A smorgasbord of delicious romances

REVIEWS BY BARBARA SAMUEL

A groaning buffet table awaits this month, with dishes to please almost any palate.

I clearly remember the first book I read by the tender and thoughtful Jennifer Greene—the now-classic Night of the Hunter, a romance that brilliantly showcased the author's myriad talents: her eye for detail, a deft touch with appealingly human, vulnerable heroines and sometimes stoic, always manly and touchingly yearning heroes. In Blame It on Cupid, Greene delivers the tale of Merry Olson, a footloose breeze of a woman who becomes the guardian of the daughter of a dead friend. Charlie and Merry do not seem a good fit at first—11-year-old Charlie is acting out her grief in heart-wrenching ways, and Merry comes off as a flibberti-gibbet. The next-door neighbor, Jack, a handsome and wary divorced dad, doesn't give the union much time to last. But that's before Merry captures him with her special brand of enchantment. Like a slice of pound cake, Blame It on Cupid is both sweet and dense, a sexy and thoughtful tale of the ways we manage loss.


Sinful devil's food

If a man could be a food, the hero of Selena Montgomery's Secrets and Lies would be Devil's Food. Sebastian Caine is a thief, or "recovery specialist" as he likes to call himself, with an appreciation for life and art. Commissioned to steal an Incan manuscript called Cinchona, Sebastian finds it has already been spirited away by Katelyn Lyda, a naturalist and botanist with an agenda of her own. Forced into an uneasy and fiery alliance, Kat and Sebastian find themselves drawn nto power plays neither fully understands, and into a relationship that could destroy them both. Can Kat ever trust a thief? Can Sebastian let down his guard enough to let someone in? And will they even live through this adventure? This is a genuinely fresh and fast novel, laced with a colorful and intriguing background of history, plant culture and the high-stakes world of pharmacological study—which sounds geeky, but trust me, it's not. Hot and smart.


More than a packet of peanuts

Who hasn't wondered about the private lives of flight attendants? I've wondered how they sleep and where they go after the flight, and if it's glamorous or just tiring. Their day-to-day reality is the world of Hailey Lane, the protagonist of Alyson Noël's Fly Me to the Moon. If you're thinking it's some glitz and glamour tell-all, scrub that. It's more like a "Grey's Anatomy" of the skies, with friends and power plays and a woman who needs to find herself before she can ever really find love. When Hailey finds her pilot boyfriend in a compromising position that leaves no room for negotiating a reunion, she's jolted into taking a look at her life and what matters. Like most of us in the throes of self-discovery, she drinks too much, indulges some whining and misses the boat with the right guy and hooks up with the wrong ones, but she also drags out a manuscript for a novel she started writing before the boyfriend took over her life. It's easy to cheer for Hailey, who is smart and warm if a little confused, and who learns—as we do—that the pleasure is not in the destination, but in the journey itself.


A bloody steak

A subset of romance has taken a strong turn toward the paranormal, creating a genre that goes far beyond romantic suspense to what I'd call romantic horror. Surviving Demon Island by Jaci Burton is a rip-roaring action novel that also falls hard on the horror side of the line. The highly romantic tale of Gina Bliss, an action-adventure movie star who does all her own stunts, and real-life action hero Derek Marks, starts out like a nice, juicy novel about a reality show, but hints of things to come emerge all too soon when the pretend demons they're on the island to "fight" turn out to be the real thing. Surviving Demon Island is a blood-rare steak, lusty and delicious and not for the squeamish. A very sexy, very romantic novel that will also scare you to pieces, trust me.


Barbara Samuel is the author of Lady Luck's Map of Vegas.

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