books

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The fourth book of Elizabeth Lowell’s Donovans series, Midnight in Ruby Bayou, is for my money the best of the lot. It’s got the most complex of any of the plots in the series up to this point, and since it’s a bit longer than the previous ones as well, Lowell has more time to develop the various characters. This time around, the Donovan Sibling Du Jour is Faith, Hope’s sister, and we finally get some payoff on the plot point set up in previous books, involving an asshole ex-boyfriend. We’ve also got a stolen priceless Russian ruby, and the torrid secrets of a South Carolina family who’ve commissioned Faith to design a necklace for a forthcoming wedding–that of her own best friend.

Lowell does a decent job tying all of these elements together, although there’s a clear demarcation between the half of the story involving “Faith and Owen travel to South Carolina”, and “Faith and Owen arrive at the Monteageaus’ mansion, and deal with all the drama there”, and the transition between the two parts isn’t entirely smooth. But that said, out of all of the lead characters in the Donovans series, I like Faith and Owen the most. Their relationship and chemistry come across to me as the most equal out of any in the series, and not just because Owen is an employee of Faith’s family. He’s the most understated of the male leads in the series, and a lot of this is on purpose as he deliberately plays to the “Southern good ol’ boy” stereotype as well as to the fact that he’s carrying a cane as he recovers from an injury sustained in Afghanistan. Most importantly, while he and Faith do their share of arguing, they get over it quickly, and there’s no Big Misunderstanding sorts of annoyances that so often annoy me in romance and romantic suspense novels.

Once the action shifts to the Montegeaus’ mansion, everything takes on a decidedly darker tone–because at this point the plot delves into the sordid history of the family, and in particular, the crazy old woman Tiga. Questions of alcoholism and incest and murder are all explored, all of which give a bit more weight to this novel than its predecessors. As this is a romantic suspense novel, nothing is ever really graphically called out, though the presence of these plot elements at all may make it a questionable read for some. So be on the lookout for that.

All in all though a decent read. Three stars.

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The third of Elizabeth Lowell’s Donovan books, Pearl Cove, is perhaps one of the earliest Lowells that levels up a bit for me in general quality of plot and character development. It’s still formulaic–I haven’t met a Lowell suspense novel that isn’t, even if it’s a formula I happen to enjoy. But this one at least does a better job than others.

This time around we have the focus on Archer Donovan, the oldest of the Donovan brothers and the one who’s generally in charge of everything the younger generation of the family does. He’s a former international operative, with the obligatory unspecific hints about Awful Things He Did When He Was Younger, and he’s got the suitably jaded outlook on life to go with it. And, unsurprisingly, a portion of his Awful Background(TM) is plot-relevant, for it turns out he’s got sordid backstory with his illegitimate half-brother–a bitter, crippled man named Len McGarry. Who, it turns out, has just died under mysterious circumstances. And Archer learns this from Len’s widow Hannah–who, it turns out, is the obligatory Only Woman Archer Has Ever Loved(TM).

Naturally, Archer must hightail it down to Australia to help Hannah find out who murdered her husband, and what happened to the priceless necklace of black pearls he’d been assembling.

I quite enjoyed the “solve the murder mystery” aspect of this story, and the chemistry between Archer and Hannah was suitably edgy and compelling, even given the gyrations Hannah’s backstory goes through to get her into a position of being a widow yet still more or less sexually innocent. The only part of their interaction I didn’t enjoy was the Big Misunderstanding trope rearing its head, since a good chunk of Hannah’s early interactions with Archer are her assuming that he’s just as much of an asshole as her dead husband was, without any particular justification at all. Once they get past the Big Misunderstanding, though, it’s fun to see the Donovans reacting to their brother finally being in love, and all of them coming together to help him and Hannah ultimately solve the crime. Three stars.

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stranger, Book 4 of Zoe Archer’s “Blades of the Rose” series, is hands down my favorite of the lot–in no small part due to the awesomeness of its hero, Catullus Graves. I was afraid he wouldn’t live up to the buildup he got in previous books, but I was happy to discover I was wrong. Sure, he’s a romance novel hero and therefore in many ways is a very typical one: i.e., he’s hot, he’s a competent fighter, and such. But what really sells him for me is his intellect; scientifically inclined heroes for the major, major win! And like many a nerd in real life, Cat’s got his issues talking to women, so I found him quite endearing as he established his relationship with our heroine, reporter Gemma Murphy.

