The Touch of Fire by Linda Howard ***

This is an older Linda Howard, now out on Audiobook, narrated by Natalie Ross. I liked Natalie Ross as narrator, but the story itself never really rose above "just ok". It's a western, where the heroine, Annie, is a doctor in a small Western mining town - the only place that would have a woman doctor in post-Civil War America. Rafe McCae is on the lam, being hunted by several bounty hunters, when he's injured. He goes to Doc Parker, and he ends up kidnapping her and taking her hostage - sorta. She doesn't really go willingly, and he is sorta mean to her, but it turns out he's really a lawyer from New York City ("git a rope") who is being pursued to cover a governmental scandal. It was ok - not great, not bad.

Veil of Night by Linda Howard - the audio version ***

Veil of Night: A Novel by Linda Howard

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The 3-star review is for the AUDIO of the book, since I might have liked it even more in print but the narration was so inconsistent and sometimes awful. Clarinda Ross (the narrator) might be a good actor - her character voices are good - but either she just cannot read books out loud or she had very, very bad direction. Her narration (the stuff between the good character voices) was sing-songy with odd, disconcerting short pauses. I forged ahead with the audiobook anyway, but I think I need to read it in print now to really appreciate it. Her narration earned maybe 1 1/2 or 2 stars, but since the story seemed good, I'll go with 3.

The story was a familiar theme with me, since I'm just now reading the end of Nora Roberts' Bride series - Jaclyn is a wedding planner! She's in business with her mother, and she's dealing with the Bridezilla to end all Bridezillas - a young woman who has managed to pretty much piss off everyone in her path. She's not just wishy-washy - she's mean! Everyone was probably imagining inventive ways to off her when she actually gets offed - with kabob skewers. With kabobs still on them. Ewwww.

The detective on the case is our hero, Eric, who coincidentally had a memorable one-night-stand with Jaclyn the night before the murder. Small town. This sorta puts some distance between Jaclyn and Eric - she's thinking, how could he accuse me of murder? and he's thinking, how can I get her back into bed?

There was a nice cast of characters - the other women working the business, a couple of funny wedding scenarios that I think will be funnier when I read them to myself.

People, this is LINDA HOWARD - her books deserve the best! I have to repeat what I read on Audible.com: Was Joyce Bean busy??



View all my reviews

Angel Creek by Linda Howard ***

AUDIO: I got this from the library, with narrator Natalie Ross. I like, or have liked, Ross as a narrator, but she either cannot do justice to this property, or she cannot rise above it, cuz I thought her narration was pretty dang mediocre on this book, which is also pretty dang mediocre (or worse). The audio of this book didn't make the story any better.

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My Review from August 2008
First off - I got this in a Large Print 2-for-1 book from PBS. Yay! But I have to warn anyone who gets this book: Angel Creek is the second in the series, but for some reason it's the first in the book. Silly me, I didn't figure that out before reading them. It doesn't entirely ruin it, but there is a character in A Lady of the West who appears in Angel Creek, so if you read it first like I did, you'll know a spoiler going into A Lady...

Second off - holy moly. OK, it is Linda Howard, but it's early Linda Howard and although her writing chops were still great, man - it's - well - the men are not just alpha, they're complete assholes and I would have to say what they do pushes forced seduction so close to rape there'd be a hung jury or a conviction if the women pressed charges, ok? Hence my 3 stars because if the writing wasn't good, this would have been a 2 star or maybe even a DNF. She has these men just forget that No Means No - in their world, No means OK, I want it even though I think I don't. Bad. Oh yeah baby like that.

I tried to tell myself it was a Western thing, hard life, yada yada. But I mean. These men just said: "gimme" and took.

In this story, we have Luke - he's the owner of the Double C ranch, with no family left, and rich. We have Dee - no family left for her either, but all she has is her family ranch, not money - and Angel Creek, the best and sometimes only source of water in the region. We have a sorta bad guy - he's not really evil, but he's not all good either, named Kyle, and he's also a rancher with a big investment in land and cattle. We have a gently bred banker's daughter, whassername. And we have Luis Fronteras - he's a drifter from the first story, A Lady of the West. And we have a whore with a heart of gold, Tillie. Are you keeping track, here?? Get out a scorecard.

It seems everything traces back to something that happened 10 years ago, for every character. After the 4th or 5th time I saw the phrase "10 years ago" I kept thinking, what exactly was it about 10 years ago? It would have taken a calculator and some notepaper to figure out what year it was set in - some time after the Civil War (10 years?), but isn't exactly named - just references to what happened some time before.

Luke and whassername have a completely unspoken non-agreement. He figures she is what he needs as a wife if he ever decides he needs one. She is 25 - practically a crone - and figures she'll end up saying yes if he ever asks because where in the hell is she going to find a man to father children before her eggs dry up? Kyle and Tillie go way back - and also sometimes go upstairs for a poke - but Kyle wants to give Luke a run for his money, so he sorta almost pursues whassername. Maybe I should look up her name in the book. Kyle also pursues Dee because if she'd marry him, he'd have more/better water for his cattle. He also offers to buy Angel Creek.

Dee's a stubborn independent woman who shoots anyone who comes on her property, except, uh, Luke. Luke decides to sorta woo her a teensy bit, just for the land, mind you - except hot damn she's an exciting piece of flesh!! So - well - the bastard takes advantage of her when she's down and sort gets her all wanting him and stuff. Damn. He does start to realize that bonking Dee and marrying whassername might not be the best idea he ever had...

Luis wants whassername. Bad. He, of all the men in both books, is a gentleman for all he's a half breed or maybe full breed Mexican drifter gunslinger. He, of all the men in both books, treats his women right (and bonks them silly before offering for their hands... hmmmm....)

The big Turning Point is when Kyle goes crazy and lies to his men, telling them Dee will allow his thirst-crazed cattle onto her land. When they herd them over there, wouldn't you know that she's standing there with a gun, shooting at them? They all go nuts, wanting blood and rape and pillaging. Luis take Dee's side, runs to Tlllie, tells Tillie to get Luke to come save Dee, and then goes back to help Dee protect her property. Whassername doesn't even find out til the next day.

OK - did you need that scorecard to keep that straight??

The writing is good, the story is ok, the men are abominable and practically unforgivable. 3 stars, and only recommended to those (1) who happen to already own the book and (2) have nothing better to do or (3) are determined to read everything LH ever wrote.
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audio notes: Natalie Ross did such a fine job on After The Night, which I have listened to 2 or 3 times, that I really expected her to make this one work for me, even though I hadn't thought much of this book 2 years ago. She does voices very, very well - but her narrator voice was just sort of sing-songy and not interesting. I just didn't like it that much, but then I hadn't like the story that much when I read it either.

