Fatal Destiny by Marie Force ~ Review

Title: Fatal Destiny (Fatal #3.5)

Author: Marie Force

Genre: Adult, Romantic Suspense

Length: 180 pages

Publisher: Carina Press

Release Date: January 1, 2011

Source: Freebie

Reviewed by: Jasmyn

With the week of their wedding finally upon them, Washington, D.C., Police Lieutenant Sam Holland and her fiance, Senator Nick Cappuano, are at odds. In the aftermath of a tragic loss, they struggle to reconnect as the big day draws near, but their work keeps pulling them apart. When a new clue into a cold case surfaces, Nick asks Sam not to take any foolish chances before the wedding and to leave it alone for the time being.

Sam agrees, but she can't let it go entirely and winds up trapped in an explosive situation. Then an unwelcome visitor from her past threatens her future happiness... With trouble at every turn, will Sam survive long enough to walk down the aisle?

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Fatal Destiny was a great novella that was all about the good feels leading up to Sam and Nick's wedding. It also sets the stage for some future drama (or so it seems) that has the potential to shake up our main couple's lives. This was more of a bridge between books four and five (which I totally loved) than a full story unto itself. We do get to meet a really amazing character - the wedding planner - who manages to keep Sam and Nick on track, on schedule, and on their merry way for the wedding. She was a force of nature, and I have it on good authority that she pops up again in a future book (yay!).

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The Art Whisperer by Charlotte Elkins and Aaron Elkins

Title: The Art Whisperer (Alix London #3)

Author: Charlotte Elkins, Aaron Elkins

Genre: Adult, Mystery

Length: 260 pages

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Release Date: August 19, 2014

Source: Purchased

Reviewed by: Jasmyn

When art conservator Alix London spots a forgery, she knows trouble will follow. So she’s understandably apprehensive when her connoisseur’s eye spots something off about a multimillion-dollar Jackson Pollock painting at Palm Springs’s Brethwaite Museum—her current employer.

Alix is already under fire, the object of a vicious online smear campaign. Now the Brethwaite’s despicable senior curator, obsessed with the “maximization of monetized eyeballs,” angrily refuses to decommission the celebrated Pollock piece. But it’s only when a hooded intruder attacks Alix in her hotel room that the real trouble begins. And when FBI Special Agent Ted Ellesworth—with whom Alix had inadvertently, but thoroughly, botched a budding relationship just a year prior—turns up to investigate the Pollock, Alix knows she’s about to have her hands full.

In her third mystery, Alix London must see through mirages in the desert to uncover the knotted history of the painting—and save herself in the process.

**********

Alix London is making a reputation for herself as the "Art Whisperer," capable of telling if a painting is authentic or not by just looking at it. And her intuition is never wrong, it might just take her a little while to prove it. This reputation is getting her in trouble this time. She's being targeted online by a smear campaign, and it's strangely tied to her new job at a small museum.

She's determined to save her reputation and find out who is behind the attacks. But she'll end up needing some help on this one, and she's not sure exactly what her relationship with FBI Agen Ted Ellesworth is anymore. Which is another minefield that she will need to navigate.

I really enjoy how the mysteries in the series build off each other. The characters are dynamic from book to book, and their growth and development adds to the storyline and enhances the mystery and sleuthing as we go on. I'm also learning a bit about art, and I love how the authors tie it all together is such great stories.

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Hollywood Dirt by Alesandra Torre

Title: Hollywood Dirt (Hollywood Dirt #1)

Author: Alesandra Torre

Genre: Adult, Contemporary Romance

Length: 414 pages

Publisher: Independent

Release Date: September 7, 2015

Source: Purchased

Reviewed by: Jasmyn

Cole Masten. Abandoned by his superstar wife, Hollywood’s Perfect Husband is now Hollywood’s Sexiest Bachelor: partying hard and screwing even harder. Watch out Los Angeles, there's a new bad boy in town.

Summer Jenkins. That’s me, a small town girl stuck in Quincy, Georgia. I cook some mean chicken and dumplins, can bluff a grown man out of his savings in poker, and was voted Most Friendly my senior year.

We were from different worlds. Our lives shouldn’t have collided. But then Cole Masten read a book about my small town. And six months later, his jet landed on our dusty airstrip, and he brought Hollywood with him.

From the start, I knew he was trouble. For our town. And for me.

Sometimes, opposites just aren’t meant to attract.

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I loved this book. It was full of great characters (including a rooster), some hilarious situations, and stubbornness. I love when stubborn characters butt heads, and Cole and Summer definitely fit that bill.