I liked Gemma just about as much as I did Cat, since she was adept at finding the right things to say to draw him out of his reclusive shell. They actually talk quite a bit during the course of the plot, and because of this, they come across to me beautifully as genuinely liking each other as people, above and beyond the obligatory percolation of each other’s hormones. In other words: my favorite kind of chemistry!

Plus, partial I am to tales involving Celtic mythos, I have to give this book props for having Cat and Gemma have to venture into Faerie. There’s some nicely creepy stuff there, and that whole sequence would have fit well in any fantasy novel. Not quite as awesome for me was this book’s choice of “monster”, but on the other hand, you can hand-wave that if you remember that the “monster” is supposed to be more the “villains’ perception of what he should be” rather than a straightforward lifting of his mythos. (Which is all I’ll say about that, lest I delve into spoilers.)

While I’m sure this is not the last of the Blades books, this does neatly tie off the story arc begun in the earlier ones. Thus this is not a good place to start if you want to check out the series. There’s followup here with the lead characters from Book 3, as they’re still critical to resolve the ongoing crisis with the Heirs of Albion, and we do see a bit more of the leads from Books 1 and 2 as well, making this much more of an ensemble cast affair than the previous installments. I found that apt, given that this was the Big Final Crisis of the arc. The villains overall were still kind of flat for me, but perhaps due to this being the end of the arc, the main villain at least felt like he had a bit more to bring to the table. All in all, fun stuff. Four stars.

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The second of Elizabeth Lowell’s Donovans series, Jade Island, continues the adventures of the jewel-loving Donovan family. This time around the camera’s on brother Kyle, the brother who’d gone missing in Amber Beach and who now gets his own time in the spotlight. He’s being eyed by the powerful Tang family as their way in to doing business with the Donovans–and the Tangs intend to have their unacknowledged relation Lianne Blakely try to seduce Kyle to get their in to the Donovans assured. Meanwhile, Kyle’s older brother Archer is sure Lianne must be involved with stolen jade, so he wants Kyle to put the moves on Lianne.

That our female lead Lianne is half-Chinese and driven by the desire to be accepted by the Tang family is simultaneously one of the best and one of the most disappointing things about the story: best since Lianne’s a nice change of pace from the standard whitebread heroine, disappointing because Lowell played up the “look how awesome the (American) Donovan family is compared to the (Chinese) Tang family and Lianne would be much better off marrying into the Donovans, wouldn’t she?” angle way too hard. There is some decent mileage with Lianne’s conflicted relationship with her parents as well as her grandfather, and that gives her some obvious reasons to want to be accepted by the Tangs. But it would have been nice to see some other positive aspects of the family, just to let us see that they weren’t all assholes.

But hey. As it stands, for what it is, Jade Island‘s a decent enough read, even if it’s on the fluffy side of romantic suspense. Three stars.

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Amber Beach is going back a while in my re-read queue, back to earlier days of Elizabeth Lowell’s romantic suspense novels. It’s the first of her Donovans series, which to this day remain among my favorites of hers. Not because they’re particularly better written or less formulaic than her later work, but more because I’m partial to the family of characters she depicts. Plus, while the cast travels all over the globe, they’re headquartered in Seattle. And I’m a sucker for books that reference Pike Place Market, what can I say?

Anyway, her Donovan clan is fairly fun. You’ve got a large group of brothers and sisters, all headed up by a forceful tycoon of a father and a hugely talented painter of a mother, and the various stories of the series all focus upon a particular sibling. Since the siblings also run an international jewelry business, each book focuses upon the starring sibling’s particular favorite gem. Amber Beach‘s jewel du jour is of course amber, and its heroine is Honor, one of the two Donovan sisters. Honor’s desperate to find her missing brother Kyle, desperate enough to overcome her own phobia about going out on the water and hiring a man to help her search the San Juan Islands by boat. This being a romantic suspense novel, Jake Mallory, the man she hires, does of course have an agenda of his own. And his reasons for finding Kyle are much less benign. And, of course, there are Bad Guys out to find Kyle too, along with agents of the US government. Every last one of ’em is out to find out what Kyle knows about the fabled Russian Amber Room, and the fortune in amber from it that’s gone missing.

Like I said, formulaic, but it’s a decent enough light read. Three stars.