Mackenzie's Mountain by Linda Howard ****

I just did a sort of marathon listening - Judith Ivory's The Proposition, Linda Howard's Mackenzie's Mountain - unabridged, and Susan Andersen's Skintight. Mackenzie's Mountain is the only one I read before blogging, so have no existing review. I did have a review of A Game of Chance, one in the series of Mackenzies, in which I rated Mackenzie's Mountain 3 stars, and mentioned it might have been because I only read it in abridged audio.

Apparently there was a new, unabridged version made recently, and only available on MP3 CD. This was a challenge to get onto the iPhone, involving importing into iTunes and converting and stuff, but it is only 1 CD because MP3s are already compressed.

I'm giving this 1 more star because it did make a better story in unabridged, although frankly there were a couple of parts where I thought - why is a teacher better at detective work than their police? Or rather, why do they believe her theory (which is correct) when it's so out-of-the-blue? One of those assumption things - if the guy has freckles, he must be fair-haired, therefore the dark hair it appears he has must be a wig therefore he's gunning for Wolf and Joe.

This is about Mary, old-maid spinster teacher (she's all of 29 and it's probably the 1980s!! gasp!) who moves to a tiny burg in Wyoming to teach at their tiny school. She realizes that one of the former students who dropped out had a spectacular school record, so she hunts him down. It's Joe Mackenzie, half-breed son of Wolf Mackenzie, another half-breed. His mother was also half-breed, but she's dead. Wolf was wrongly imprisoned for rape, and released when the real rapist was caught, but the townfolk are still scared of him and consider him a dirty Indian/rapist. His son Joe also suffers because of this.

Of course, being one of Howard's earlier-to-middle books, he was very Possessive and Agressive, but not quite the asshole of Loving Evangeline. She was pretty spunky, even if it was laughable that a 29-year-old would consider herself an old maid. They face down the town and another rapist (wow, that's a lot of rapists in a town of less than 200...) and get married and start having more kids. There are books about Joe, Zane, the daughter (which I haven't read and cannot recall her name) and Chance, who is adopted. It's a pretty popular series among romance readers.

The new narrator is one I hadn't heard of - someone online commented they couldn't believe someone new was chosen to narrate this "romance classic" and I have to agree. Christina Traister sounds like, with a lot more experience, she might become an OK narrator. She used a distinctive, southern-accented voice for Mary who is from Savannah, Georgia, that was ok. Her voices for Wolf and Joe were done with an attempt to make them lower, but with no accent of any kind. Her other various voices were ... ok... Her narration was bland, using very little inflection. In my humble opinion, she needs to learn the value of pauses - like, uh, pause between sections, first of all. She just kept reading as if she didn't realize there was a shift in POV or time or something. She didn't use the character's voice at all when in POV - just a straight, I'm trying to put you to sleep voice.

I guess it's better that she didn't get all breathy and excited while reading Howard's hot and steamy scenes. But maybe some kind of inflection, feeling, something in her narrator voice would add to the experience - not just the hot and steamy experience, but the experience of hearing the book! And some pauses - not just between sections, but also for emphasis, for conveying meaning.

so I'd give her reading maybe 2.5 but the story 4.

Strangers in the Night by Linda Howard ***

This is 3 short stories (novellas?) written by LH in the 1990s but only recently released by audible.com in audio, narrator Laural Merlington.

I guess the first story should have alerted me that this wasn't going to be as good as I'd hoped. Generally, I'm a big LH fan - my absolute favorite book right now is To Die For, and among my top favorites are After The Night, Death Angel - oh, too many to count. But hey, there are a couple of duds, and now I can add these three stories to that list. Yeah, I rated them 3 stars, because, I don't know, I didn't hate them, just... blah.

I can't even recall the first story now, and I only started the audiobook yesterday. All three have a strange man coming into the lives of our heroines in mysterious ways and falling madly in love within about 2 minutes, then pledging loyalty to death do they part before 24 hours. The first one was something about the 2 of them having known each other forever, literally, then dreaming about each other, then meeting each other in real life/today. The narrator got so caught up in the story, her drama was way over the top and I wanted to ask her to calm down and lower her voice.

The other 2 didn't seem to have... wait, no - I started to say no paranormal element, but no, story #2 did have a woman who could see auras and also had a sort of vision thing happening too. And that living off the land thing in Alabama, no electricity and all that? Sorry, but it's hot as hell and humid too, and so I just couldn't buy that one either. Oh, they are thrown together on an island and the bad guy takes their boats, so what the hey, they boink all night.

The last one, the heroine takes in the frozen stranger, warms him with her body heat then, what the hey, they boink all night. But - oh - noes - could he be a murderer? You'll have to read it to find out. Naw, I won't put you through it: spoiler, no, he's not the murderer, but because they boinked all night she thinks she's probably pregnant, and he's so happy he proposes right then and there.



3 stars for the narrator cuz she wasn't as hysterical in the last 2 stories.

But I recommend skipping it or getting it from your local library.

Son of the Morning by Linda Howard ****

I read this book and reviewed it almost 2 years ago, and today I finished it on audio book. So, here's my original review, and then I'll comment on the audio book:

from August 2008

Here's another of my subjective 4 star books - it's Linda Howard, it's an AAR Top 100 - I liked it ok, so maybe it should have been 3 stars but... I'm so wishy-washy because I liked it more than "average" or "mediocre"!

The story involves Grace St. John - an average woman with a good career, a loving husband, and a loyal brother, who loses it all in one evening when she realizes she is inadvertently caught up in the enormous power struggle between Good and Evil. She translates ancient documents for a living, for a Foundation that is Evil - "Lucifer thou Son of the Morning" is the quote from the Bible, I believe. The Foundation Director is the current embodiment of All Things Evil, and he is looking for documents Grace has in her possession that will help him locate the source of the power he seeks.

The documents in question were written by the Guardian in the 14th century - a Guardian who, while not the embodiment of All Things Good, is the person charged with protecting the Big Secret. Or Secrets. He's the last of the Knights Templar and he has the relics and the documents hidden in his Scottish castle. The Big Secret includes (or is?) the recipe for time travel, and once Grace starts working on translating it while on the lam from the Foundation Director, she begins to dream of the Guardian.

Grace is truly a wonderful heroine - she's really all things good, and normal, and average, until she witnesses the murder of her husband and brother by the Director. Then she is all things cunning and wary - she uses her considerable skills in reasoning and translation and problem-solving, and turns them into street-smarts to avoid being caught. For a year.

Several reviewers have remarked that the book really does have 2 heroes - one is her wonderful husband, who died lying to the Director, protecting her so that Grace wouldn't be caught. In all her thoughts and all the flashbacks, he is loyal, and loving, and her true soulmate. The other hero is the Guardian himself, Niall - who shares Grace's dreams. Literally.