Summer is a true southerner. She knows all the southern small town rules and niceties that a person must follow if they want to be part of polite society, but she's not quite welcome still. The reason is amazing. It's one of the best revenge stories ever, but it turned most of the residents against her. Yet Summer is the one that finds herself the center of attention again when Cole demands that she plays the leading lady in the film his is not only starring in, but directing.

There is tons of humor and watching as these two make the transition from barely tolerating each other, through friendship, and on to something bigger had me smiling the entire time. The antics and situations they found themselves in as they tried to one-up each other were amazing - and the rooster - the rooster stole the show a few times.

This is a light-hearted fun romance. I laughed out loud and couldn't stop grinning the whole time.

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A Cruise to Die for by Charlotte and Aaron Elkins

Title: A Cruise to Die For (Alix London #2)

Author: Charlotte Elkins, Aaron Elkins

Genre: Cozy Mystery

Length: 256 pages

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Release Date: September 3, 2013

Source: Purchased

Reviewed by: Jasmyn

This should be the cushiest job Alix London’s ever had.

The second Alix London mystery finds the art restorer in a world brimming with idle luxury, spectacular locations, and deadly intrigue.

Surrounded by art and wealth and the sun-drenched Greek isles, she’s aboard a sumptuous mega-yacht with no responsibilities save the occasional lecture to the guests of her temporary employer, Panos Papadakis, one of the world's richest men. But there’s a catch: Papadakis has long been suspected of being at the center of a multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme and Alix is actually there as an undercover operative of FBI special agent Ted Ellesworth, a member of the Bureau’s Art Crime Team. They hope Alix can gather the inside information they need to finally put the cagey Papadakis away.

Alix’s exposure to the enormous wealth of high-end collectors and the shadier aspects of the art trade—the avarice, naked greed, and ingenious scams—somehow brings her closer to her charming, "reformed" rogue of a father, and helps crystalize in her own mind just where she fits into the mix.

**********

When FBI agent Ted Ellesworth asks Alix to help be his eyes and ears during an art auction on a luxury yacht, it seems more like a vacation than a job. Elkins did a great job showing the luxury and decadence of the Greek tycoon's yacht and captures some of the very unique personalities on board very well.

What she finds instead is a possible counterfeit, maybe a murder, and a stream of finances that just isn't adding up. Once again she's neck deep in a mystery involving the high-end art world. This one was a little more convoluted than the first with lots of hands in the pot and tangled webs wrapping around things.

One of the best things about the series so far - I don't figure it out halfway through. There are enough hints that point me in a general direction, but the big reveal only happens when Alix and her "crew" all get together and share their collective information. The fact that it takes the entire team to figure out all the details in the end only makes things better.

The ending of this was quite intense though. More so than I expected, but it kept me on the edge of my seat until the last page.

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Lover Unleashed by J.R. Ward

Title: Lover Unleashed (Black Dagger Brotherhood #9)

Author: J.R. Ward

Genre: Adult, Paranormal Romance

Length: 512 pages

Publisher: NAL

Release Date: March 29, 2011

Source: Audiobook Purchase

Reviewed by: Jasmyn

Payne, twin sister of Vishous, is cut from the same dark, warrior cloth as her brother: A fighter by nature, and a maverick when it comes to the traditional role of Chosen females, there is no place for her on the Far Side... and no role for her on the front lines of the war, either.

When she suffers a paralyzing injury, human surgeon Dr. Manuel Manello is called in to treat her as only he can—and he soon gets sucked into her dangerous, secret world. Although he never before believed in things that go bump in the night—like vampires—he finds himself more than willing to be seduced by the powerful female who marks both his body and his soul.

As the two find so much more than an erotic connection, the human and vampire worlds collide... just as a centuries old score catches up with Payne and puts both her love and her life in deadly jeopardy.

**********

Lover Unleashed continues Ward's story of the Black Dagger Brotherhood with the full introduction of Payne. I've seen her sparring with Wrath in the Sanctuary in the past book, but now she's on Earth with a horrible injury to her neck. Right off the bat there were a few storyline inconsistencies with her past and Vishious that really bothered me at first. But I'm so deep into the series now that I just had to keep going.

Very glad that I did. One of my favorite things about this book was seeing one of the women, Doc Jane, playing a major role after her romance was done. My biggest complaint about the series so far is that we seem to lose track of the women. There aren't many updates or glimpses into their lives unless it's directly related to the Brotherhood. But we got to see a lot of Doc Jane here - and it was a side of her that we hadn't really seen before.

