A captivating romance that effortlessly balances laugh-out-loud scenes and heartwarming family moments.
A Chickasaw woman fudges the truth on a job application and soon finds herself unable to keep up with her lies.
Ember Lee Cardinal is unhappily working at a bowling alley, stuck plunging toilets when she knows she’s capable of more. She desperately wants to be an accountant, but she doesn’t have the money to finish her degree. After yet another job application is rejected, she has an idea—what if she tells a few little white lies on her application? She exaggerates her qualifications, saying she has a degree when she really just took a couple of classes, and lists her race as white instead of Native American. And it works—she gets the job. Ember finds out that it’s actually possible to learn these accounting skills on the job, and soon she’s so successful at work that she earns a promotion. But it’s not all number crunching and spreadsheets; Ember also can’t help but notice Danuwoa Colson, the company’s Native American IT guy. The two of them get closer, and Ember realizes that he’s everything she’s been looking for in a man, but their company explicitly forbids interoffice dating. Also, Danuwoa doesn’t know she lied about some major parts of her application, and soon Ember finds herself lying even more. As their feelings get stronger, Danuwoa becomes impossible to resist…but Ember will need to be honest, with the people around her and herself, if their relationship has any chance of working. As an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, Nava brings a sense of realism and heart to her debut. Ember’s journey is about her career and her romantic life but it’s just as much about accepting her family, her history, and the help of everyone around her. Nava blends deeper themes, like Ember’s fraught relationship with her brother and father as well as the racism she experiences at work, with fun and always welcome rom-com tropes like “just one bed.” Ember and Danuwoa’s intense sexual tension leads to plenty of steamy scenes and a relationship that’s both enjoyable and satisfying to read.
A captivating romance that effortlessly balances laugh-out-loud scenes and heartwarming family moments.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780593642603
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.
A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way.
Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn’t been able to get her head together, and it’s affecting her performance. Plus, she’s trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction—until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it’s something neither of them can stop thinking about. It’s Lukas who suggests they have a fling—purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett’s friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas’ relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood’s latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms.
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641057
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
A satisfying crime novel with a side order of romance.
A TV producer and a detective try to stop a strange pattern of young women disappearing.
In “Auclair, Loooziana,” disillusioned detective John Bowie reluctantly meets in a bar with Beth Collins, producer for the true crime show Crisis Point. She needs to interview him about the disastrous case of the missing Crissy Mellin, but he refuses. The teenager disappeared three years ago on the night of a blood moon and hasn’t been found, but a suspect hanged himself in jail after signing a confession. Case closed, says John’s boss. But John is convinced that their prisoner could not have been guilty, and he’s deeply upset at his failure. “The Mellin case messed up your life,” Beth tells him. She persuades John that Crissy’s disappearance is the latest of a series that happen on the night of a blood moon, the colloquial term for a total lunar eclipse. “It’s going to happen again,” she predicts. And wouldn’t you know, another blood moon is coming in four days. Tick, tick, tick. Beth’s boss at Crisis Point insists on airing an update on the case, but Beth knows the show is going to get it wrong, and its reputation will be ruined. Meanwhile, there’s an electric sexual tension between Beth and John that the author toys with nicely—do they, or don’t they? The answer plays out in detail more than once. The characters are fun if easy to pigeonhole: the detective angry at his failure, the honest (and beautiful) outsider eager to do her job but susceptible to love, the hero’s corrupt (to say the least) boss, and the ogre who carries out said boss’s dirtiest deeds. Even John’s dog, Mutt, plays a small but vital role. When John found him, he’d been “a flea-bitten hide wrapped around a skeleton that whimpered.” Little plot devices are easy to spot, like the phone that rings at a crucial moment, or the handgun that John places in Beth’s hand for her protection. Does Chekhov’s guideline apply here? The romantic angle leavens the dark theme, and readers will have plenty of incentives to turn the pages.
A satisfying crime novel with a side order of romance.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781538742983
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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