When Grace finishes translating the documents, she decides that to avenge her brother's and husband's deaths, she must do whatever it takes to keep the Director from getting whatever it is Niall is guarding. The documents she has only point to where the Treasure is. Grace follows the recipe for Time Travel and shows up in Niall's world to move the Treasure so that the Director won't find it.

There was a lot of anguish and heartache in the story - the deaths at the beginning, her year of hiding from the police and the Director, having to use all her wiles to find underground employment, to remain disguised and hidden. The Director was truly a bad, bad man - evil in every possible way. Niall, the medieval Scots warrior, was also bigger than life - tall, big, possibly immortal - although he wasn't All Things Good or the least saintly, he was alpha to the max. I had a hard time buying the concept that Grace would be enough Woman for him after his exploits, I'm afraid - even if she was supposed to be his match. He just didn't strike me as true soulmate material.

But hey - another one on the AAR Top 100 checked off the list. I might manage it this year after all, if I can veer away from glomming more Linda Howard and Nora Roberts and - hey, I need to read more Jennifer Crusie, and I have a couple more Jo Goodmans to go, and...

Sooo many romances, so many bills to pay that require me to work instead of read 24/7...

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OK the audiobook. Well, while I still feel the book is around 4 stars, I think the audio is closer to 3 stars. The narrator is ok, but either she has an odd way of speaking or the audio itself is off. Every word, every sentence,there's a sort of mini-explosion or elevation of sound and then it backs off, like her opening consonant is loud but the rest of the word is soft. After a while, I got used to it, even though it did continue all the way through. Maybe the microphone was off, I dunno. Plus she had a sort of quaver in her voice when it was dramatic that I really found annoying. But her voices were good, and different, so she wasn't awful - just not great. Plus, after listening to Davina Porter narrating the Outlander series, while this narrator's Scots accent was pretty darn good, I cringed when she said pronounced plaid to rhyme with "add" instead of "aid" the way Porter says it.

After The Night by Linda Howard *****

Ahhhh - another great read by Linda Howard. I've known for a while that she is a terrific author and I don't know why it's taken me so long to start glomming her backlist. This is an AAR Top 100, which is how it ended up in my TBR pile this summer.

The story takes place in south Louisiana somewhere near Baton Rouge, in a small town Ms Howard made up called Prescott. I know she made it up because I grew up in south Louisiana somewhere near Baton Rouge, and I'd never heard of it. She had it described as near the Mississippi state line and the heroine shops in New Roads. Oh not that any of this matters - except I have this creepy growing up thing about south Louisiana and sometimes reading about it gives me the heeby jeebies.

Faith Devlin is the heroine - her family was poor white trash from the word go - I mean, you couldn't get lower than being a Devlin. Her mother, Renee, was the town slut, and the mistress of the town's first family's patriarch, Guy Rouillard. He gave the Devlin family free rent on a shack on his property, where Faith and her mother lived with her alcoholic father, 2 ne'er-do-well older brothers, slutty older sister and retarded baby brother. At age 11, she's already the only responsible one in the family. And she's already over aware of the patriarch's son, Gray, currently an LSU football player.

ok, it does kinda give me the creeps to have characters attending the university my sisters attended and stuff. I just had to throw that in.

At age 14, Faith is awakened from sleep one night when Gray storms the Devlin shack to throw them all out, backed by the sheriff's department. It seems his father has run off with Renee, never to return, and Gray ends the charity right then and there. They scramble to get some belongings thrown in their cars and they head to Texas.

Gray is a well-defined Howard alpha hero - he's always had the world handed to him on a platter and feels pretty much worth it. The one constant thorn in his side is his cold society bitch mother, but he still loves her. When his father apparently deserts the family, he steps in and does what he can to save them from financial ruin. His father left no note, nothing was packed or taken - but he does send a proxy so that Gray can control the family business. I wondered that it never occurred to Gray to try to find his father, but it's explained away that the father's best friend who is also the family lawyer confirms that the father had been planning to divorce his mother and run off with another woman. No one questions it. He's really done it, even though the lawyer thought it was just drunken talking.

12 years go by - Faith has long since pulled herself up by her bootstraps and is a successful business woman. One thing bothers her, though, and that is her pull to go back to her hometown and set the record straight on what actually happened. She wants to know if the town has forgiven or forgotten - because she now knows Gray's father did not run away with her mother, who is now living with her grandmother. She figures he came back in a day or two, and everyone has moved on.

Another aside from me: I could never go back to where I grew up, and I never felt it was my hometown even though I lived there from age 2-15. Faith has no family there, and in fact didn't even know her extended family. So this part sorta got to me, because although I did feel what Faith felt (such is the power of good writing), I could never have that feeling for myself and my own "home town".

Faith isn't in Prescott 10 minutes before she's recognized - or worse, before she's recognized as her mother since the resemblance is uncanny. It becomes apparent Guy Rouillard did not return, and everyone still believes he ran away with Renee and is still with her. Gray storms into her motel room and threatens her to get outta Dodge. Self-assured, confident spitfire that she's turned into, she leaves quietly and makes a plan to come back that he can't get through so she can find out the truth. She buys a house outright (no mortgage), works from home running her multi-city business, and leaves no ends loose that Gray can use to force her out of town. He puts pressure on the local businesses to not allow her to shop there; she drives to other towns to shop. The game is on, and every step one takes is a challenge to the other.

The sexual chemistry between them is so strong the pages in the book are practically hot to the touch. It's a wonder the paper doesn't just burst into flame - but Howard, devil that she is, keeps the tension high and doesn't allow them any release til near the end of the book - leaving you panting and sweating along with them. Faith is on a mission to uncover the truth about what happened After The Night her family was run out of town - but she hasn't confided in anyone that she believes there is a different story than the one everyone tells. She doesn't tell anyone that Renee is alive and alone in another state. She is determined to clear her name there - she needs to bury the child she was and gain acceptance from her home town to go on with her life. And she is determined not to follow in her mother's footsteps as the town slut sleeping with the patriarch of the first family.

I did figure out most of the mystery sorta early on, but that wasn't a deal breaker for me. I was still on the edge of my seat waiting for Faith to give in to Gray, and for Faith to uncover the truth for herself, and for Faith and Gray to allow their feelings to come to light. There's something so exciting about reading the plot the first time, not knowing what is coming up. Although I like re-reads because you uncover more details, more layers, you can never really go back and not know what happens and whodunnit.

It's a 5 star read.

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I also have this in audio, narrated by the wonderful Natalie Ross! It's a definite 5 star listen as well.

