The Spook in the Stacks, by Eva Gates

Looking at my NetGalley shelf recently, hoping to tackle the embarrassingly large backlog there, I realized that I have ARCs for several titles in this series; with the tenth book releasing this week, I decided to start with the earliest installment I have.

Silver Master, by Jayne Castle

While I was still indulging in the great Harmony series listening glom, back in August (ye, gods, it’s been almost five full months!), I listened to the next few titles in the series, though I agree with Wendy the SuperLibrarian: there is danger in glomming. Smaller irritants can become major annoyances, and things one does not notice while breezing through one novel, can stop one dead after seeing them repeated in four or five.

Warning: evil is explicitly equated with mental illness–for both villains.

Oh, and there is sex on the page.

Silver Master, by Jayne Castle

This is the fourth novel in the Harmony series. It’s also the first one in the series that clearly links this world back to the Arcane Society universe, of which I am most definitely Not. A. Fan. Oh well.

We are back in Cadence, with two new characters and new dust bunnies. Here’s the blurb (from the Fantastic Fiction website):

The Book Club Murders, by Leslie Nagel

I confess that, despite knowing better, I was attracted to both the cover and the blurb for this cozy mystery, and was happy to get an ARC some time ago. However, what with one thing and another, it took me a while to get to it.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had a really hard time reading anything new to me, for going on two years now. (Pity me.) Therefore, any novel I manage to read all the way through these days feels remarkable in some way, on that basis alone.

As usual, reader beware: there’s a romance alongside the mystery, but there’s no sex on page, and very little ‘objectionable’ language.

The Book Club Murders, by Leslie Nagel

I didn’t know before I started reading the story, but this is Ms Nagel debut release. It is also the first in a series set in Oakwood, OH.

I confess that, after reading a few chapters, I did suspect that this was either a debut, or perhaps a second book, because some of the elements of the story seem to fit rather awkwardly next to each other–such as the romance between our intrepid leading lady, one Charlotte “Charley” Carpenter, and the cop in charge of solving the improbable murders that, apparently out of the blue, are happening in the very quiet community of Oakwood.

Here’s the blurb:

Lords of Passion (Virginia Henley, Kate Pearce, Maggie Robinson)

Lords of Passion Anthology (Virginia Henley, Kate Pearce and Maggie Robinson)

Back in 2010, RWA National Conference was held in Orlando, and I was lucky enough to be able to attend. It was an exhausting and exhilarating experience, and during those days I met a number of people I had only interacted with online for years. Among them was writer Maggie Robinson (aka Margaret Rowe), who very graciously gave me an ARC of the anthology Lords of Passion, which has stories by her, Kate Pearce and Virginia Henley.

However, with me being a moody and unpredictable reader, the poor thing has languished in the humongous TBR Mountain Range since. Then, when I saw that the theme for January’s TBR review was shorts, this was the book I reached for. Unfortunately, less than twenty pages into the first novella, I was seeing red and couldn’t continue, so I grabbed the Charmed Anthology for that review instead (with less than stellar results—oh well, there are eleven more months to try for a hit).

I did finish the book, though, and now you get to suffer through my impressions of it.

The three stories are “Beauty and the Brute” by Virginia Henley, “How to Seduce a Wife” by Kate Pearce and “Not Quite a Courtesan” by Maggie Robinson. The dreaded blurb: