 Thanks to the publisher for the complimentary hardcopy & the publisher & Netgalley for the complimentary e-ARC. All opinions provided are my own.In my opinion Diana Biller’s Hotel of Secrets is a perfect historical & the couple in it is now one of my faves & imagine every other superlative you can think of attached to the end of this sentence because the book is that good. The lovely & formidable Maria Wallner is doing everything she can to bring her family hotel back to its glory days. But someone is also trying to kill her, a fact which really arouses US Treasury Secret Service Agent Eli Whittaker’s ire…& he really doesn’t know why that would be, he is not one to form emotional attachments & he is in Vienna for a job etc etc. This book. The Vienna setting is richly rendered—I can picture the sounds & the sights even now—& it’s even more striking with the epigraph journal entries at the beginning of chapters, each written by the fierce Wallner women. Biller makes it easy to see that this couple belongs together, despite their surface differences. He comes across as uptight & reserved & she’s a dynamo & a charming & also extremely driven when it comes to her hotel but they have similar characters & values, not to mention incendiary chemistry that’s also communication-focused. I love love when a FMC in a historical romance is experienced & it’s just not a big deal & we get that here, along with a celibate MMC who decides not to be that anymore. Dear readers, he actually goes to an illicit bookstore to educate himself about female pleasure!!! If I haven’t convinced you yet, I will note that one of my fave things about this book is the subtlety & the power of the increasingly frequent moments when Eli has “urges” or “impulses” to actively show support or kindness to the people he is bewilderingly coming to care for… This book is an act of magic & I adored it. 5 BIG ⭐️. Out now![ID: Jess, a white woman, wears a dark green dress & stands against a yellow wall holding the book.]
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 Thanks to the publisher & Netgalley for the complimentary e-ARC. All opinions provided are my own.Talk about serendipitous…Tansy Adams’ lie about having a fake girlfriend for the last 6 months could blow up in front of her face. Instead, the very woman she’s been pretending to date—Gemma West, a romance novel cover model—walks into the wedding reception & agrees with Tansy‘s story. But Gemma also wants to take their unexpected ruse even farther. She wants a marriage of convenience with Tansy so that she can satisfy the terms of her grandmother’s will & take over his media company. So now it’s a marriage of convenience between two women with some unexpectedly similar trauma from their childhoods, some similar ambitions when it comes to saving their family legacies, & some similar attraction for their “fake” partner turned real the more they spend time together. Alexandria Bellefleur’s The Fiancée Farce is really cute & the things that work for me really work for me. Like the mental health rep—this might be the only book I’ve read where the book talks about mixing mental health meds & alcohol? And though the relationship in this book moves really quickly at the beginning, by the middle & end I felt caught up & more settled in the feelings I could see were growing. Adorable text message exchanges & words + actions giving proof to how protective they are of each other really won me over. What works less for me are how some things feels glossed over or jumped over a bit, including the aforementioned beginning & a family bit at the end, & a truly unsettling villain who as far as I’m concerned deserved a far worse fate than what he got. I kind of wavered a bit on the ranking because the beginning is more like a 4 for me, & the middle toward end is more like 4.5. So how about 4.25? ;). Either way, this one is really sweet, but not too sweet (let’s not forget the dirty talk), with a lovely story of people finding out a marriage of convenience that turns into more is possible in & out of romance novels. 4.25⭐️. Out 04/18.CWs: Previous death of father. References to familial loneliness and scenes of familial antagonism. A lead is called a “whore.” In high school, Tansy was seduced and intimate photographs of her were shared with classmates, leading to harassment; the same person who did this is a secondary character who continues to appear in this book, often “leering” & making crude comments.
 Thanks to the publisher & Netgalley for the complimentary e-ARC. All opinions provided are my own.Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh is a sci fi book that startles into a beginning. At first I was like “what? What is happening? What is that?” but soon the confusion was (mostly) swept away by the secrets that are revealed & the magnetic plot that keeps serving twists & jolts & somersaults. The book opens with Kyr, a soldier on a station called Gaea Station. Kry & the other people living there are descendants of Earth, a planet that was deliberately destroyed in a war against the majo. Throughout her life Kyr has been taught to wage war & to nurse the vengeance & hope that she’s been told is her due. But she’s only 17 & we can see—& gradually, slowly, Kyr too—that things aren’t quite as they seem. This book is complex—immediately after reading I felt a bit awed & very aware that it would take a while to wrestle with what happened & what the implications are. It’s one of those books that has the shine of brilliance to me—you know those wildly inventive books that go places you aren’t expecting? This book definitely did that. & did it again. 4.5⭐️. Out 04/11.CWs: please see a trusted reviewer’s list of CWs.
 Thanks to the publisher & Netgalley for the complimentary e-ARC. All opinions provided are my own.I’m a sucker for a foodie or fake dating romance & lucky me, Fake Dates & Mooncakes by Sher Lee has both. Dylan Tang works at his aunt’s Singaporean Chinese takeout & dreams of winning an upcoming moon cake competition so he can drive more customers to his aunt’s business. Using a family recipe for the mooncake is also a great way to remember his mother, who passed away one month ago, & possibly to get to know Theo Somers, a handsome, wealthy charmer who Dylan has a crush on immediately after meeting. Though they don’t have the most auspicious beginning, Dylan & Theo help each other out through a business grant-wedding date exchange. This cute book explores the importance of Chinese culture to both characters & how that’s tinged by their own respective losses. Family support is huge in this book with Dylan’s family banding together to help him the same way he tries to help them. Though the drama feels a bit odd to me, Theo makes a great gesture for Dylan’s sake, & it all wraps up with a heartwarming & satisfying ending. 4⭐️. Out 05/16.Please check out a trusted reviewer's list of CWs.
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