Recipe for a Curse (2021) Lissa Kasey (Romancing a Curse) I downloaded this novella as part of a Winter Wonderland giveaway of holiday short stories and novellas. As the first story I read wasn’t good, I haven’t expected too much from the other stories I’ve read. Montana works as a chef for a retreat in […]
Getting It Right (2015) A.M. Arthur (Restoration) Nathan Wolf and James Taggart have been best friends for half their lives. “Thank God for Gina, or you’d never eat.” “Fuck you, Wolf. I can cook just fine.” “Only you don’t, because you’re lazy.” “True.” And James has been in love with Nate for most of that. […]
So We Meet-Cute Again (2019) Geneva Vand Aiden and Jason keep seeing each other everywhere–at the coffee shop, and the local market, at the grocery store, on the street–so much that each feels like he’s stalking the other. There was nothing at all wrong with this story. My problem is that once the two had […]
Little Wolf (2015) R. Cooper (Beings in Love) Tim Littlewolf ran to Wolf’s Paw to try and (at least briefly) find sanctuary on his run from his uncle and his uncle’s henchman. “Who meant well, Tim?” Nathaniel was right in front of him, larger than before, as if he’d straightened in response to a threat. […]
A Beginner’s Guide to Wooing Your Mate (2015) R. Cooper (Beings in Love) Zeki Janowitz has returned to Wolf’s Paw while trying to figure out what to do with himself now he’s finally graduated college. If attending high school in one of the longest surviving werewolf refuges in the country had taught him anything, it […]
Not So Cookie Cutter (2019) Aidan Wayne Jerrell is content being second baker, but he doesn’t mind taking over the kitchen when his co-worker is out sick. What he doesn’t expect is to be called out front so a customer can talk to him. He clasped his hands behind his back, at-ease stance so he […]
Loud and Clear (2016) Aidan Wayne Let me state first that the cover may be innocuous, but it also gives you completely the wrong idea about the book. There are no car chases are action scenes, it’s just that one character is a cab driver in the city. Jaxon may be a high school drop […]
Gay All Year (2020) Richard May These are twelve short stories–one for each month of the year–with a variety of men in a variety of situations, including age differences, second chances, friends to lovers, some supernatural elements and a BDSM story. Which is a lot. As with most anthologies, I didn’t love all the stories, […]
There Galapagos My Heart (2020) Philip William Stover (Love Beyond Boundaries) Mike Davis is perfectly content being an account manager. Of course he’d rather be an artist, but after his mother got sick he needed a job and it’s not a bad thing to be comfortable. I can never go back to not knowing where […]
Sergeant Delicious (2020) Annabeth Albert I shouldn’t have started off today with a Josh Lanyon short story. No other short story was going to measure up (unless it was another Josh Lanyon short story, which I don’t seem to have on my TBR pile.) Xavier is going to be discharged in just a few weeks. […]
New Game, Start (2017) C.S. Poe This is a perfectly fine story. I just feel like it needed to be a lot longer for what happened, because what did occur happened so fast it was almost out of left field. I mean, it took place over the course of a week–and during that week they […]
Requiem for Mr. Busybody (2020) Josh Lanyon Michael misses his days as a crime reporter. His life now consists mostly of his apartment building and his research. But when his elderly neighbor disappears, Michael reaches out to his ex, Detective Leonard Drake with his concerns. Here’s the thing about Josh Lanyon: She’s really good at […]
Angels Sing (2019) Eli Easton (Daddy Dearest) Jamie Bailey has been a single dad since he was eighteen. He still managed to go to college, but stayed in his small town to help his uncle run his bookstore (after all, his uncle gave him a job when he was an eighteen-year-old single father trying to […]
The Remaking of Corbin Wale (2017) Roan Parrish Alex Barrow broke up with his boyfriend and lost his job so he has headed back to Ann Arbor and taken over his parent’s coffee shop–turning it into his dream bakery. The best bakeries had a cohesive vision. You didn’t want a counter selling bran muffins next […]
Team Phison (2017) Chace Verity Phil Hutton is 55 struggling with the dating scene. Luckily, he he has his favorite game to keep him sane. When he goes on a mission with a newbie, he thinks there’s not going to be anything more, but the more they interact, the more Phil likes him. Except that […]
Heathen Volume 3 (2020) Natasha Alterici, Ashley A. Woods Aydis has entered the lands of the gods, searching for Odin. But Odin, angered by Aydis’ brash demands and actions, wants revenge against her, and will take it out in her people. Some of those she has met along the way are also journeying–some towards her […]
Iron & Velvet (2013/2019) Alexis Hall (Kate Kane, Paranormal Investigator) Kate Kane is a paranormal private investigator, called when something goes wrong i the supernatural world. She’s called out to Velvet–an expensive nightclub–to investigate the exsanguiation of a werewolf in the back alley. It doesn’t look like he had been killed by a vampire, but […]
Tic-Tac-Mistletoe (2020) N.R. Walker Hamish Kenneally is moving to the US. His sister has been there for four years, and there is nothing for him in Australia, so he has a two year visa, is going to remote work, and see if a change will do him good. But he arrives in the US just […]
Best Laid Plaids (2020) Ella Stainton (Kilty Pleasures) Set in Scotland in 1928. Well, I’ve now completely ruined my search history, trying to find when top and bottom were first used as gay slang. And the worst part is, I didn’t find the answer. Joachim Cockburn fought in WWI. He’s now trying to finish his […]
Love All Year: A Holidays Anthology (2020) Stacey Agdern, Hallie Alexander, Savannah J. Frierson, Felicia Grossman, Farah Heron, Celestine Martin, Ekaterine Xia This is an anthology of romances set around holidays that are NOT Christmas, Thanksgiving, or Valentines Day. Three Stars in The Sky by Stacey Agdern It Happened One Yule by Celestine Martin Queen […]
