Silence Fallen by Patricia Briggs

It's a night of pirates and gaming when Mercy discovers she needs more ingredients to bake cookies. She goes out but then wakes up battered and bruised in a cube with two vampires, her pack and mate bonds seemingly severed. She is on her own. Luckily, Mercy is underestimated once again and she manages to escape (because the pack was practicing their Jackie Chan moves, she knows how to run up the corner of a wall.) But now she's in Europe. Alone. With no known allies (and a lot of enemies), Mercy needs help more than ever but her pack doesn't know where she is.

This book is nice because Briggs introduces a third person omniscient that follows both Mercy and Adam at different points and that was really fun, to get more of a look at his side of the story.

Three stars
This book came out March 7th, 2017
Follows Fire Touched
Followed by Storm Cursed
Ebook from Library
Opinions are my own

Girl Gone Viral by Alisha Rai

Katrina King grew up with an abusive father who pushed her into the spotlight. She married a much older man to get away. When the man died, Katrina was left a fortune that she quickly developed. She also struggled with agoraphobia but has largely conquered it. She enjoys her life and her routines. That's what makes her new notoriety so heartbreaking. She shared a table with a guy in a coffee shop, shared several sentences with him, all of which were captured by an enterprising blogger, and now the world wants to know who she is and whether their meeting has led to an epic romance. Katrina wants none of it. So she escapes with her bodyguard to his family's fruit farm.
Jas just wants to keep Katrina safe. Yes, he's been her bodyguard for almost a decade. Yes, he's developed some feelings for her that go deeper than what a bodyguard usually feels but that doesn't mean he's going to act on it. He's just going to do his job and keep her safe.
But this is a romance novel. So that means that means forced proximity might force some of those feelings to make themselves known....
I really liked the first book in this series and that may have placed my expectations a bit too high for this book. This is a fine story and I liked Katrina but the bodyguard trope (which, to be fair, Rai doesn't exactly follow) is not a fave. There was also a lot of concentration on Jas's back story and it felt a little more weighted to his backstory than hers.

Three and a half stars

Follows The Right Swipe

Followed by First Comes Like
This book comes out April 21st
ARC kindly provided by HarperCollins Publishers and NetGalley
Opinions are my own

All He Ever Desired by Shannon Stacey

We've met both Ryan Kowalski and Lauren Carpenter in earlier Kowalski books and we also know that there is some "mystery" in their past that causes Ryan to avoid Lauren as much as he can whenever he returns to their hometown.
Well, it turns out that Ryan has always loved Lauren, even when she was married to his best friend. And he betrayed his best friend by asking Lauren to run away with him (it's in the first part of the book, not exactly a spoiler).
So... awkward. Right? And it's worked out for the two to avoid each other. But they can't now because Lauren's teenage son has caused some major damage at Ryan's family home and now he needs to work it off. Which mean the Lauren and Ryan will be seeing a lot more of each other. (heh)
I loved that conflicts were solved so fast because the damn characters talked to each other. Does that happen in romance novels? Not often. And Stacey made it work! Love it. That was what really bumped this book from a three to a four for me.


Four stars
Follows All He Ever Needed 
Followed by All He Ever Dreamed
November 19th, 2012
Listened to on Audible Escape
Opinions are my own

Wylde Fire by Sarah Robinson

Holly Glen has had a hard life. She was in a car accident that took the life of her parents and put her younger into a coma. That was three years ago and her younger sister's care is more than she can afford. So when she can steal a parking space from her high school crush, Sam Wylde, who was kind of a jerk back then, she figures the fates are just aligning. She doesn't expect him to propose marriage.
Sam needs a reason for his family to stop fussing over him. Just because his high school girlfriend started an affair with his brother and now they're getting married, everyone is worried. But if he has a love of his own...
I wish we had seen more of his brother - we're told that he's not a nice guy but we're only given a couple of instances. And this was a really short book so there wasn't a ton of time to see whether Sam and Holly are really going to work out (especially with some kind of big news in the epilogue) but hopefully we'll see a little of them in later books.)

Three and a half stars
This book came out September 17th, 2019
Ebook from Kindle (originally an ARC from Author Collective 20 and NetGalley that I did not download in time)
Opinions are my own

Fire Touched by Patricia Briggs

The werewolves are out. Humans now know that they exist. They also know about the fae. And the humans are frightened. So when there is a troll on a bridge, the werewolves are on the list to help take care of it. And while dealing it, some old friends show up to help and they bring a small boy. Mercy  agrees to take care of the boy for 24 hours and accidentally declares that her wolf pack is in charge of the tri-cities (which is more than three, really.) But the small boy turns out to be both a blessing and a curse - he has spent a long time in Underhill and has been changed in ways that make the fae jealous. Mercy will have to protect him from the Grey Lords themselves.
A good story but I'm not sure about Aiden and what that will mean for Mercy in future books.

Three stars
This book came out March 8th, 2016
Follows Night Broken
Followed by Silence Fallen
Ebook from Library
Opinions are my own

America's Geekheart by Pippa Grant

Beck Ryder is a lot of things, including famous. He was in a boy band then became an underwear model. It's that fame that makes the tweet that was supposed to be a private message to his sister go viral. And not in a good way. No he's America's #1 hated man and his charities are floundering. He needs some help to get out of it.
Sara Dempsey has a very good reason for wanting to stay anonymous. But she's willing to step into the limelight if it means that her beloved giraffe and bee charities will get some play in the press.
I'm not sure why I liked this book so much. Pippa Grant is hit or miss for me and it might be something about the humor (I can't put my finger on it) but this book hit my funny bone in the right place as did Sara and Beck's story. And the lack of a last Big Misunderstanding. I kept waiting for it, feeling so bad for the characters but it never happened. Yay!

Four stars

This book came out April 5, 2019

Bro Code #2
Follows Flirting with the Frenemy
Followed by Liar, Liar, Hearts on Fire
Borrowed as ebook from Kindle Unlimited
Opinions are my own

Reread as ebook from Kindle Unlimited September 2024

The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne

A mystery written by the author of Winnie the Pooh? I wonder how many people have read this book for exactly that reason? And it's not bad, a pretty fast read. I liked the summary on the Classic Mysteries podcast.
Antony "Tony" is visiting a friend at the Red House when he hears a shot go off. And someone is dead; the brother of the house is dead. He was coming up from Australia and Mark, the owner, was not pleased.
I thought it was sort of interesting that Tony, an amateur sleuth to be sure, IDs the killer quickly but it made it more fun because it was easy to pick up on the other clues of what had actually happened.
Three stars
This book originally came out in 1922
Borrowed from the library
Opinions are my own