Duncan's Bride by Linda Howard ****

This is a short Silhouette category romance from early in Linda Howard's career (1990). Reese Duncan is a trademark Howard hero - alpha, stubborn and not very nice to his woman until he figures it out. He's a rancher who went through a bitter divorce from a woman who took half his assets. Now he figures all women are like her, but he has a biological clock issue: he wants an heir. For that he needs a wife - and for a rancher out in the middle of nowhere, working 14 hour days, he decides to go the mail-order bride route and advertises.

Madelyn is Robert Cannon's stepsister (Robert is the seriously badass alpha hero in the sequel, Loving Evangeline.) If you read the stories in order, you meet Robert in this one and learn to hate him in the next - I read LE first, so I was already wary. But Reese isn't as bad as Robert, he just needs a lot of sensitivity training to catch on. Although Maddie is in NYC, a friend's mom sends her the local Omaha paper every week, and she sees the ad there. On a whim she answers it - and flies out to meet him.

It's lust at first sight for both of them - but Reese decides this NYC fashionista will be the same as the evil first wife, so he turns her down. Eventually, though, he changes his mind after the only other 2 candidates don't pan out.

It's no bed of roses, being a rural rancher's wife, but Maddie does her darnedest to learn to keep up - she cooks, she works in the barn, she rides along on fencing missions and cow herding. They even decide to go ahead and start a family. But the real conflict comes when it's time to face facts about the mortgage - he refuses to let her use her money to help pay for anything, afraid she'll take it all in a divorce. It takes him a long time to realize that she's in it for life - and that she needs to hear him commit as well.

I was impressed with this realistic look at the relationship - for one thing, Maddie is a virgin and the initial love scenes don't gloss over that and have them both in simultaneous ecstasy several times. In fact, it's a while before she even looks forward to it - he's not the "usual" romance hero who is an incredible lover who turns virgins into wantons in one move. In spite of their lust, Howard doesn't have them falling in love right away, and their relationship grows realistically. OK, yeah, it's fiction, and the chances of these initial circumstances even happening are pretty slim, still it didn't have me rolling my eyes constantly!

So I'm going with 4 stars. It fits the Winter 2008 Challenge and the Serial Reader's Challenge too.

Kiss Me While I Sleep by Linda Howard ****

Wow - 1 series finished for the Serial Reader's Challenge! And it was a great one. I read them all in a row - Kill and Tell, All The Queen's Men and Kiss Me While I Sleep. I'm a big fan of Linda Howard's books anyway, so it wasn't a hardship.

On Fantastic Fiction.com, the books are referred to as the John Medina series - ok, John appears briefly in book 1, Book 2 is his story and in book 3 his name is mentioned one time... Elsewhere I saw it called the CIA series, which more closely describes it.

Interestingly, and especially in book 3, the CIA is made out to be very all-powerful and all-knowing. That's in contrast to my impression that a lot of the time the government guys are, in fiction plots, made out to be desk-jockeys, going by the book, not getting it right. OK, I have no examples of that. But in this series, they are The Man (even the women). And of course, I think I've mentioned my secret childhood fantasy of being a paid assassin/cat burglar, so Lily - the heroine - was a woman after my own heart. (really, I think it was the influence of James Bond books and movies that made me think that would be a romantic career, and not because I actually wanted to kill anyone or even handle guns and steal stuff.)

Lily was approached at age 18 because of her marksmanship talents to become a sharpshooter/assassin for the CIA. After her first kill at age 18, she was hooked. Oh, I think she had some misgivings at first but next thing you know, she's a lethal weapon owned by the CIA. After her best friends and their adopted teenage daughter are killed, however, she turns rogue and sets out to kill the head of the family that put the hit on her friends. And succeeds. But this fellow, as bad a bad guy as ever existed, is also an asset to the CIA and so dangit if they don't have to take her out. Somehow. But how?

Well, John Medina is out of consideration since he's on another job (there's his one mention) so Frank Vinay brings in West Texas cowboy Lucas Swain - he's almost as good as John. Swain goes to France, where Lily killed the Bad Guy, and sets out to find her. He's just a step behind her at every turn - and he figures out where she will be and dangit if he doesn't locate her in just a few days! She walks into the park across the street from the lab where the action is (think avian flu, vaccine and morphed virus development) while he sits there and ponders - and rescues her when the Bad Guys start shooting at her.

Well - there's instant chemistry betwixt the 2 - and he decides to actually help her out. Seems Swain has a soft spot for kids and dogs, and once he realizes that she (a) is grieving over the teenager's death and (b) goes out of her way to help an old guy with a dog, he figures he'll at least see what her motivations and plans are before Taking Her Out. (Look - it's romance - so while we're led to believe Lily will be Terminated aka Killed, I'm going to spoil the ending for you: HEA.)

There's moles, bombs and a terrific security plot that I wished I'd thought of!! Plus the nice vacation in Greece when it's all over, before The Big Sleep. Yeah, there were probably some unrealistic spy things in there - hey, it's fiction!! but they went right over my head!

It was a 4 star read for me - and it's the last in my first completed series in the challenge.

All The Queen's Men by Linda Howard ****

Wow! Another great, fast, thrilling suspense from Howard in her CIA series!

It's always fun to read about these incredible heroes, the special ops or, as they are called in this book, black ops - special training that makes them the most dangerous men, who can sneak up on anyone and kill them without a trace and without remorse, know all kinds of computer tricks, can break into any locked building or room, and are hot hot hot to boot!! Hmmmm do these men really exist?

We first met John Medina in the first book in the series, when his father (with similar experience) was killed doing an undercover job. John always stood in the shadows and rumor had it he killed his wife as part of a mission. As part of another mission, he worked with man-and-wife operatives Niema and Dallas Burdock in Iran - and Dallas was killed. He managed to get Niema out of the country, and had surreptitiously followed her life ever since.

Niema (somehow pronounced vaguely like Naomi as Nye-ema but I couldn't tell from the book if it was Nye eeeema or Nye Emma) worked in electronics for the CIA - she could build and rebuild radios, microphones, whatever was needed. She and Dallas were both adrenaline junkies, and she had convinced him to go on this op instead of a planned thrill-seeking vacation in Australia. So she spent 5 years trying to get over the survivor guilt as well as the grief of losing him.

John mentioned to the deputy director of operations Frank Vinay that he was interested in Niema, so Frank put them together in a job. Niema didn't want to take the job - she'd been a desk jockey for the CIA, almost as a penance, since Dallas's death. John convinced her she was the right woman for the job: All she had to do was get invited to Louis Ronsard's house party in the south of France. Ronsard was the middle guy for terrorists looking for materials and weapons, and John suspected he was involved in a recent airline bombing in the US. John and Niema needed to get into Ronsard's home and copy the files about the product used in the bombing. Niema also needed to plant something electronic - a new device she invented that was invisible to sweeps for bugs, and something she put together on the spot in his office.

