Tag Archives: erotica

Book Review: Grave Stakes, by Grave Grahme

I recently picked up a freebie copy of Grave Grahme‘s Grave Stakes on Amazon.

BRITT
I thought I’d seen everything.

A decade as a cop tends to make anyone cynical. Even a cop with great instincts.

Until I follow those instincts one night, and get my throat torn out.

That’s a new one.

Odder still, I wake up in the ER with no trace of the lethal injury. Don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled to be alive, but my memory is blank.

I’m going to find out what happened.

pnrI followed a man that night. I have a feeling he has answers.

Finding him might kill me.

ETIENNE
I was the king of the city. Untouchable.

Until a hired assassin tried to kill me.

My saving grace? A police officer caused a distraction allowing me to dispatch the assassin.

My mistake? Saving that police office. A woman who haunts me with the sweetness of her taste.

Someone is power-hungry enough to try to make me permanently dead. I need an expert to help uncover the source of the threat.

And I know just where to find a detective.

Whether she wants to help or not.

Meh. This was a fine read. I didn’t hate it. It didn’t light me up, either, though. I really liked that the heroine is older. I don’t think an exact age is ever given. But, she has some grey in her hair and has been in her job long enough to be the mentor instead of the mentee. I liked the archetypes that the men are filling. I liked the snarky tone, and the writing is pretty clean and easy to read.

But I also don’t feel like the book lived up to its own potential. The villain is paper thin and dispatched with no fanfare (super anticlimactic). I did not feel any connection between the romantic leads. The lust is instant and baseless. So, I can’t even say I felt the erotic chemistry.

There’s also a trigger warning for SA. So, I’m not complaining about that. But I also always assess if an SA is actually integral to a plot or if an author could have skipped it without changing the story any. And that is 100% the case here. It just wasn’t needed.

All in all, I’d be willing to read the next series. In fact, I’d like to. This one kind of felt like an extended prologue more than anything else. But alas, it isn’t out yet, and I’ll probably have forgotten about it by the time it is.

Other reviews:

Book Review: Scars, by Dana Isaly

I picked up a copy of Scars (by Dana Isaly) as an Amazon freebie. Well, I picked up a copy of The Triad series.

My family hired someone to kill me. One day I was the sole inheritor of my family’s fortune. The next I was diving out my bedroom window, leaving everything behind. I’ve been hiding for years, successfully outrunning my demons. I was getting by, making a life of my own. Until the Triad came for me. Dangerous. Wealthy. Corrupt. The Triad run this city. And they think I’m the key to getting my family out of their way. The plan is to exchange me for a truce. But if I go back, I’m as good as dead. Convincing them to keep me is my only chance of survival. They have no clue just how valuable I can be. I am so much more than they bargained for.

This book was not a winner for me. I think the fact that I own all three books in the series and am stopping after this first one should tell you a lot. I am not a person who likes to leave things unfinished, especially when confronted with a cliffhanger. But I’m just not invested enough to continue. There are a couple of reasons for this. Before I get to them, let me give a positive and say the mechanical writing seems fine. It’s perfectly readable.

Now, the reasons this didn’t work for me: to start with—and not entirely the fault of the book—have you ever accidentally picked up two books that were just too similar too closely together? I read Den of Vipers last week. So, when I started Scars, I very quickly realized that it is very, very, very similar. That timing isn’t Scars’ fault, but one does have to ask why it so so very, very, very similar.

What’s worse, when I went to investigate on Goodreads, I found allegations that this is a rip-off of not Den of Vipers but Sarah Bailey‘s Four Horsemen series (which I have not read). I don’t know which derivation came first (and I suspect this is all old news in the book world), but I do know it’s at least one too many.

Second, I don’t have a problem with PWP. But there being 3 books in this series suggests that it isn’t actually supposed to be porn without plot. Otherwise, what is carrying over into multiple books? But this moves so quickly, develops so little, and gives the characters so little depth that it felt like a waste of my time. (It felt like Isaly decided she didn’t need to give us any more than an outline because we’ve all read the story so many times already that the reader is expected to be able to just flesh it out on their own.)

