Two good people find love in this emotional, slow-burn romance.
A social media influencer asks a firefighter to pretend to be her boyfriend during a stressful family vacation in Key West.
Sara Vance is panicked. She arrived in Florida for a weeklong family vacation only to be stood up by the man she’d been casually dating. Her mother is in recovery from a recent bout with cancer, and this vacation was supposed to help knit her fractured family closer together. Sara is the youngest sibling and an underachiever—her parents and both siblings are high-powered doctors—and Sara worries that being dumped will either make her the butt of the family’s jokes or cause her mom to worry. Enter kind, handsome Key West firefighter Luis Navarro. Luis has an unplanned week of vacation; his captain insisted he take time off to get his emotional bearings after handling a particularly gruesome car accident. After meeting a distressed Sara when she arrives in Key West, he agrees to play the part of her boyfriend—anything to avoid his own feelings and family dramas. The story’s opening is tight and compelling, but the middle section drifts by without much conflict, just Sara and Luis ruminating about past mistakes and marveling at how easy it is to be together. The Key West setting is lovingly portrayed, showing how local families struggle with the rising costs of living on an island paradise. Also notable: Sara is in recovery from an eating disorder she developed in college, and the book carefully portrays her determination to implement her therapist’s advice and avoid triggers, all while refusing to succumb to her family’s overbearing concern. Oliveras has a gift for showcasing how new lovers navigate introducing romantic partners to their families. Eventually, the plot snaps together and Luis and Sara realize they are stronger together than apart.
Two good people find love in this emotional, slow-burn romance.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4201-5017-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Zebra/Kensington
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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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