Holiday Spice by Samantha Chase

Finally the last Shaughnessy sibling gets her story. Darcy is the youngest as well as being the only girl. She's twenty-five and still working on figuring out what it is she wants to do with her life. She knows she's good at organizing and that's what gets her a week-long job helping woodworker Benjamin Tanner figure out his book. And it works well. Until she can't get home. And Ben is conscripted to come rescue her so she doesn't have to sleep at the airport.
Their relationship starts off with a misunderstanding and it just keeps going.
There's a lot of sexual tension in this book but I'm not sure that we get to see much else. Both  are sketched out but there's not an arc for either. An okay book but I was hoping for more for Darcy.

Three stars
This book comes out October 3
Follows A Sky Full of Stars 

A Sky Full of Stars by Samantha Chase

My favorite of the series so far, this book lets socially awkward and braniac astrophysicist Dr. Owen Shaughnessy  meet his match in the beautiful former beauty queen, former head cheerleader, and former mean girl, Brooke Matthews (a lot of jokes about her being named after a famous model, never quite figured this one out). She's now an artist obsessed with the night sky. Owen is about to take some students out to Red Rock to study the stars and his mentor/her uncle thinks Brooke would not only benefit from being able to go out with a group, Owen would get a go-between to help him with the students.
The two meet and have an immediate attraction. Brooke feels an affinity to Owen right away, being able to talk to him how she would have talked to her older brother, also a genius. But she feels a little insecure because her parents pushed her and her brother so much into the roles of Beauty and the Brain. There is a swift romance that involves a whirlwind trip from Chicago (where they met) to Las Vegas and then on to meeting Owen's family in North Carolina.
And it's here that I start to have some issues with this book. I think we start to move away from Brooke and Owen's story to the set up for the last Shaughnessy sibling, Darcy. The last Big Misunderstanding also felt a little forced and unnecessary. It just dragged out the story.

Four stars
This book comes out June 6
Follows This is Our Song
Followed by Holiday Spice

This Is Our Song by Samantha Chase

Riley Shaughnessy is a big time rock star. He recently stepped back from his band to prove that he could handle a solo career. But... he's recently hit a brick wall on his song writing. His label is about to dump him but agree that he can have another chance as long as he participates in a month-long interview that will put him back in the public's eye. And not for being known as the least-talented of his band mates.
Savannah Daly is the reporter picked to do the interview. She's peeved because that means she's going to be bumped from a Cold Play article that she's been researching for the past month. Her first meeting with Riley is an accidental one when he quite literally bumps into her at a restaurant. Then she saves him from a rabid group of fans. When he finds out who she is, he assumes that their meeting wasn't accidental. And this is a continuing theme in their relationship. He assumes that she's all about the job, cools off and acts like a jerk, and then eventually figures out that he's being a jerk. And that was sort of boring. To see Riley make the same mistake over and over again and having Savannah apologize because he's hurt....
I think most regular Chase readers will not be disappointed but I was hoping for a little better from Riley.

Three stars
This book comes out December 6
Follows Always My Girl
Followed by Sky Full of Stars

Always My Girl by Samantha Chase

We know from the first two books in the series that Quinn Shaughnessy has been willfully blind to the fact that his best friend Anna has been in love with him pretty much forever. But she's finally making a move to get on with her life. Quitting her regular job and starting to wear girlier clothes. And yet, now is when Quinn finally starts to notice that she's a woman.
Quite frankly, I didn't like Quinn all that much. The man used Anna most of his life and then got upset when he got called on it. And Anna was so wishy-washy, wanting Quinn then not wanting Quinn. Not my favorite book in the series but I'm certainly not going to stop reading them because of these two.

This book comes out July 5
Two and a half stars

Previous book Love Walks In
Followed by This is Our Song

Love Walks In by Samantha Chase

For me, Samantha Chase can be uneven. Some of her stories I really enjoy, others I can barely finish. The book before this one, Made for You, I didn't enjoy so much. This one, I liked.
When we meet Hugh Shaughnessy, he's a rebellious teenager whose biggest act coincides with the night his mother dies. That completely changes him and he swings to the other extreme, becoming very rigid.
When we meet him again as an adult, he's the owner of twelve resorts and in a panic because his events planner (the same person for all twelve) has just left. No two weeks notice. Just gone. And Hugh does NOT deal well with change. He is definitely not amused to find pink luggage not attached to a person on the resort's immaculate lawn. Nor is he later amused to see a woman with a proclivity for tiny underwear.
Aubrey is a Runaway Bride who has just had the luck to meet the man who is about to make Hugh a LOT of money. The man, an eccentric, immediately decides he loves Aubrey and he demands that she be the new point person for the events he is having at Hugh's resorts. An immediate reason for Aubrey and Hugh to spend more time together without being gross because he's not really her boss.
I wish we had seen Hugh open up to Aubrey about his OCD (though we didn't really see any evidence of actual OCD except with the dinners, mostly he just talks about having it). It was almost like love magically cured him of all his issues with the past. So, either his issues were overstated or we have a magic hoo-ha situation here.
There were issues, as I've noted, but the pacing was nice, I liked both Aubrey and Hugh and this was a sold "OK" book for me.

This book comes out April 5, 2016
Three stars

Followed by Always My Girl

Made for Us by Samantha Chase

Who-ee. I got a pre-pub version of this book and I can only hope that the editors they get to review this deal with the POV issue. Good God. I counted up to three different points of view on single pages. We jumped around to each character so much I had trouble keeping up with who was thinking what and what was going on. It made me as seasick as Zoe ostensibly was by the wavy painting in the entryway closet. Better editing would have bumped this up to at least a two-and-a-half book for me. Probably more but it was so bad in the beginning of the book... hopefully this gets straightened out before it goes into print.
Anyway, Zoe has moved to North Carolina to get away from Arizona and to live by the beach. She's just had all of her clients summarily taken away so that she could work with the firm's big client, Aiden Shaughnessy. See, he's the kind of man who wants things done his way and only his way. Good thing that Zoe's able to stand up to him. Except when she's not. Zoe never  really became a full character. I think she was supposed to be this strong business woman, a match for Aidan, but she was mostly fairly wishy-washy. And Aidan. Well, Aidan was a jerk. A big one. And I didn't see any indication that that was really going to change.
If this were my first Samantha Chase book, I probably wouldn't read any others in the series. But, luckily, I have read Wait for Me. Also, the friends-to-lovers trope is like catnip and I really want to see what it takes for Aidan's brother, Quinn, to realize that his best friend, Anna, is in love with him.