There were fewer fleshed out characters in this tale than in the previous - the main focus was on Niema, John and Ronsard. But she managed to make Ronsard a three-dimensional and even complex and sympathetic guy whose motives were not purely evil - he had a young daughter with cystic fibrosis who needed at least a heart transplant to survive, and all his profits went to her health care. Well, and his extravagant lifestyle, but still Howard wrote him to be from a wealthy family with a thriving regular business before his daughter was born, so that lifestyle would have been the same.

Niema felt the attraction to John almost from the beginning, but John was an enigma to her - he was always so controlled that she thought it was business only for him, and the attraction he showed her was just part of the play-acting they did for Ronsard. Very James Bond-ish stuff here, and lots of action and excitement and tension too.

It was truly a page-turner - I read it all in one day. Since it's a series, it fits the Serial Reader's Challenge, but not the Winter or A to Z challenges - already have A in the titles and H in the authors! 4 stars.

Kill and Tell by Linda Howard ****

This is a really good suspense/thriller with romance! And I love the conceit of having the bad guy be a high-powered senator on his way to the White House! That isn't really a spoiler, by the way, because they reveal it pretty early. It did take me a while to catch on to his motive for being the bad guy, though, so that was good. I just get a giggle out of thinking of a guy like that, being soooo bad and yet having this oh-so-good public persona, going down (it is romance, so there will be a HEA!).

Howard does write great alpha heroes, and Marc is one of those - a New Orleans homicide detective (pre-Katrina) called to investigate the death of a homeless guy. Except something about the homeless guy gets him to thinking it wasn't just a case of a guy living on the streets - this guy was healthy, in good shape, and his "dirty homeless guy" look seemed to be more in the way of undercover makeup.

When he locates the guy's only relative, his adult daughter Karen, Marc is upset with a woman who would let her father live like this, until he gets to know her and finds out the truth - her father left her and her mother when she was a child, after returning from his stint as a sniper in Vietnam, apparently the victim of PTSD. He contacted the mother from time to time, and she never divorced him and apparently continued to love him until her own death just a few months before.

The guy is killed by a professional who is then - immediately - killed. Considering both of them, homeless guy and professional, were so incredibly good at what they did, I wonder how they found anyone better who could track them both down and kill them? But, moot point, they did. But the little black book that homeless guy theoretically had was nowhere to be found - could it have been in the package he mailed to his wife and daughter a few months before?

Karen went to New Orleans to identify the body, and in spite of his initial reaction of dislike, Marc was drawn to her. In fact, it was the thunderbolt of love for both of them, although he recognized it first - she was still in shock over her father's death, after all. It took Marc a few days of what he considered "courting" to get her to trust him, so they could have one night of blistering monkey sex before she ran home. But when she is almost killed 2 times in 2 days, it occurs to her that these are not coincidental - father's death and 2 attempt on her own life - and she runs back to Marc.

In addition to the main characters of Marc and Karen and the senator, there were some interesting secondary/supporting roles - Antonio, Marc's colleague that he is mentoring; John Medina, the undercover operative whose father was The Professional who killed Karen's father; McPherson, the CIA guy; Raymond, the Senator's, uh, butler? or something - more like a Closer I guess.

So I liked the suspense part, maybe even better than the romance part (which was still good, if slightly over the top) - and this is the first in a Series so it fits my Serial Readers Challenge as well as the A To Z Challenge!

Cover of Night by Linda Howard ***

I listened to this book on my road trip to Arizona to pack up my life and move it cross country for a new beginning. This fact might have colored my experience, but somehow this story seemed so unlike any Linda Howard I'd read that it left me a little confused.

There wasn't much romance or sexual tension, and the hero was so beta at first as to be almost non-hero until a sudden transformation late in the story. I guess because we hear so much of the heroine's POV at first, he comes across as a blushing, stammering idiot whenever he's around her. Cal's a handyman in the small Idaho town, and he's spent so much time fixing things at Cate's Victorian B&B she's considering offering him free room and board in exchange for his services. His HANDYMAN services that is.

She's a widow with twin boys - her husband had some short fatal illness (staph infection? I think) right after the twins were born. In her grief, she sold her home and moved to small-town Idaho to start over. How she made a going concern of a B&B at the end of the road in a town of 50 people I have no idea.

But her handyman issues are apparently all because everyone else in town can see that Handyman Cal is head over heels in love with her, so they break things in her house to force their getting together. Weird, huh? Especially since he's actually a former special ops marine with all kinds of saleable skills, so why is he doing plumbing and carpentry?

That's only part of the weirdness of the story. A mob accountant decides to force a mobster's hand: pay me $20 mil to keep your real books away from the feds or else. He has the raw data on a flash drive which he takes with him to - guess where - the Idaho B&B. He leaves his stuff in the room, slips out a window and disappears, leaving a trail to the B&B that stops cold. Now - let's take stock - he has the data on a flashdrive, and several times the people who know this realize it MIGHT be on his person like, duh, in a pocket or on his keychain. But the mobster hires some goon who hires some more goons, one of whom has a beef with Goon #1. The goons go to Idaho and shoot 7 of the 50 townspeople after cutting it off, and now Handyman aka Former SpecOps guy must save the day. Meanwhile no one has any idea why they're shooting at them - they have made no demands at all. No one realizes Mob Accountant is even involved. Or is an accountant. Or works for the mob. Or anything.

And at the very end, while trying to get over a mountain to Save The Day, Cal and the widow boink in a cave while it snows, their first and only in-story tryst. He admits to her he loves her and her wild kids and that he stayed in Small Town for 3 years waiting for her to be ready for him. Which borders on creepy and stalkerish in a way.

Ok - why did I even give it 3 stars? Because I didn't really dislike it as much as I was disappointed.

Killing Time by Linda Howard ****

I listened to Killing Time on audio as I drove from my... former home... to Kerrville, Texas, where I'm in a Best Western, halfway on my trip to the next part of my life. So I used Killing Time to kill time while I drove.

This is a time-travel/suspense with a dash of romance. I haven't read any of the other reviews, but I'm guessing LH romance fans were not happy with waiting so late in the story for any romance to come about. The time travel - from the future to 2005 - isn't the usual time travel conceit (which seems to be a contemporary woman going back in time to some guy, often a Scot - am I wrong?). I didn't even know it was time travel when I started listening, so the clues, which are released slowly, had me guessing. Was she from another country? Outer space alien? I enjoyed how it came about, that speech was so different in addition to other issues like paper being precious and digital data being lost because we in 2005 thought it would last forever.