She has to make the call to bring a human surgeon in to help repair the damage to Payne's spinal cord, and Dr. Manuel Manello is the only one she trusts to operate on the vampire female. And, of course, something happens between them that no one really understands. Payne and Manello will have to fight to be together and find a way to merge their two worlds.

On the war front, we don't see too much going on. Lash doesn't play a role in this story. The conflict was all within the main characters - a bit of a change from past books in the series. I loved how the story progressed and seeing some new characters in the mix - but still - I want to see the women play more in the story from book to book.

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A Dangerous Talent by Charlotte and Aaron Elkins ~ Review

Title: A Dangerous Talent (Alix London #1)

Author: Charlotte Elkins and Aaron Elkins

Genre: Adult, Cozy Mystery

Length: 270 pages

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Release Date: March 6. 2012

Source: Purchased

Reviewed by: Jasmyn

Alix London has a promising career as an art consultant, a sumptuous condo in Seattle’s toniest neighborhood, a gorgeous figure, and a presence that exudes Ivy League breeding and old money. She has it all…or does she? Only Alix knows that the image she presents to the world is a carefully constructed mirage that veils an embarrassing truth. A brilliant, once-promising art student, the daughter of a prominent New York art conservator, her world was left in ruins when her father went to prison for art forgery. Now a Harvard dropout with an emptied bank account, she is languishing in a career that has produced little more than a lucky house-sitting gig. But all of that changes when Alix meets Christine Lemay, a novice art collector with money to burn and a hot tip on a recently discovered painting by American master Georgia O’Keeffe. Chris hires Alix to perform the authentication, an assignment that finally could launch Alix into the big leagues. But soon after her arrival in Santa Fe, she finds herself tangled up in a web of forgery, deceit—and murder. Anxious to avoid becoming the next victim, she teams up with FBI Special Agent Ted Ellesworth—and gets a little unlikely help from her roguish father—to uncover the truth behind the painting and those who would kill to have it. Sharp, witty, and devilishly fun, A Dangerous Talent offers an insider’s look into the surprisingly treacherous contemporary art world.

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A Dangerous Talent was a really fun read. I won't vouch for the accuracy of the artistic facts, I'm not an expert in that area. However, the main character, Alix London, is. Alix has an interesting history in the art world, and it's a history that doesn't really help her reputation. With a father convicted for forgery, she's had a hard time finding clients that will trust her.

But she does have a few, and the newest one, Christine Lemay, has decided she just must have a Georgia O'Keefe. And so begins Alix's first trip into mystery and mayhem. Chris and Alix are a great team. Chris is the loud and wonderfully outrageous woman that doesn't care what anyone thinks, and is a nice balance to Alix's much more conservative nature.

A simple trip to view and authenticate Chris's painting turns out to involve a dead body, an explosion, and an FBI agent. With a great mix of mystery and action, and maybe the beginnings of something with a certain hunky guy. This may not top the list of all-time favorites, but A Dangerous Talent was something I was very happy to stumble upon. 

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Live For This by Kathryn Biel ~ Review

Title: Live For This
Author: Kathryn R. Biel
Genre: Adult, Contemporary Romance
Length: 221 pages
Publisher: Independent
Release Date: March 8, 2016
Source: Request
Reviewed by: Jasmyn

Samirah Lundgren is living the party girl life. While she's trying to forget about her past and put off having a meaningful future, her lifestyle catches up with her, leaving her in a wake of personal destruction. Alone and homeless, she encounters Michael Salinger, a man carrying his own baggage in the form of a spinal cord injury, not to mention his former fiancé is marrying his former best friend. 

Can a man with a broken body and a woman with a broken soul help each other find the redemption they need to become whole again?

**********

This was an incredibly moving story. It starts out with a questionable heroine that I wasn't sure I was going to like or want to root for. But I ended up falling in love with Sami. I quickly realized that she wasn't out to hurt people or steal someone's husband, but she was trying to find something in herself to value. Within the first couple chapters, I found a depth in her character that was unexpected and wonderful.

Michael was another one I had a hard time with at first. I think I was supposed to. He's put up a wall around everything in his life and pushed everyone away. He's so determined not to let anyone hurt him again, that he's destroying himself. You can't help but feel for the man who lost so much, and you really want him to just open up and let life back in.

Their romance isn't a traditional one. They both have so much to work through and it almost consumes their lives. But watching as they slowly build each other up in such positive ways was amazing. It was a true romance - not love/lust at first sight. It was life, pure and not so simple.

These two broken souls ended up being perfect for each other. Both looking for someone to trust and relate to. Someone that understands their brokenness in a way most people never will. A beautifully told, semi-clean romance with an HEA that almost made me cry. 

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