Romance

As Cecilia Holland’s historical romance Great Maria opens, our young and pretty heroine is doing what any well-bred medieval girl might be about on a blustery afternoon: visiting a religious shrine some miles from home and contemplating a life in the convent. Guarded as she is by a handful of her father’s knights, she cannot help noticing that one of them is extremely young and handsome... and that he has noticed her. But when a sudden vicious attack leaves her in dire peril, it is an older knight with cool gray eyes who defends her and brings her back to her father’s castle.

In its first chapters, Sweet Tooth begins like Dickens’ David Copperfield.  Serena Frome (rhymes with Plume) tells of her unremarkable childhood and how she ends up working as a spy for Britain’s MI5. With her blonde and beautiful looks, she is a bit of a Bond Girl and wreaks havoc on the men around her.

A good all-around student, Serena devours novels and wants to do an English degree in a small university, but her housewife mother, in an uncharacteristic fit of feminism, tells her she has a chance of making something of herself by going to Cambridge and doing “maths.” 

Never Apologize for Your Reading Tastes.  Libraries live by this adage from Betty Rosenberg.  But, truthfully?  We're all biased.  There are those who won't get near a bestseller--reading only serious non-fiction, or, perhaps, literary fiction.  My personal eye-rolling, disdainful sniffiness was aimed squarely at paperback romances.  Until I actually, well, read some of them.

Ryan Dooley has always been in trouble. Victim Rights, by Norah McClintock, tells of his journey from one side of the law to the other. Dooley, as he prefers to be called, had a hard life growing up. He was forced to try to care for his mother, all the while taking care of himself because no one else was able to take care of him. However, when his ex-cop uncle found him in a juvenile detention center, he offers him an ultimatum. If Dooley will stay out of trouble, his uncle will provide for him until he turns eighteen in a couple months.

Do you believe in ghosts? Violet Willoughby does not and she is the daughter of a medium, albeit a fraudulent one. In Haunting Violet by Alyxandra Harvey, the year is 1872, London England and Violent is the daughter of a scheming, manipulative and opportunistic mother who wants her to “marry up” no matter what. They rig séances and swindle unsuspecting high society spiritualists. After many faked séances Violet remains a skeptic of ghosts until one fateful night she sees a transparent girl oozing water and lilies and who will not rest until her killer is brought to justice. Violet is the only one who sees the very persistent spirit and soon realizes that it is up to her to solve the mystery behind her death in order to have the spirit be at peace.