Sirius and I are over at Dear Author with a joint review of Give Up the Ghost by Jenn Burke. Entertaining second installment – I really enjoy the found family aspects of the series.
Tag: mystery (Page 2 of 4)
I’m over at AudioGals with a review of Peril by Post by Sherri Cobb South, narrated by Joel Froomkin. My first John Pickett mystery – even though it’s not the first in the series, it wasn’t difficult to dive in here.
Monthly Mini Review
Where Serpents Sleep by CS Harris, narrated by Davina Porter – B+ I’ve been glomming the audiobooks of the Sebastian St. Cyr mysteries since just before Christmas. This is book 4 in the series. When I started listening, being an inveterate romance reader, I read the blurbs ahead and realised that the enduring love interest I needed to support to get my HEA fix was Hero Jarvis. In this book, things happen (at last) but we are still a long way away from any kind of HEA. I’m currently listening to book 6 and it may well be that way at the end of this one actually – but I have faith!!
I have been thoroughly enjoying not just the romantic threads though. The history in the series is rich and the mysteries are engrossing. In this one, eight young women are murdered and Hero asks for Sebastian’s help in first, identifying “Rose” the woman who died in Hero’s arms and then solving the crime. I was aided by my lack of knowledge about that particular period of English political history; I really didn’t know what was going to happen next. I did go and look things up afterwards and then I was impressed about the way the author weaves historical fact into her fiction. Continue reading
Why I read it: My friend Caz recommended this series to me.
What it’s about: (from Goodreads) Gideon Frayne has spent his whole working life as a policeman in the village of Dark on Bodmin Moor. It’s not life in the fast lane, but he takes it very seriously, and his first missing-child case is eating him alive. When his own boss sends in a psychic to help with the case, he’s gutted – he’s a level-headed copper who doesn’t believe in such things, and he can’t help but think that the arrival of clairvoyant Lee Tyack is a comment on his failure to find the little girl.
But Lee is hard to hate, no matter how Gideon tries. At first Lee’s insights into the case make no sense, but he seems to have a window straight into Gideon’s heart. Son of a Methodist minister, raised in a tiny Cornish village, Gideon has hidden his sexuality for years. It’s cost him one lover, and he can’t believe it when this green-eyed newcomer stirs up old feelings and starts to exert a powerful force of attraction.
Gideon and Lee begin to work together on the case. But there are malignant forces at work in the sleepy little village of Dark, and not only human ones – Gideon is starting to wonder, against all common sense, if there might be some truth in the terrifying legend of the Bodmin Beast after all. As a misty Halloween night consumes the moor, Gideon must race against time to save not only the lost child but the man who’s begun to restore his faith in his own heart.
What worked for me (and what didn’t): I enjoyed the story very much. It was a short (novella-length) audio and, considering that the main characters had not met before it began, it managed to sell me on the budding relationship between Gideon and Lee. There is a bit of insta-lust (nothing wrong with that) and perhaps one or two narrative jumps which suprised me just a little in the romantic story but nothing I wasn’t able to go with fairly easily. Gideon’s last relationship broke down because he was closeted. It’s clear that he has enough regret about that and enough time had passed that when Lee bobs up in his life, Gideon wasn’t likely to let that happen again. So it made sense to me. Continue reading
I’m over at Dear Author with a review of The Next One Will Kill You by Neil S. Plakcy. Not much romance but a solid mystery.
I’m over at Dear Author with a review of In Another Life by Julie Christine Johnson. For fans of The Time Traveller’s Wife. Not for Kaetrin.