📖 Q: what’s your current read? I’m about 44% into Roan Parrish’s Lights on Knockbridge Lane.

Sonia Hartl’s Heartbreak for Hire was an interesting read for me for lots of reasons, including the fact that there are things I really liked about it & some things that didn’t quite work for me.

It’s bold & wry & comes out swinging at cutthroat academia—there’s also some quality steam, a hot + nerdy professor hero, & a heroine who’s adept at disguises & has a few epiphanies about her life & the direction it’s going in.

Brinkley Saunders wants to own her own gallery where she can sell her artwork but in the meantime she’s helping pull off revenge schemes at Heartbreak for Hire. She targets Egos (men whose professional egos have gotten out of control & who have grossly wronged their female coworkers), although her judgmental, emotionally unavailable mom—chair of a psychology dept—thinks she’s an admin assistant.

Then Brinkley is hired to target professor Markus Cavanaugh but she’s won over by his conversation & against her better judgement they end up hooking up. Until she runs away, reminded of what her job is.

Later, he shows up at Heartbreak for Hire, one of its newest hires.

I love how HRH goes after so many important topics including verbal & emotional abuse, toxic masculinity in the workplace, parental disappointment, & damaging behaviors & culture in academia. Also on my Very Much Enjoyed List is how Brinkley is snarky & daring—except when it comes to her gallery & confrontation—& Markus eats it up.

But the book doesn’t have quite the emotional resonance I wanted in some moments & the reconciliation feels somewhat rushed (& also I was a little bothered by how some of it comes about.)

On the whole I really enjoyed this one & Hartl’s style & I’m excited to see what she writes next!

Q: what kind of motivational style do you prefer, gentle or “tough love”?

Farrah Rochon’s The Dating Playbook gives me some of those same soft feelings I get from watching athlete human interest segments on tv.

Featuring admirable characters w/ enough determination to win over a stadium, some steam, & a couple dynamic powered by heat but also friendship & compatibility, this romance is sweet.

The world thinks former NFL star Jamar Dixon can’t play football anymore. Widely praised & then injured, Jamar’s now itching for a spot back on a team if he can only convince them that his body can handle it.

So he contacts Taylor Powell, whom we met in book 1 of this series, a personal trainer who draws from her military dad as inspiration for her lessons. She agrees to help him, mostly because she needs the business & the funds to counteract some business-related debt she’s in.

When Jamar panics at the thought of a reporter uncovering that he’s trying to get back into the NHL, Taylor pretends they’re dating. That makes everything more complicated when they realize they both want to work out & kiss.

The Dating Playbook tackles a lot of big topics w/ aplomb: Taylor’s business concerns, Jamar’s guilt, her insecurities about a lack of college degree & a learning disorder, & more.

Watching them both work through the things holding them back is emotionally fruitful & I really enjoyed the portrayal of Taylor, who is impulsive & regularly runs from problems & confrontation with Jamar but doesn’t hesitate with most people.

Kudos also to Jamar, who’s a sensitive stud. He’s coolheaded but admires how Taylor claps back at offensive people & I love that dynamic.
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This book feels “real” to me—people who are trying the best they can & ultimately coming from a place of passion & love—& I really enjoyed it.

It Happened One Summer is a dirty delight from beginning to end.

I have spent time ranking my fave Tessa Bailey books & heroes before for funsies so please trust me when I say this book & Brendan + Alexis’s relationship are new faves & this book is basically a master class in romance.

Socialite Piper Bellinger has just been arrested for helping to break into a pool & throwing a major party when her Hollywood stepdad gives her temporary marching orders: she’s a liability to his film funding & needs to move to Westport, Washington, the town where she was born—& the town where her fisherman father lived when he died—for three months while her latest scandal blows over. She can help with her dad’s bar while she’s at it.

When Piper & her sister arrive, they find that the bar & the apartment are dumps & the people there—chiefly a hot but evidently married fisherman captain named Brendan Taggart—are less than charmed.

But Brendan’s actually a widower. & against his wishes he is charmed. Relentlessly so.

Where to start. Since this is a Tessa book I’m going to lead with the chemistry which is blistering. The sex scenes are filthy magic.

Brendan is G O N E for Piper soon after they meet & it’s a joy seeing how different they are & yet how he doesn’t want her to change. He loves her vanity & her desire for praise & spectacle & also her giant heart & bravery & sense of humor.

& three cheers for Piper, who by the end of the book knows who she is, what she wants, & who she wants it with. She’s learned what’s real & what isn’t.

This book is funny too—Brendan on Insta 🤣🤣— & hit every emotional note for me. It’s a feast for my carnal soul, it made me smile, & it made me wish for a sec that a real Brendan & Piper are in Westport, living their best life…on every flat surface in their home.

