing.
In “Auclair, Loooziana,” disillusioned detective John Bowie reluctantly meets in a bar with Beth Collins, producer for the true crime show Crisis Point. She needs to interview him about the disastrous case of the missing Crissy Mellin, but he refuses. The teenager disappeared three years ago on the night of a blood moon and hasn’t been found, but a suspect hanged himself in jail after signing a confession. Case closed, says John’s boss. But John is convinced that their prisoner could not have been guilty, and he’s deeply upset at his failure. “The Mellin case messed up your life,” Beth tells him. She persuades John that Crissy’s disappearance is the latest of a series that happen on the night of a blood moon, the colloquial term for a total lunar eclipse. “It’s going to happen again,” she predicts. And wouldn’t you know, another blood moon is coming in four days. Tick, tick, tick. Beth’s boss at Crisis Point insists on airing an update on the case, but Beth knows the show is going to get it wrong, and its reputation will be ruined. Meanwhile, there’s an electric sexual tension between Beth and John that the author toys with nicely—do they, or don’t they? The answer plays out in detail more than once. The characters are fun if easy to pigeonhole: the detective angry at his failure, the honest (and beautiful) outsider eager to do her job but susceptible to love, the hero’s corrupt (to say the least) boss, and the ogre who carries out said boss’s dirtiest deeds. Even John’s dog, Mutt, plays a small but vital role. When John found him, he’d been “a flea-bitten hide wrapped around a skeleton that whimpered.” Little plot devices are easy to spot, like the phone that rings at a crucial moment, or the handgun that John places in Beth’s hand for her protection. Does Chekhov’s guideline apply here? The romantic angle leavens the dark theme, and readers will have plenty of incentives to turn the pages.
A satisfying crime novel with a side order of romance.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781538742983
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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