My Harlequin Hero

A Past Revenge by Carole Mortimer My rating: 4 of 5 stars REVENGE!! There’s nothing quite like revenge when it goes off without a hitch… but that’s not what happens here. And she would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling feelings! Oh man, I haven’t had so much fun reading such angst-filled drama since… my last Carole Mortimer, I guess. I laughed, cried, barfed, cried again… it was better than Cats . SPOILERS GALORE , you silly rabbits. Once upon a time, a silly nineteen-year-old girl named Ellie Smith, straight out of finishing school and all, attended a grown-up society party of a rich girlfriend related to a very wealthy man called Nicholas Andracas , an embittered Greek man who had just received divorce papers from his whorish, devilish soon-to-be ex-wife and was currently indulging himself in the process of hating all women and girls. Because Nicholas Andracas was Greek and foreign and therefore Tall, Dark, Mysterious, and handsome, a...

Dark Summer Dawn by Sara Craven My rating: 1 of 5 stars Biggest trigger warning ever : the "hero" is a raping rapist who rapes . This isn’t one of those “gray area” rapes that some of the filthy pigs in the legislative branches of our government like to bandy about, either: they’re both drunk and things just got out of hand or she’s his wife, so it can’t be rape. She was a young girl and he was her older stepbrother and she said no and tried to push him away, and he didn’t stop . He had sex with her until she passed out. In the story, she refers to it as rape . She even specifies it as rape, but he never acknowledges it as such and never really takes responsibility it for it. This motherfucker is no hero, trust me. He is a predator . He should be placed in a burlap sack, beaten with reeds, and dropped in a wood chipper. I looked over my notes real quick before I started writing this review and my stomach actually turned when I was reminded of the age differen...

The Devil's Arms by Charlotte Lamb My rating: 3 of 5 stars Amnesia: one of my favorite Harlequin Presents trope next to Secret Baby, which means my favorite trope of all time is Amnesiac Secret Baby (Yes, I know all about Pregnesia and the other one where she wakes up and she’s pregnant and amnesiac and there are 4 candidates for daddies or something—someone tell me which book this is! It must have been written by Judy Christenberry or something, I swear to God). I love amnesia stories because it gives the protagonist the chance to walk through their previous life through the eyes of others and discover they’re completely heinous people or something and maybe this time, redress the grievances and right the wrongs. I’m a sucker for redemption stories like that. Syke! This is not that story. A lost, confused young woman is found wandering in the moors by an irate, taciturn man with a giant dog, who is really mean to her from the get-go, and doesn’t say much to her bu...

The Long Surrender by Charlotte Lamb My rating: 2 of 5 stars Ugh…and yet another vintage romance novel where the so-called hero gets a little slap-happy and is a little too fond of calling our heroine “a little bitch.” This, by the way, after he finds out she was sexually assaulted and regularly beaten by her stepfather as a young girl, which is the reason she’s not too welcoming of the hero’s sloppy attempts to get in her drawers and make her “surrender” to him. Does he slow down and give her time to adjust to him even after his great revelation? Nope. Full speed ahead for this bucko. Dickhead. Selena West lives in London and supports herself as a sought-after lounge singer, having been divorced from her husband Ashley Dent some years ago (Selena West and Ashley Dent—sound like Batman villain names). Her only family is her brother Roger, who has a severe gambling problem and often comes to her to save him from financial ruin. Selena is trying to forget that she was ever...

Princess by Alison Fraser My rating: 4 of 5 stars Once upon a time, a little girl lived with her brilliant artist father in a small seaside village in Italy. Because her mother was dead, the father decided the little girl needed a new mother, so he went and found himself a bride from England, who was very beautiful, but unbeknownst to him, was quite cruel and jealous of his beautiful dead wife and the special bond he shared with his daughter, who was looking more and more like her mother with each passing day. One day, the father died and the little girl was distraught, but the new mother told her everything was going to be all right because she was going to be her special little girl from now, but it was all a lie. In time, the true nature of the wicked stepmother was revealed and the little girl, whose name was Serena , was punished because the stepmother never forgot that her husband loved the little girl and her mother more than he loved her as a bride and she ...

Guilty by Anne Mather My rating: 3 of 5 stars And yet another hot Italian stud saves a prematurely middle-aged English rose wasting away in the countryside, just waiting for the right man to come along and water her garden and fill her womb with his virile seed, so she can have Miracle-Gro babies. Laura Fox is thirty-nine years old and teaches high school English in northern England and lives in a tiny two-bedroom cottage by herself, since she has a grown daughter who moved away to London to become a model a few years ago. She lost her virginity to a man in a party at sixteen and when the man–who was married and a lot older than her, by the way–found out how young she was, he freaked out and disappeared. Laura never saw him again. She had to live with the stigma of being a young, single mother in a small village and raised her daughter with the help of her parents. Having to put herself through school, taking her care of her daughter, and working to make a livin...

