Taming the Rake, by Erica Ridley

I requested the ARC because I could not resist the blurb–but obviously, the idea of a man who could not even remember the name of the woman he deflowered the night before would require either that there be an alternate hero, or a damned good reason for his ‘forgetfulness’.

Turns out, I’ll never find out.

Reader beware: very sweary ranting by yours truly, taking apart the plot and characterization up to 25%, when I gave up.

A Mansion for Murder, by Frances Brody

Reader beware: death of a parental figure; child in danger; another child’s death (several decades prior); miscarriage or self-induced abortion; off-page rape; sudden death (heart attack) of a minor character; tangential mention of PTSD.

Disclosure: the formatting of the ARC is weird. For starters, it does not have a table of contents. At all. For a 300 pages and change book. That made it time consuming to go back to check things as I got to the later parts of the story. I presume this won’t be the case for the final product, but it makes it harder for me to review an advance copy. (YMMV obviously).

Beyond that, there are whole sections with hard returns after every sentence in the same paragraph, the name of the author appears randomly in the middle of some pages, there’s nothing to indicate transitions between narrators, and so on. (See footnote ¹)

I hope this didn’t color my opinion of the book too much, but that’s one of those things that are really hard to quantify, so do keep it in mind as you read this review.

The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, by K.J. Charles

I had been waiting for this book since it was first announced; the cover reveal just upped the ante. I was therefore pretty close to ecstatic when I managed (through sheer luck) to get an ARC.

As expected, I loved it.

Of course, this being a K.J. Charles book, there are a few warnings to get out of the way (her author tag is “romance with a body count”, after all),

Reader beware: death of parents as backstory; parental neglect, parental abuse; explicit sex; threat of sexual violence against a young woman; actual violence and murder; and racism.

Murder Against the Odds, by Janice Frost

Reader beware: several mentions of suicide, not all sensitively done, and murder and suicide on page. This is a review of a digital ARC provided via NetGalley.