The prologue sets up the original issue: 15-year-old Knox and his dad watch the small town governors bury a time capsule in 1985 to be opened in 2085. But thirteen items are put in, not 12 as noted in the newspaper, and Knox worries and wonders about it.

Now it's 2005, 20 years later, and someone digs it up - but the 2 video tapes detective Knox looks at only show a bright light then a hole, with a second or two between. Then some weird things start happening, and people start dying, and a female FBI agent named Nikita shows up, thinking the first murder might be related to a case she's working on... in 2205. After a phone call to the agency proves she isn't an FBI agent (in 2005), Knox cuffs Nikita to a chair in advance of locking her up. She manages to get him curious about her story that she's from the future, and after a couple of tricks of 23rd century technology, he reluctantly agrees to help her.

She's here chasing an unknown time-travel bandit that she suspects might be one of her colleagues. But how does his/her appearance in 2005 relate to the disappearance of the time capsule, slashed tractor tires and three murders - as well as a suicide in 1985?

Here's the one thing about this audio: I find Joyce Bean's narration to be slightly stilted and that bothers me. I don't mean just her Nikita voice, for whom 21st century English is not her native language - I mean her narration of the POV voice too. As the book goes on, it gets less noticeable. I felt the same way about Death Angel but I loved Death Angel so much I overlooked this issue after the first several minutes. This story wasn't quite as engaging, so the over-pronunciation of consonants, and slight pauses between some words seemed more pronounced. I see that she has narrated a lot of LH books - I guess it's lucky for me I have been reading them rather than getting the audio. I do have one more to keep me company on the final leg of my trip, so we shall see.

Up Close and Dangerous by Linda Howard ***

This is a romantic suspense novel - although it's more a road-trip type (well, a survival trip, anyway).

Bailey is the widow of James Wingate, to whom she was married for a business reason only: she was the trustee of his adult children's trust funds, and Wingate was hoping to shock his kids into being responsible with this action. He was diagnosed with a terminal illness and died less than a year after the marriage to Bailey. The Wingate heirs Seth and Tamzin were pretty hateful and public about it too.

When Bailey takes the Wingate private charter plane to meet her brother for a 2-week vacation, the regular pilot Bret is ill and has to allow his partner Cam to fly the plane. Cam and Bailey have never gotten along, so it seemed like it was going to be a long 5 hour trip - until the engine died over the mountains in Idaho, out of fuel.

Cam manages to find a place to land the plane, but is knocked unconscious with a gash in his head. Bailey has no survival training or skills, but she was on her way to a 2-week rafting trip, so she has 2 suitcases of helpful items including hiking boots and such. She manages to get Cam out of the plane and sutured up, and even builds a shelter of sorts for them.

They spend 5 days in the wilderness - Cam figures out the plane was sabotaged, and they both realize that Wingate's kids must have done it to kill Bailey. Meanwhile, on the ground, we have Cam's partner Bret and their secretary Karen, both shocked and grieving over the suspected deaths. Bret uncovers evidence of potential tampering and turns it over the to NTSB, but without real proof, no arrests can be made. Seth Wingate, scared straight that he might go to prison for this, starts work at his father's company, hoping to avoid any suspicion.

Cam and Bailey also spend their survival time realizing they don't hate each other after all...

So - there ya go. Suspense. Road Trip. Love and a HEA for Cam and Bailey. You'll have to read it yourself to find out whodunit. It wasn't bad, it wasn't good - average. 3 stars.

Open Season by Linda Howard *****

I have listened to the abridged audio book of Open Season three - or more? - times and it's one of my favorites. However, I knew I was missing out on the whole experience, because abridged means a lot of the story was left out. So when I purchased an eBay lot of Howard's books, I was glad it contained Open Season, and I picked it up to read.

As a matter of fact, the abridged version does a very good job of giving most of the story, and most of the very best scenes in the book. But, having listened to it so many times, I could practically mark the book with the deletions made!

Daisy Minor faces her 34th birthday with some dread: she's drab. She's a small town librarian, and she lives up to the worst stereotype: she's single and hasn't had a date in years, she's prim and prissy, and she lives at home with her widowed mother and aunt. She decides she needs to spruce up her wardrobe, her hair and her makeup and be a party girl if she wants to ever meet a man, much less get married.

Jack Russo is the small town chief of police, but he's an outsider, having grown up in Chicago. His police background is as a SWAT member in both Chicago and New York City - but when his elderly aunt died and left him her home in this small town, he decided maybe it was time to make a change, so he gave up his big city cop life and is now the chief of police in a community with very little in the way of crime.

Jack and Daisy first meet in the library when Jack goes in to sign up for the virtual library. He gets a kick out of her prickly behavior, but she's put off by his invading her space and being too big, too male. But the next time they meet, he saves her from a barroom brawl she's inadvertently started. He follows up on that meeting by taking her for a ride while he updates her on the potential dangers of date-rape drugs being used in the area.

The story is a romantic suspense - the suspense is that the local good ol' boy mayor is actually involved in the sex trade, and has in his employ several shady characters, one of whom (Mitchell) has been killing women with GBH. Daisy is in her car in the bar parking lot when she witnesses one of the other bad guys having Mitchell killed - and now they need to tie up that loose end by killing Daisy!

The truly famous scene in this book is when Daisy decides the best way to announce her availability to the single men of her small town is to buy condoms at the local drug store. She knows the pharmacist's wife will spread the gossip, so she goes in and grabs a PartyPak - half a gross of condoms in varying colors and flavors. As she's checking out, Jack gets behind her in line. The dialog after they leave the drug store is hysterical, and has me gasping for breath every time I listen to it. The next best scene is when they actually use the PartyPak, trying to decide what the best color will be. These two scenes always come up in discussions of funny moments in romance novels.

There's also a Notable Pet - Midas, the golden retriever puppy Daisy gets as a guard dog. Midas eats everything in sight, and is pretty much adorable through and through. Having owned a goldie, I can picture this puppy completely!

So it's still one of my favorite books, and I now know "the rest of the story." Mostly what was left out of the abridged audio was detail: there's nothing about Daisy's sister Beth and her family; there's less detail in every scene (even the condom scenes); there's less detail about the puppy - the scene where she picks him out of the litter is left out. Pretty much everything about Todd Lawrence was left in, though, which still has me scratching my head: was Todd Lawrence working as a federal agent on the sex-trade issue, or was his involvement only personal? I never did figure that part out. If not, then what the heck were he and Howard doing? And that scene in the epilogue with the mayor's wife and Sykes, well, that was just creepy - was it a setup for a sequel or just there to make us be creeped out? Cuz frankly, I'm not sure I want a story about Jennifer and Sykes, because they weren't exactly sympathetic characters to begin with. Well... then again, I loved LH's Death Angel, and those were 2 similarly nefarious and flawed characters.

