REVIEWS BY SANDY HUSEBY
This book should come with a warning: caution—highly addictive. Kyra Davis' first novel,
Sex, Murder, and a Double Latte, is an absolute treat! You won't want to put it down. Sophie Katz's vivid imagination fuels her mystery writing as much as the frappucinos she downs in a San Francisco Starbucks. That imagination is her ticket to fame—until Michael Tolsky, the Hollywood producer who optioned her story, turns up dead in a scene out of his own movie. Suicide, or the work of a homicidal stalker who has now turned his attention to Sophie? Not satisfied with the cops' answers, Sophie decides to get her own. Anatoly Darinsky turns up too conveniently just as the brew heats up. He's too intense, too Russian, too disciplined for Sophie's liking. What's a savvy, thirty-something, ethnically intriguing, fanciful woman to do? Suspect him, of course. Davis' blend of mystery and chick lit is as perfectly balanced as the coffee and steam in Sophie's favorite frappucinos. And every bit as addicting.
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Ring around the Renaissance
A love for the ages—its secret hidden beneath a carefully applied mask of paint. Who covered up the ruby ring
on the young woman's finger in the Raphael painting? Why place such a seemingly deliberate deception in a masterpiece
of the Italian Renaissance? Diane Haeger's The Ruby Ring posits an explanation amid the intrigues swirling around the Vatican in the early 1500s. The maestro, Raphael, seeks the perfect model for a papal commission to paint the Madonna. He finally discovers the ideal woman in the baker's daughter, Margherita Luri. Margherita proves more than mere model as the two begin a love affair that scandalizes Roman society and makes a powerful enemy of Cardinal Bibbiena. Set against the vivid descriptive detail of Rome and the Trastavere, Haeger's tale of how the ring came to be obscured in the Raphael masterpiece resonates with the grandeur and intimacy of epic love stories. The included reader's guide gives fodder for discussion, but this romance is first to be savored as the wonderful historical tale that it is.
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It was a dark and stormy night
When Tracy Potter checks a stranger into her isolated bluff-top hotel on the California coast, she recognizes shadows of
sadness in his eyes that mirror the ones in her own in Jill Marie Landis'
Heartbreak Hotel. The rain-swept hotel beckons Wade MacAllister as a refuge for his tormented spirit. The secrets haunting him keep him on the move, but he recognizes a kindred spirit in Tracy and cannot resist the warmth of home and family that she has imbued in her run-down hotel. Tracy is still trying to adjust to widowhood and to the betrayals that the death of her husband, Glenn, revealed. Dreams of a future together seem too ephemeral to both Tracy and Wade, as unreal as the ghostly whispering of a sea captain with a story he's determined to tell. Landis writes with heartwarming clarity of losses and sorrows, and of the power of the healing light of love to chase away shadows.
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Born-again virgin
Novelist Celeste D'Arcy is in the throes of angst while exploring the cruel reality of sex—because it
doesn't necessarily come wrapped neatly in the breathy protestations of love crafted in the romances that
keep her alter ego, male romance writer Jack Carter, endowed with a lavish Venice Beach lifestyle.
Yearning for more from the women in his life, Jack takes a vow of born-again virginity until he finds
a woman to love forever in Nina Killham's dishy romp through the maze of chicks and lit,
Mounting Desire. When his roommate, writing as "Molly Desire," starts competing for his heart and his shelf space, Jack discovers that all's fair in love and war.
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Sandy Huseby writes from Fargo, North Dakota.
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