Tag: Beverly Jenkins

reviews, romance, series

Romance Series: Women Who Dare

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Happy Friday everyone, another week, another romance series for you today.

Beverly Jenkins’s Women Who Dare trilogy is three books set in the aftermath of the Civil War in the United States. First there is Rebel, which is set in New Orleans in the aftermath of the Civil War. Our heroine is Valinda, a transplant from New York in town to teach the newly emancipated community while she waits for her fiancé to return from abroad. Our hero is Drake LeVeq, an architect and son of an old New Orleans family descended from pirates. Second is Wild Rain which is set in Wyoming and is that rare thing: a western historical romance that I liked – so much so that I made it a BotW! And finally To Catch a Raven – which is set back in New Orleans and has a hero and heroine who are forced together in order to reclaim a stolen copy of the Declaration of Independence. Raven comes from a family of grifters, Braxton emphatically does not and as they fake marriage as part of the job they start to discover that perhaps they’re more suited to each other than it seems.

I don’t read a lot of American-set historical romances but I will always make an exception for Ms Beverly Jenkins. I love her writing and characterisation – her Blessings contemporary series is one of my favourites as you know – and she brings all that to the historicals but with interesting settings and premises that you don’t see a lot in the genre. I don’t think you have to read these in order to appreciate them – I didn’t – but you’ll probably get a better experience if you do.

They used to be quite hard to get hold of – but they’re all on kindle now, and they seem to rotate on offer fairly regularly so you can pick up the set.

Have a great weekend everyone!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: January Quick Reviews

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I’m rechristening this post for 2022 – to quick reviews. What practical difference it makes I don’t know, but it feels like less pressure from where I am so I’m going with it! And there’s only three today, because frankly I’ve already written about so much of what I’ve read this month – which has been a particularly productive one on here.

Bookish and the Beast by Ashley Poston

This is the third book in the Once Upon a Con series, and although you’ll get most out of it if you have read the previous ones you don’t need to. This is a twist on Beauty and the Beast (as the title suggests) with a disgraced/out of favour young Hollywood actor exiled to a small town and a high school student who accidentally damages a book from the library of the house he is staying in. A pleasant YA way to wile away a few hours.

Rare Danger by Beverly Jenkins

A romantic suspense contemporary Novella from Beverly Jenkins. What is not to like. No seriously, what is there to complain about. Jasmine is a librarian who curates books for private libraries (I want this job) who ends up investigating the disappearance of a book dealer with a private security man – who she also happens to have he a meet cute with. It’s got romance it’s got peril and it’s very satisfying even if it is only just over 100 pages. This is great. I could have read pages more of it.

Capital Crimes ed by Martin Edwards

Honestly at this point it feels like it wouldn’t be a end of month round up without a British library crime classic. This one is a collection of London-set stories and actually features some creepier ones as well as a Margery Allingham Campion short and an Anthony Berkeley too. There’s also a story about a serial killer on the Underground, which was so realistic when it was first serialised, that passenger numbers dropped! Here the ending is a little truncated from that original serialisation, but you can still see why it would have freaked people out!

So that’s it for the January round up. Stat’s coming tomorrow, but Books of the Week this month were: Beware False Profits, Ashes of London, Vanderbilt, The Christie Affair and The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym (although I finished that last one at the end of 2021 rather than in January). I’ve also chattered about The Royal Spyness and Cupcake Bakery series as well as some of the newly published books from January, Magical Worlds and some Vanderbilt-related books. And when I write it all out like that, it’s really quite a lot!