Still 5 stars.

Now You See Her by Linda Howard ****

This book came from an eBay glom I did - got several LH books for a low, low price. I read it, I enjoyed it - but it wasn't --- great.

It's a murder mystery with a background in romance. Maybe it should be called a thriller or suspense - I just went googling in search of some definition assistance. Mystery is the unveiling of the clues, the whodunit, and in suspense you as the reader know it's going to happen but not how the protagonists will react or the outcome of the suspense (to which the protagonists are not privy).

So this was a mystery with suspense - well, thriller maybe, because while the victims didn't know it was coming, the hero and heroine sure did.

I agree with some of the criticisms pointed out by the 2 reviewers on AAR for this story. Our heroine, Sweeney, became psychic - she sees dead people. She knows the answers to Jeopardy! before the clues are even revealed. Her presence makes traffic get out of the way, traffic lights turn green and cars abandon the best parking spots so she can park right in front. And she sleep-paints death scenes and is unnaturally cold afterwards. But, why? What happened to her to make these gifts suddenly start? What is the significance of the traffic and the Jeopardy! answers, other than to prove she has some gift? We are never shown and we are never told.

She's an artist, living in NYC, and since her Gifts appeared, she's been painting stuff she finds weird and wrong - although once shown to her adoring gallery owner, it seems everyone loves them. Ah - the adoring gallery owner is going through a nasty divorce from Richard Worth, a Horatio-Alger story fellow, grew up poor, got rich and is now dumping Candra.

Candra's another dilemma. If Richard was as great a lover as she thinks, WTF was she doing screwing everything in pants? We are shown she's a snob - and maybe there's a hint of insecurity, but it doesn't add up to sexual addiction, which is the only answer I could come up with for collecting an average of 2 additional lovers a month. Or more. She makes it clear he was insatiable so how could she be even more insatiable than he? We are never told. Richard knows about her adultery, but he's an honorable fellow who keeps his vows until she reveals she had an abortion. Then it's over.

Richard has always thought Sweeney was attractive. Sweeney was always too wrapped up in her art to give any man a single thought. Until that Diet Coke commercial...

OK - she sees Richard for the first time since the Gift and in her heightened awareness is wildly attracted to him. And he senses it and returns it in spades.

The story is then about how Sweeney has these two episodes of painting while asleep, each a murder scene. The second one comes in spurts - first just shoes, then more but no face. When she finally paints the face and learns who the victim is, the victim is dead. Now we're on a manhunt to uncover the killer whose face hasn't yet been painted. Uh, why didn't they watch her at night to see if she would paint the killer's face??

There was a shortlist for the position of killer - there weren't that many characters in the story - and it's given away pretty easily. So - I enjoyed reading it, I liked the hero, I didn't understand the heroine, and the story wasn't as good as I've come to expect from a great author like Linda Howard. Yeah, yeah, a rich guy, an artist, a senator and his ambitious bitch of a wife, the gallery owner and her lover - whodunit? Guess.

still, 4 stars because she is such a good writer that even mediocre from her is 4 stars.

Death Angel by Linda Howard *****

I have this book on audio from audible.com - it's not my first Linda Howard on audio, but my first with Joyce Bean as narrator. I have to say right upfront that for the first several minutes I thought I would have to stop and read it instead. I found her narration stilted and unnatural - she over-enunciated so many words that I wasn't sure I could stand to listen to it for 10 hours.

However, Linda Howard is such an incredible story-teller that before long I was drawn into the story, and the nuances of Ms. Bean's awkward narration disappeared into the background. (shockingly, 3 of the 4 current reviews on audible.com noted how great this narrator was... ???) Well, Joyce Bean wasn't dreadful, like the narrator for the first of the Feehan Dark series, but she's no Anna Fields. Personally, if I was allowed to give professional criticism, I'd say lighten up on those T's and D's, and try to make the flow of the narration less stilted and more like natural speech. But who am I? Just another listener.

The story centers around the major theme of the redeeming power of love. The h/h are both anti-heroes - Drea is the mistress of a drug lord, Rafael, thinking she is using men to get what she needs by playing the bimbo; "the Assassin" is just that - a killer-for-hire. The Assassin demands that Rafael give him Drea in lieu of payment - just for one afternoon. Rafael agrees, and leaves Drea heartbroken and sick, feeling worthless and crushed that she meant so little to him. The Assassin manages to make her even more confused, however, in a 4-hour stint that completely breaks her down because she loses control and actually enjoys - no - craves him. Although by the end she is begging him to take her with him, he tells her "once was enough" - and leaves a completely shattered woman, desperate to change her life.

Drea isn't the bimbo everyone believes her to be, however, and she's always had a plan for taking care of herself as soon as she had gotten what she needed from Rafael. She leaves him the next day, and in the execution of her plan, also manages to steal a large amount of his money - a sort of "up yours" gesture. When he figures out he's been had, he hires the assassin to do his job: kill her.

At this point we learn the assassin's name: Simon. He doesn't accept the job right away - first he sees if he can track her down. He admires her courage and her ability to stay one step ahead of him. He was not sure whether he would have taken the job - or her life - if fate hadn't stepped in and taken it from her in an accident. Once he's convinced she's dead, he takes her ID and calls 911. Although he proves to Rafael she is dead, he hadn't accepted the job and so doesn't accept payment either.

But he can't seem to shake her from his life and decides to locate her grave. He needs closure. Instead, he's shocked to learn that Drea actually survived the accident.

Now going by her nickname Andie, she realizes that she was never the one in power or in control of her life as she had thought, but that she had allowed men to use her. Her near-death experience forces her to face the truth of her way of life. Now she needs to reclaim her life and seek redemption for her past. Although she still has the original $2 million she stole from Rafael, she decides to fly under the radar, with a job that pays cash, living on what she makes, and use the money some way that will bring her redemption.

Then Simon is revealed to her by a flash of lightning during a storm - he's been watching her. As the reader, we know he's been her guardian angel, but to Andie he's still the relentless assassin who has found her and plans to finish the job he started. Although he had never planned to reveal himself, once again divine intervention plays a role, and now the two of them must face both their fears. And Andie must find her redemption and reason for her second chance.

Well - I loved the suspense, the skillful story-telling, the powerful transformation Andie undergoes from feeling worthless to finding her power within, and especially Simon's own redemption, because he had so much further to go than she did. Rafael's ending almost caught me unaware - it seemed to come out of nowhere but then made perfect sense after it happened.

I would rate the narration 3 stars for mediocre. I can't blame Linda Howard for that, though, so Death Angel gets 5 stars from me.