A Forbidden Loving by Penny Jordan My rating: 3 of 5 stars Hazel is a single mother in a small town. Her father, long-suffering from an illness has just died, and her soon-to-be 19 year old daughter Katie has gone off to university. Hazel is alone for the first time in her life and it has given her a lot of time to contemplate the state of her being and the fact that at 36 years old, she has never felt like a woman. She is impregnated at 16 by her childhood boyfriend who promptly dies in a motorbike accident and her father, a successful barrister in London quits his practice to stay at home with her and look after her and the baby. Hazel is beholden to her father because he basically sacrifices his career for her, so when her father tells her she shouldn't ever think of getting involved with a man again lest he think she's an easy lay since she'd already been knocked up once (and the whole town will brand her a scarlet woman), Hazel takes his entreaty to hear...

Desire For Revenge by Penny Jordan My rating: 3 of 5 stars Cute, quick story, though the ending came rather abruptly. Hero/heroine are fighting, No HEA in sight,still some issues to resolve, but all of a sudden, they're in the same room and there are three pages left and they're saying they love each other and want to get married ASAP. THE END. Sarah and Joss come across each other at a masquerade ball, their eyes meet and lock. Sarah gets breathless because she has never felt this way about anyone, let alone a man she hasn't met. My homie Joss goes up to her and asks her to dance. Instant connection, insta-lust. He's feeling it, she's feeling it, so homie says, "I want to make love to you." Sarah practically swoons upon hearing this and says she wants that, too. Joss says he's got a cottage nearby, Sarah says, "Take me there." Joss is on a roll! At this point, they don't even know each other's names yet! Anyway, S...

Wicked Caprice by Anne Mather My rating: 3 of 5 stars Okay... more like 2.5 stars. This is one of those books that I had on my TBR for a while and was hesitant to pick up because the title is boring and kind of vague. Wicked Caprice. Wicked = Mischievous or playfully malicious; caprice = a sudden or unpredictable changing of mind or attitude. What does that tell us? Somebody in the story changes his mind about somebody in a… playfully malicious way. Or somebody’s  attitude radically changes due to suddenly lax morals.  I bet this is an “Ooops, I’m sorry I thought you were a whore. Everyone else said you were. As it turns out, you are good and kind and as pure as the driven snow and I regret that I had to violate you with my peen and take your virginity to discover that you were telling me the truth all along. Will you marry me?” storyline.  It's a tale as old as time. Very romantic. Don’t know why Disney never based a full-length animated Princess mov...

Tiger, Tiger by Robyn Donald My rating: 2 of 5 stars For an oh-no-we-cant-bone-we-might-be-siblings story, this was kind of boring. I was hoping for a more lurid, salacious, V.C. Andrews-type-of-forbidden angle, but novel doesn't quite go there. The H/h just don't have the connection/chemistry to pull it off. Keane and Lecia meet each other at a festival in the park and both are struck dumb by their resemblance to each other. They look so much alike that they could be boy/girl versions of each other. And it's insta-lust for these two. What a strange form of narcissism. I just wasn't convinced that these two couldn't live without each other. On Lecia's part, it is more believable because she has this almost hero-worship for Keane, but then again, the story is almost entirely from her POV. I just couldn't get the same sense of "I don't care if we're blood-related, I love you and I want to stay with you" desperation from ...

Take Hold of Tomorrow by Daphne Clair My rating: 4 of 5 stars Stella Rawson is a widow and the sole owner of a large, successful electronics company after the death of her husband, Mark. Since she is beautiful and was considerably younger than her husband, she'd had to prove herself to the company, to show them that she was deserving of the management position Mark had put her in. Now that she's in charge of everything, Stella works doubly hard to be seen as more than a figurehead and to be respected by the company's board members, all of whom are male. When she pushes for the hiring of a young, brilliant whiz kid educated in America for an important management position, the board members are suspicious because Russ Langford, all of twenty-five years old to Stella's twenty-nine, is also lean, tall, and ridiculously good-looking. Stella, who has to be beyond reproach at all times, must prove to her board members that Russ was hired due to his brains and...

Treacherous Longings by Anne Mather My rating: 4 of 5 stars Quinn Marriott is a man on a mission. An investigator for a television news show, he is tasked to find the elusive, mysterious Julia Harvey, a famous film actress who disappeared ten years ago at the peak of her career. Long ago, Quinn thought he knew Julia more intimately than anyone could ever know anyone--until she dumped him without a word, shattered and embittered. Without Julia in his life, Quinn had been forced to move on. He had a new life, a job that challenged him, a woman who loved him back, and most importantly, his heart and sanity were intact. And now here he was, standing in his boss's London office, being told that Julia Harvey may have been found and Quinn is the one he wants on the job to get her and secure an interview. Julia has been living in the Cayman Islands for the last ten years in a house she had lovingly restored herself, as Mrs. Julia Stewart, a successful children's boo...