My Harlequin Hero

 My rating: 3 out of 5. Here’s a classic amnesia tale for us to share. A woman wakes up in a hospital with a bad concussion and injuries to a man telling her she is his wife. Is she? Annabel wakes up in a hospital in Nassau, Bahamas heavily bandaged and injured. A man named Luis Alarcon tells her she is his wife, but she can’t remember anything, not even her name. She's almost sure she is not his wife, though he insists she is. She was found in a life raft after floating in the ocean for three days and was almost dead. She had a gold doubloon in her pocket and nothing else to identify her. Luis takes her back to  San Sebastian, an island he owns, where he hopes Annabel regain her memories.  Luis, for the most part, is patient with her, but sometimes the little head does the thinking for the big head and he ends up harassing his own wife. Meanwhile, he has an ulterior motive for bringing back Annabel to a secluded island: for most of his life he’s been searching for th...

 My rating: 3.5 out of 5 Lynne Graham is one of my favorite HP authors and her books make sigh dreamily. I don't even like sheikh stories, but I really enjoyed this one. Prince Saif has to get married in order to make his ailing father happy and his father had chosen the granddaughter of an old friend from England. Saif was abandoned by his mother when he was a toddler to run away with another man, so it was his father who raised him. Ergo, he has mommy issues. The bride is Tatiana who has a cousin named Tatiana. Ana doesn’t want to marry a man she’s never met, so she persuades her cousin Tati to take her place as a distraction while she runs away back to England to be with her boyfriend. Tati goes through the pampering and makeover that a princess bride deserves, but when she gets to the ceremony, the groom’s father insists that they get married anyway and Tati’s evil uncle threatens to cut off the funds to Tati’s mother’s nursing home if she doesn't marry Saif. The tw...

My rating: 2 out of 5 Hooray, another Anne Mather classic featuring a hot Brazilian dude and a lovely English rose. This one is about a woman who has a one-night-stand with a gorgeous stranger that results in a baby girl our heroine keeps a secret from the hero.   Isobel Jameson meets Alejandro Cabral in a house party. He is brought to her apartment by her friend who had designs on him. Unfortunately for her, Alex is more interested in Isobel who is also shyly interested. Isobel is a divorced woman whose husband left her for another guy. This was the exchange: “No, there was no other woman. It was another man.” “Yours?" “No, my husband’s.” I took this to mean that Isobel got dumped for a dude. Anyway, it's been six years since the divorce and Isobel is thirsty. One rainy night, Alejandro goes over to Isobel’s flat soaking wet and she's like, “Let's get you out of these wet clothes,” so one thing leads to another. Alex was immediately enthralled with Isobe...

My rating: 2 out of 5. Harlequin Presents that feature adulterous heroes are always hard to read. In this one, the hero does start dating someone else and blames his straying on his wife. Let’s break this one down, shall we?   Sancha Crofton is a mother of two guys and a very demanding little girl while married to Mark, who is busy at work all the time. Having three kids in six years put a strain on their marriage, they sleep in separate beds, and they haven't had sex in several months. After a difficult birth with her daughter, Sancha suffered depression and pushed away Mark who's been feeling neglected. Now Mark has been coming home late from work, sleeping in a separate room, and is sarcastic and dismissive of her when they talk, which is rarely. During breakfast one day, Sancha receives a note basically telling her that Mark has been having an affair and he's been lying to her for months. Distraught, Sancha doubts herself, goes a little crazy, gets a makeove...

There are some Harlequin romance novels that make me want to reach in, grab the hero, and scream in his face, “Shut up and listen! This would all be resolved in a few pages if you just shut up and listen.” Gabriel Calbrini is a billionaire with an emotional grudge. Ten years ago, the little harlot he hooked up with decided she’d had enough of his bullshit, so she upped and left his ass to marry his elderly cousin, Carlo. Women don’t leave him, he leaves them! And so his poor little pride was hurt, which makes him come up with some revenge schemes: namely, I will make her want me again and when I’ve got her, I’ll be the one to leave her this time. Hahaha. Gabriel imagines that the 17-year-old “cheap tart” he seduced was also sleeping with his cousin at the same time, so she got pregnant with his babies. She was 17, he was 25. She was a big-eyed girl who was impressed with everything he was because she was a teenager! He also believes she's slept with half of Europe...

This book is the sequel to “ The Lotus Palace ” and this time the story focuses on Sun Mingyu, Yue-ying’s elder sister, and the head constable who prosecuted her in the last book.  Mingyu is a beautiful, sought-after courtesan who lives in a classy, upscale brothel where she commands the highest price among all the women. In the last book, she was accused of murder and had to go to jail (for a day) and her jailer was Wu Kaifeng, the head constable. At the start of the story, Mingyu is found by Wu Kaifeng in the mansion of her old lover, General Deng. The general is dead—decapitated—and Mingyu is the first one to find him. Of course, Wu Kaifeng comes to investigate and finds Mingyu there with blood on her clothes.  This is an Ancient China version of the old “cop and the whore” trope. Wu Kaifeng is exacting and unyielding, while Mingyu is the epitome of sophistication and a hedonistic life. Mingyu decides she doesn’t hate Kaifeng after all and in fact rather fancies him. Kaifen...

I liked this one a lot because it was set in Ancient China and there’s courtesans, swords, and rich culture in it. And murder. The author Jeannie Lin is really good at writing historical romance novels based in China, this one during the Tang Dynasty. Yue-ying is a servant to one of the most celebrated courtesans Miyung and is often in the shadows. She also hides half of her face in the shadows because she has a big red birthmark on her cheek. She is used to being ignored and treated like she isn't there so when Bai Huang, a handsome and roguish scholar, starts paying attention to her, she will have none of it. Bai Huang is the eternal scholar, having already failed the imperial civil service exam three times. He’s a wealthy playboy with lots of money to burn and he doesn’t seem to mind that his peers and elders treat him like a jolly idiot. In fact, he encourages it. Spoiler alert: he's actually a spy for his father who works for the Ministry of Defense. He h...

Our heroine Riot (wacky name, boring personality) lives in a small town in Georgia and works as a waitress. Her free-spirited roommate invites her to go to Cambodia and explore some ruins along with her wacky (read: unreliable) friends. They go to Angkor-Wat (which I thought was in Malaysia) to have spiritual experiences (consequently, my favorite movie “In the Mood for Love” features Angkor-Wat, which is how I know it's in Malaysia) and so-called friends ditch her while she's out exploring around. Of course it rains, so she seeks refuge in a temple and there just happens to be a ridiculously hot Cambodian dude there named Krav. The first time she sees this man, she's thinking “tiger” which means predator who could eat her. He offers to take her to his tree house in the forest and she’s like, “Yep, sign me up.” Girl, this guy could have been a white slaver. You crazy. Anyway, he takes her to his tree house which turns out to be mansion and he says “let...