Tag Archives: romance

the gentleman next door

Book Review of The Gentlemen Next Door series, by Cecilia Gray

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I’m still working to clear all the novelettes from my To Be Read shelf, but this week I’ve opted for something a little different. Instead of focusing of those books within a certain page length range (I’m up to 60-69), I’m going to clear a whole novelette series away.

With that in mind I present you with Cecilia Gray‘s The Gentleman Next Door Series. I Picked these up from Amazon when they were free.

the gentleman next door

The Gentlemen Next Door, because sometimes a lady in need of love need look no further than next door.

A Delightful Arrangement (The Gentlemen Next Door, #1): I am not a huge regency romance fan and that should probably be taken into account, but I found this cute. Yes, Fran annoyed me by being so unaware of her own feelings and eventually in the requisite “I don’t know what this feeling in my body is” sex scene. (I basically just dislike that sort of sex scene in general.) And yes, even though I liked Philip, the whole story hinged on his not telling her how he feels, which is a little too close to the ‘misunderstand’ trope for my liking. You always knew exactly where this story was going and how it’d get there, but, if you like the sort of thing, it’s a cute read.

An Illicit Engagement (The Gentlemen Next Door, #2): I believe I liked this one more than the first. I think it and the characters weren’t quite as developed, but I preferred them and this story. This is also a clean read, no sex.

A Dangerous Expectation (The Gentlemen Next Door, #3): This was another cute addition to the series, but it had a bit too drastic a change of personality in the MC to bring about the happy ending. Clean read, writing was good, could do with a bit more editing.

 A Flirtatious Rendezvous (The Gentlemen Next Door, #4): This was my least favorite of the series. I didn’t at all feel the history the two MCs were supposed to have and his change of heart came out of nowhere, giving him no time to redeem himself in my eyes for being a jerk.Writing was fine and it’s another clean read.

Colorado Wild

Book Review of Colorado Wild (Colorado Heart #1), by Sara York

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Colorado WildI downloaded a copy of Colorado Wild, by Sara York, from the Amazon free list.

Description from Goodreads:
When love sneaks up on you, shoot for the heart.

Billy Bradford has a secret, and it’s bigger than the fact that he’s an assassin. When Tucker Hayes, Billy’s straight best friend, is injured on a mission, Billy acts in haste, kissing Tucker. Shocked by the act, Tucker runs. But desire is stronger than convictions, leading Tucker to hunt down Billy.

The other guys on the ranch are oblivious to Tucker and Billy’s actions as they investigate a new target. Grant Stovall is hung up on his ex, but Roger Burk, their new operative, catches his attention and one small touch isn’t enough.

Meet the cowboys of Wild Bluff Ranch in the first book of the Colorado Heart Series, Colorado Wild.

Review:
Wow, um, wow. That’s about the most coherent thought I can manage on this book. It’s totally illogical, overblown and unfocused. I mean, despite what the blurb suggests, it doesn’t even have a main character. What do you do with a book that doesn’t have a main character or couple? What do you do? (As an aside, that blurb is totally inaccurate anyway.) There’s no plot. The characters do everything from pine for one another to assassinations to buy a horse that randomly gets bitten by a snake. There’s insta-lust and a relationship that goes from 0 to 4,000 in about a page. There is endless agonizing over if the characters are a couple yet and if they’re gay or not, all in artificial and exaggerated ways. There’s pointless past trauma that is too much to be believed.

There is telling, telling, telling about how wonderful and significant and ‘I’ll be with you forever even though we’ve been a couple for 2 days’ the characters feel, all adding up to basically nothing. Nothing that happens is believable. None of the emotions read as believable, not even the lust (though that’s not really an emotion, I suppose). These men are supposed to be super elite soldiers and assassins, but they agonize over everything like teenager, and I don’t just mean the emo stuff (though that’s non-stop from page one) but if a teammate gets injured or is doing his part of a mission out of sight or killing. All the things a highly trained soldier would take in stride (and we’re told they do) they are shown to whinge about. And the technical aspect of these soldiers? “…are you sure this little black box will disrupt them?” Seriously, that’s how they talk about their tech!

Nope, this was a total strike for me; almost nothing to recommend it as far as I’m concerned.

Blood of the Beast

Book Review of Blood of the Beast, by Tamela Quijas

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Blood of the BeastI grabbed a copy Blood of the Beast, by Tamela Quijas from the Amazon freebie list.

Description from Goodreads:
There is a scent that fills the night, far more delicate than the beat of the heart, more fragile than the whisper of breath escaping human lungs.

The echo that fills the darkness is the scent of blood pulsating through the mortal body.

Commonly overlooked by those among the living, it is a sound fervently sought by those residing on the fringes of the world existing between the living and the undead.

Blood is what the beast craves.

Detective Valentina Kureyev had been assigned to one of the worst murder cases of the century. A serial killer haunted the streets of her city, depositing bloodless corpses throughout the section of town known as Little Europe.

She hadn’t a clue to the identity of the culprit.

The case was hopeless.

The terror was real.

As real as Demetri Daskova.

The Professor of Russian Antiquities had been targeted with the murderer’s special form of a calling card. Val couldn’t turn away from his offer of aide in the bizarre case, even though he whispered tales of ‘those that walked on the dark side of the moon’ and the beast that hungrily fed on human blood.

He was the primary suspect.

Review:
Good lord that was just horrible. I almost didn’t even make it through the prologue. But it’s the end of the year and I’d set myself an alphabet soup challenge (read a book by an author for every letter of the alphabet) and I only have Q, X,Y & Z left and I DNFed my Y yesterday. So, I wasn’t going to do the same with my Q. So I was trapped with it.

Eventually I just started reading passages aloud to my husband, because sharing the shocking horridness and strange, STRANGE over-use of the word quiver/quivering was the only way I could keep going. (Seriously, the word is used a lot, often in questionable ways.) The whole book is painfully wordy. No one has gold eyes, they’re golden hued eyes, etc. It contradicts itself. It is painfully dependent on tropes. There is no palpable chemistry between the characters. The female MC is pathologically angry and extremely unlikable (but all the men lust after her). The male MC was a jerk in the beginning and we’re never shown that he changed. It’s just supposed to be assumed. In addition to too many words, there are also misused words, missing words and anachronistic language. The villain is a cliche scorned woman (who spent one purchased night with the man she goes bad over) and the whole thing was just jumpy and clunky. But hey, the author’s name is Quijas, so it’s all good.