Third, the sex. It wasn’t particularly enjoyable for me. I don’t want to kink shame anyone who is into such things, but I found the spitting and lack of respect very offputting. The spitting I will just let stand with ‘yuck.’ But the lack of respect I want a word about. I am well aware that humiliation kink is a thing, and it’s super common in this genre. But when characters have known each other less than a day, have had no conversation, and the reader is given no reason to believe the man involved knows the woman’s preferences, all it feels like is internalized misogyny served up with pick-me garnish. It’s not sexy.

Similarly, and maybe more importantly, the love is so instant that I couldn’t figure out how (as a reader) I was supposed to believe that Scarlet was anything more than any of the other dismissable women the men had shared in the past. How, after 48 or so hours, I’m supposed to believe she’s the one, based on…………….

Lastly, a list of more minor points; there just isn’t any finesse or nuance here. Isaly just tosses it all out on the table and expects us to be grateful for it. The Triad of the series title does not refer to the Chinese mafia but rather to the fact that there are three men. (The choice of name makes me wonder if Isaly simply didn’t do enough research to realize it already has real-world associations.) The book is supposed to be set in England (I think); one of the men has a Yorkshire accent, for example. But I got no sense of place from the book’s setting, speech patterns, etc.

All in all, I think the safest thing for me right now is simply to set this series aside and back away slowly.

Other Reviews:

Book Review: Hadley House, by Olivia Lewin

I picked up an e-copy of Olivia Lewin‘s Hadley House as an Amazon freebie.

Life had gone to hell in a handbasket when I received news that my Uncle Felix had passed away and left me an inheritance. Fired from my dream job and days away from eviction, I took the inheritance as the blessing it was.

Unfortunately, it was only a blessing until I saw the house I now had in my name.

A falling apart hovel in the middle of a decommissioned graveyard. Bad enough, right?

It got worse.

The place is overrun by creatures that shouldn’t exist. An oversized orc. A pixie-demon with an attitude. A feral wolfman. A defective basilisk. And a ghost. Have I mentioned I’m terrified of ghosts?

I need to get the hell out of here, but it’s easier said than done when the house is keeping us all captive and the only way out is untangling a series of puzzles my uncle left for me. And the kicker; the worst part of it all?

I’m stuck in an infinite time loop that always ends in me dying and resetting the day to the beginning. I have no idea who’s killing me or why time is rewinding, but I have a bad feeling it’s an important part of the puzzle. I have an even badder feeling that the men have a lot to do with the happenings in Hadley House. The men who don’t remember who I am at the beginning of each cycle, the ones I know intimately, who don’t act like the monsters society makes them out to be.

I doubt I can make it out with both my heart and my body intact, but I’ve got to try.

This was entertaining enough; a little repetitive and padded in the plot, but I enjoyed it. I would have jumped into book two if it had been out yet. Having said that, I did feel like we (the readers) were denied the chance actually to get to know the men as characters. They remained pretty underdeveloped. And Hadley’s willingness and ability to forgive them was almost supernatural in and of itself.

I feel like I need to address the sex. I actually really loved that the men had been locked in with one another for a long time and were, therefore, just as comfortable having sex with one another as Hadley. But the orgey-level sex scenes played an odd role in the book. They were not particularly well-stitched into the plot. (They actually stood out as anomalies to the rest of the plot.) But this also isn’t erotica or porn without plot. This means it is a non-romance/non-erotic plot, shallow as it may be, and then the occasional full-on, multiple-partner sex scenes that felt strangely out of place.

All in all, I’d have read another book to find out what happens after the cliffhanger, and I enjoyed this well enough. But I didn’t love it.

Other Reviews:

https://avanorris.com/hadley-house-by-olivia-lewin/