A high-risk pregnancy. A dangerous secret. When her case turns deadly, can this investigator avoid racking up a fatal debt?
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PI Kelly Pruett’s search to locate a former classmate’s missing father ends in what appears to be a tragic accident. But putting the pieces together that led to that fateful night will require Kelly to play a high risk game of chance with a killer willing to gamble everything to win.

Private investigator stories are always fun to me—even more so when the lead is getting her sea legs & proving her instincts & mettle not only to herself but to those who don’t think she can handle it.

Denied is the second in Mary Keliikoa’s Kelly Pruett series. It’s entertaining, it’s layered, and the mystery is compelling, opening when lead Kelly takes on a case to look for a former classmate’s dad. When she arrives at his home she doesn’t find him but she does see lots of evidence of gambling & a severed finger in his trashcan.

Questions abound & the case is made more poignant to Kelly—& more interesting to the reader—by the parallels Kelly makes between this missing dad & her own complicated father who recently passed away & who owned their PI company.

Whereas Kelly had a rookie learning curve in the first book, in this one she’s obviously grown as an investigator & she hasn’t lost her tenacity or her bravery. She’s all too willing to pursue wherever the case’s leads take her to find her answers & that makes for a fun ride.

Romance readers: there is a romantic relationship in this series but it’s kissing only & not a real focus. The sweet spot of Denied for me is in offering a single mother heroine who isn’t afraid to take risks in order to give her clients the answers they’re seeking. A PI with integrity & a lot of guts.

4 ⭐️. Out now!

Mary Keliikoa is the author of the Lefty and Agatha award nominated PI Kelly Pruett mystery series and the upcoming Misty Pines mystery series featuring Sheriff Jax Turner slated for release in September 2022. Her short stories have appeared in Woman’s World and in the anthology Peace, Love and Crime: Crime Fiction Inspired by Music of the ‘60s. A Pacific NW native, she spent a part of her life working around lawyers. Combining her love of legal and books, she creates a twisting mystery where justice prevails.

When not in Washington, you can find Mary on the beach in Hawaii where she and her husband recharge. But even under the palm trees and blazing sun, she’s plotting her next murder—novel that is.
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Find out more about Mary on her website, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

It's up to a trio of adorable rescue huskies to make two lonely hearts in a coastal Alaskan town realize that true love is worth too much to turn tail and run.
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Glaciers have nothing on Kelsey Porter when she decides to freeze someone out. After getting burned once, she's not about to let it happen again. And right now all that icy contempt is focused on one annoyingly attractive and entitled interloper: Ian Roth. Not only is he looking to take advantage of her quaint, coastal community, tainting the small-town charm of Helen, Alaska, but he has committed the one crime she can never forgive--he doesn't like her dogs.

Unlike what Kelsey believes, Ian loves Helen's charms as much as she does. That's partly why he's determined to open a brewery there, and he's not about to let anything or anyone stop his dream from coming true. But he didn't count on the beautiful, prickly woman getting under his skin. Or having to be within hand-biting proximity of her three huge huskies.

When Kelsey's family conscripts her into helping Ian get his brewery off the ground, she finds herself caught between a rock and a hard . . . muscular . . . man who has a fear of dogs. But the longer they work together, the more she can feel herself begin to thaw. Now she'll have to choose: let sleeping dogs lie to protect her heart, or mush head-on toward love.​

Alanna Martin’s Paws & Prejudice is a romance set smack in small town Alaska, where the biggest threat isn’t quite the local wildlife but instead a long-running, take-all-prisoners feud between two families.

Everyone’s expected to take sides, even new residents of Helen, like Ian Roth, hopeful brewery owner & transplant from Florida.

He’s a more laid-back type except he does get annoyed by self-described “ice queen” Kelsey Porter, who’s mastered the snarky behavior that keeps people from looking too closely.

She also doesn’t like outsiders. But when they’re made to work together, they both realize the other isn’t quite as they seem, & maybe Helen, Alaska is big enough for both of them.

There’s quite a lot going on here & on balance I found it entertaining with some enjoyable steam. The ice queen-“puppy” personality hero is a fun take, even if the heroine made me raise my eyebrows on a couple of occasions.

At the beginning of the book I had reservations about her & the feud she’s been part of for so long & it’s cool seeing her realize for herself that the feud is damaging & not necessary, that she can step out of it & achieve positive change using the power the feud has given her.

The fact that the heroine is a romance novel writer in secret—& the hero has a dog phobia & the heroine has three beloved huskies—gives them both more opportunity to grow emotionally.

I wanted more build up for their feelings before things between them really accelerate, though they do start establishing more of that intimacy—& the book has more thorough relationship development—after they sleep together the first time.

Paws & Prejudice has some sweet moments, some hot moments, & it’s 3.5 ⭐️ for me.

Out today!