Rom-com meets action-adventure spy novel in The Blonde Identity. It’s full of danger, chase scenes, and action sequences, but it’s also funny and sexy and frothy in all the right ways. And it hits some familiar romance and spy novel tropes in ways that somehow feel comfortingly familiar and fresh at the same time.
The Verity Kent series gets off to a good start with This Side of Murder. Huber revisits the classic “trapped on an island with a killer” trope, but gives it tension and immediacy… Huber is skilled at plotting, characterization, and atmosphere. I found all three here, plus a believable, complex heroine.
I generally enjoy Agatha Christie, and I love Miss Marple, but this is not one of my favorite of her books. On the other hand, the 1985 BBC adaptation starring Joan Hickson is a longtime favorite and a comfort movie for me.
Weaving Hope is a very gentle, very slow-burn closed-door romance set in magical 1920s Britain.
Naomi Novik’s Buried Deep and Other Stories is a stellar collection of short fiction that displays all of her skill as a writer as well as the breadth of her imagination. I read it slowly, savoring each story.
It’s All a Game starts off with the ancient games of senet, the “royal game of Ur”, and the many forms of mancala, then delves into a truncated history of chess before moving on to the board games many of us grew up playing.
Wooing the Witch Queen was an absolute delight, from its sweet, sensitive, traumatized cinnamon-roll hero to its introverted, reclusive, but decidedly not evil heroine.
It took me a little while to get into On the Edge, but once I did, I was totally hooked. This paranormal romance has great worldbuilding, compelling characters, external threats and internal conflicts that each inform and heighten the other, and a romantic pairing that I was initially dubious about and ended up loving.
The Wishing Game reminds me so much of the books and series I loved as a child: the ones that made me fall in love with reading, the ones I escaped into over and over. It has the whimsy and wordplay of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (one of the author’s inspirations) without the nastiness that seemed both funny and disturbing to me even as a child. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Most Wonderful Crime Of the Year by Ally Carter Published by Avon Genres: Holiday, Cozy Mystery, Contemporary Romance Pages: 303 Format: Kindle or ebook Source: purchased Purchase: Amazon | Bookshop | Audible | Chirp Add to Goodreads Also by this author: The Blonde Identity Knives Out gets a holiday… Read more »
