A hit-and-miss erotic fantasy with sharp writing but underemployed characters.
Psychic lovers wrangle with each other—in and out of bed—in this paranormal period romance.
Piper Scott and Jules Alexander seem like perfectly matched English aristocrats with scruffy Victorian backstories. He’s the eighth Viscount Beauchamp, she’s the granddaughter of an earl; he fled his abusive father to live as a London street urchin, and she spent her youth accompanying her wastrel dad to gambling dens. However, Jules is also head of the League, a secret organization that shelters misfits with psychic powers at his country estate, and he has visionary trances that debilitate him; she perceives people’s auras and can heal mystic maladies with a touch. They’re also both so gorgeous that they spend half the book tremulously ogling each other. However, vague contrivances stymie their passion. Jules rebuffs Piper because he thinks his psychic gift might overwhelm her if they get close; meanwhile, she’s pursued by an unbalanced Frenchwoman with ESP who’ll use violence to access Piper’s healing touch. This first installment of Sumner’s League of Lords series is weakened by the fact that the lady isn’t trouble enough: Piper has a background in gambling but never gambles, and she enters the novel posing as a fake clairvoyant but never cons anyone; throughout, she’s mainly just a woman in love who helps people. She’s surrounded by potentially interesting supporting characters whose entertainment value is similarly wasted, such as her maid Minnie, a sex worker’s daughter who can throw knives with her mind but never uses her telekinetic powers in the narrative. The action set pieces are mainly in the bedroom, where Piper and Jules get up to intense, if slow-paced, antics: “He swallowed her moan as he captured her lips, his lids sweeping low the last thing she saw before she crested, her body bowing off the bed and into him.” Still, Sumner has a knack for snappy dialogue and Austen-esque drollery: “A week passed before Piper concluded that her rejection of Julian’s pitiable but heartfelt proposal might have been an unintentionally deceptive feminine ploy.”
A hit-and-miss erotic fantasy with sharp writing but underemployed characters.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-65920-208-3
Page Count: 420
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sink your teeth into this delightful paranormal romance with a modern twist.
A vampire and an Alpha werewolf enter into a marriage of convenience in order to ease tensions between their species.
As the only daughter of a prominent Vampyre councilman, Misery Lark has grown accustomed to playing the role that’s demanded of her—and now, her father is ordering her to be part of yet another truce agreement. In an effort to maintain goodwill between the Vampyres and their longtime nemeses the Weres, Misery must wed their Alpha, Lowe Moreland. But it turns out that Misery has her own motivations for agreeing to this political marriage, including finding answers about what happened to her best friend, who went missing after setting up a meeting in Were territory. Isolated from her kind and surrounded on all sides by the enemy after the wedding, Misery refuses to let herself forget about her real mission. It doesn’t matter that Lowe is one of the most confounding and intense people she’s ever met, or that the connection building between them doesn’t feel like one born entirely of convenience. There’s also the possibility that Lowe may already have a Were mate of his own, but in spite of their biological differences, they may turn out to be the missing piece in each other’s lives. While this is Hazelwood’s first paranormal romance, and the book does lean on some hallmark tropes of the genre, the contemporary setting lends itself to the author’s trademark humor and makes the political plot more easily digestible. Misery and Lowe’s slow-burn romance is appealing enough that readers will readily devour every moment between them and hunger to return to them whenever the story diverts from their scenes together.
Sink your teeth into this delightful paranormal romance with a modern twist.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780593550403
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
This slightly smutty monster romance feels more like a spectacle than a deliberately paced story.
A woman travels to Scotland to unravel her late father’s past and meets a grumpy Scotsman with his own secrets.
Keyanna MacKay was brought up by a single father who was always tight-lipped about his upbringing, so when he dies, she’s left with no family. Key decides that learning about his life before he left Scotland would be a good way of keeping his memory close and perhaps connecting with long-lost relatives. She discovers a grandmother and other extended family in Scotland, but they’re hardly welcoming. “I know who you are....And you shouldn’t have come,” are the first words her grandmother says to her. Lachlan Greer has little patience for the American he’s already written off as clueless. When he witnesses Key’s snubbing by her family members, his grumpy demeanor gives way to begrudging pity, and he starts helping her navigate the local community and try to build a bridge to her grandmother. At first, this book seems to be a contemporary romance with light magical undertones involving a family’s mysterious curse, but it quickly devolves into a monster romance heavy on shock value. While monster romance can be fun, it doesn’t work here. Key and Lachlan’s chemistry is bumpy, and the pace of their relationship as they go from disastrous first impressions to a happily ever after is all over the place. Ferguson tries to combine too many elements—including a grumpy-meets-sunshine pairing, a mystery with sensitive family dynamics, and the complicated logistics of falling in love with a cryptid—leaving several threads not fully resolved. The setting is the most positive element, with Scotland’s lush greenery providing the perfect whimsical background for hunting down long-buried family secrets.
This slightly smutty monster romance feels more like a spectacle than a deliberately paced story.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780593816851
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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