A Lady of the West by Linda Howard ***

As I wrote in the entry for Angel Creek, I was lucky to get this in a Large Print 2-for-1 book with Angel Creek. However - the book has Angel Creek as the first story, but chronologically it's the second one in the series and this one should be read first to avoid character spoilers.

If you read my review of Angel Creek, you already know I have mostly contempt for the men - heroes and villains - in these 2 books. The men in this book are the worst. I mean, what bastards! Especially the Sarratt brothers, Ben and Jake, the 2 "heroes" which is only to mean they are the main protagonists. Jake is the #1 asshole, I mean hero.

The brothers witnessed their mother's rape and murder, and saw their father dead, and managed to escape some 20 years earlier at ages 13 and 11 with slight bullet damage. They have spent the past 20 years honing their gun skills and their anger because the killer took over their father's property and has been living on it ever since. They are gonna get it back, come hell or high water.

Now, 20 years later, their plan is ready - with one fly in the ointment. If they kill the bastard McLain who murdered their parents and stole their land, now his new bride - Victoria - will inherit. Victoria has just arrived from Augusta, GA, with her young cousin and sister in tow. She's basically been sold to the old guy, McLain, by her parents who were devastated in the war. Civil War.

McLain is really a bad guy, and lucky for Victoria, he can't seem to get his johnson to react so the marriage is never consummated. Jake has immediate lust for Victoria anyway and decides after he murders McLain, he'll marry her so he can have everything he wants - Victoria's pussy and the land. What a nice guy, huh? NOT. He pressures her a lot to let him have a little before he kills McLain - what's a little adultery between friends, right?

And just when you thought Jake was the biggest asshole, here comes Lil Brother Ben - who decides he'd like a piece of ass too - how about cousin Emma? But marry her? No way Jose. Just put out and shut up, that's his motto. Makes ya get all warm and squishy just thinking about it, huh? Good thing Emma's spine is a little stronger than Victoria's. She holds out for months.

Is this Linda Howard's idea of how men were in the old West, or is it just before she started writing great alpha heroes? I'm pretty sure a jury wouldn't take 20 minutes to convict either one of rape and assault. The brutes!! And frankly, I didn't find their technique that coma-inducing either - they had a sort of wham bam shut up ma'am way about them.

Meanwhile Luis (if you kept your scorecard from Angel Creek, he's the one who wanted whassername) has discovered what a treat little sister Celia is. Too bad she's written in as, well, slow. "Fey" was another way they put it. But it came across as mentally challenged. Yep, wasn't that sweet of him to show her his thing when she asked, all innocent and full of wonder. Remember, he's a gentleman and women love him. Even 16 year old mentally challenged women. (rape rape rape - jury verdict in 10 minutes on this one)

OK - there's some plot twists and turns - they do manage to kill McLain (he's actually killed by a woman servant McLain raped, robbing Jake and Ben of their right to murder him theirselves, dagnabit) and get the ranch back. At this point, Jake rapes Victoria, then marries her, then continues to rape her as much as possible. She, of course, falls in love with him, and lo and behold gets pregnant pretty quickly.

Now - he's not much of a talker, but he's a deep thinker. He's thinking she's holding some awful secret from him, but he doesn't know what. We know what it is - she's sad because she's in love with him, but she thinks he had only 2 choices - marry her or kill her for the land. She thinks this because BEN SAYS IT in front of her. Oh. So she's sad that she's just a piece of ass with land to him.

When she announces her pregnancy, he immediately decides it's McLain's baby, and well - he is a ratass bastard, so in his dark world, the baby has to go at birth and she can either go or stay. She tells him, no no, McLain never did it to her. This is when we learn he is also a batterer - he knocks her across the room, leaving her bruised and bloody. Does ANYONE like this guy?

Oh - but when the local whore tells him Victoria's telling the truth, McLain never touched Victoria and it's indeed his baby, sure, THEN he wants Victoria to forgive him, goddammit. Right. He believes a whore but not his wife. Yes, they'll have years and years of loving to look forward to, huh? NOT.

oooo it makes me mad to write this.

And yet - LH is a good story teller and excellent writer, so as mad as those ratass bastard Sarratt brothers made me, I'm still going with 3 stars. What a sucker I am.

Shades of Twilight by Linda Howard ****

I got this in a 2-for-1 book with Son of the Morning, and read it first.

This one is a contemporary that takes place in the South - a South I'm not sure really exists, where people still live in the Big House with a large extended family headed by a formidable matriarch who can trace her genealogy to all the important and good Southern families in the area. This matriarch also runs the Family Business that is rich, powerful and growing.

Hey, I grew up in the South (on the grounds of a plantation, mind you!) and I'm not sure that "Dallas" world ever did exist.

Regardless, you have to buy the concept to get the story, so I paid and went inside with popcorn and a soda and enjoyed the ride.

Well, mostly enjoyed. There's some truly icky moments involving incest that made me wince and look away. And our beloved heroine walked a very narrow line between doormat and reasonable actions.

I'm not gonna recap the story - there's a heroine and a hero, and they have to go through a lot of bad things, wrong accusations, and heartache before they can admit to their feelings for each other, overcome the evil past and face a bright future together.

And yet - I rated it 4 stars because it worked its magic on me, and had me feeling and rooting for the HEA.

Drop Dead Gorgeous by Linda Howard ****

Drop Dead Gorgeous is the sequel to To Die For, featuring former cheerleader Blair Mallory. To Die For recently became my all-time favorite story, so needless to say I was really looking forward to reading about Blair again. It was a sweet bonus that I got a hardcover large print version from PBS (my eyes thanked me over and over).

I guess I can say I'm a little disappointed that I didn't love it as much as the first book, but it was still fun. It's a sort of thriller - Blair seems to be attracting nutcases who are trying to kill her again, and somehow she has to deal with that while trying to pull off a wedding in 4 weeks as well. It's pretty inconvenient all around, and fiancé Wyatt, consummate cop, decides she's being a little paranoid and perhaps a tad high maintenance about 1 near-miss in a parking lot and some hangup phone calls.

Blair has a way of dealing with life: lists. She kept a list of Wyatt's transgressions in the first book, and starts a new one when he doesn't pay attention to her concerns. But when he finally actually accuses her of stepping over the line and expecting him to drop everything whenever she calls, it dawns on her that maybe there is a more serious issue to be dealt with in their relationship, and maybe the wedding planning should come to a halt.

The stalker quickly ups the ante and Wyatt finally starts to pay attention - both to the dangerous situation with the stalker and the explosive situation with Blair over his attitude about her.

It's the same tone and first-person POV as the first book, but somehow it didn't enchant me as much this time around. That and the coincidence of the identity of the stalker made me rate this a 4 instead of a 5 star read.