The Affair of the Mysterious Letter (2019) Alexis Hall Captain John Wyndham has returned to the city of Khelathra-Ven after five years of war. He needs rooms, but anything nice is beyond what he can afford–until he sees a posting. Co-tenant required. Rent reasonable to the point of arousing suspicion. Tolerance for blasphemies against nature […]
Glass Tidings (2016) Amy Jo Cousins Eddie Rodrigues is back on the road, heading to Texas–like he should have in the first place. But a breakdown and then witnessing a hit and run leaves him stuck in the small town of Clear Lake, an unwelcome guest of a man who owns a Christmas shop. Grayson […]
Conventionally Yours (2020) Annabeth Albert (True Colors) I tend to really like Annabeth Albert’s writing, but I generally dislike enemies to lovers tropes, so I wasn’t sure this was for me. until someone mentioned that not only was there no hate-boinking in this story, there was no explicit on-the-page sex. Conrad Stewart and Alden Roth […]
Boyfriend Material (2020) Alexis Hall I don’t care that I just read this. I managed to hold off before re-reading, and then tore through it, no better able to put it down in a second read than it was on the first read. In fact, I’m lucky I didn’t just go back to the beginning […]
His Mossy Boy (2017) R. Cooper (Beings in Love) This story has problems, most of which are editing related. But I was also unable to put it down. Martin Dyer is a mess. He drinks too much and smokes too much weed in an attempt to escape from his brain and the pressure his mother […]
A Boy and His Dragon (2013) R. Cooper I was perusing ebooks on sale and came across an R Cooper fantasy romance. Then I saw that it was available from the library. So I checked it out. And then realized they didn’t have the kindle edition so I had to read it on my phone. […]
Gifts for the Season: Winter & Christmas MM Charity Anthology (2020) This is an anthology of short stories, which are always to have some stories that don’t work for me. The issue with this anthology is that there were short stories–most of which were quite good–and there were tales that could not stand alone outside […]
Tales from the Folly: A Rivers of London Short Story Collection (2020) Ben Aaronovitch This is a collection of Rivers of London short stories. About half the stories are are Peter stories, the others features other characters from the world, including Abigail and Dominic Croft (from Foxglove Summer). PART ONE: THE PETER GRANT STORIES The […]
And Everything Nice (2016) Ada Maria Soto This in adorable romance about baking as a way of saying I love you. Or at least, I’m interested in you. He held out the plate. He’d gone for his chocolate-chip cookies, always a good icebreaker. They weren’t too large, making them harder to justify refusing. He used […]
Kneading You (2016) C.S. Poe (A Lancaster Story) Christopher Hughes desperately needs a job, and when the position of small town librarian opens up, he leaps at the opportunity. But the library is under threat, since a developer wants the land for a cell tower and shopping mall. “This library is not cost-effective. It’s really […]
Joy (2017) C.S. Poe (A Lancaster Story) The pandemic is about to get worse. The election is Tuesday. We hit a deer on the interstate and our car is now in the shop. Nothing by comfort reading for me right now. This story is just so adorable, it’s precisely what I needed. I noticed over […]
Three Stupid Weddings (2018) Ann Gallagher The world is terrible. I wanted something cute to re-read, without any boinking. This fit the bill. Please note that one character is trying to deal with an eating disorder that developed from emotional abuse from his ex-boyfriend, but it’s not heavy. the “you need to gain weight” crowd […]
Ben’s Bakery and the Hanukkah Miracle (2018) Penelope Peters Adam Bernard has spent the last ten years caring for his father and coaching his pee-wee hockey team. He could have made the NHL draft, but caring for his father was more important than hockey. But now his team has been invited to a tournament in […]
Elements of Retrofit (2017) N.R. Walker (Thomas Elkin) Thomas Elkin is 44, divorced, and a senior partner in a prestigious architecture firm. What he doesn’t expect is to fall for one of the summer interns–a man who is also a friend of his son. So. Yeah. Not my thing. I don’t love the age difference […]
Blind Faith (2013) N.R. Walker (Blind Faith) Carter Reece has moved to Boston to take a position a veterinary clinic. One of the unexpected things is that the clinic still does house calls for a few people–one of whom is Isaac Brannigan–a man who uses brashness and arrogance to hide his fear of losing those […]
For Real (2018) Alexis Hall (Spires) This was really really not my thing. Yet I couldn’t stop reading. Laurence Dalziel has grown weary of the local BDSM scene. It gives him some of what he needs–but so much else of what he wants is nowhere to be found. So it is as much a shock […]
Glitterland (2018) Alexis Hall (Spires) I kept reading the synopsis of this story and thinking, “I don’t know if this is my kind of story.” But I utterly adored Boyfriend Material as well as Waiting for the Flood, so I decided to try it. It opens with a the aftermath of a one-night-stand and the […]
A Study in Honor (2018) Claire O’Dell (The Janet Watson Chronicles) Here’s the deal. I don’t like SF. I don’t like dystopias. But I love mysteries, and I’m a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, although I really dislike Sherlock Holmes stories that were NOT written by ACD. So this was not going to be an easy […]
Passing Strange (2017) Ellen Klages Set in San Francisco in 1940. Haskel is an artist who makes her living doing pulp covers. She and her friends live on the edge of polite society, either because they aren’t white or because of their sexuality, but they are found family. “Ah, Jack. You failed the three-garment test […]
Galaxies and Oceans (2018) N.R. Walker I know it’s only been a month since I read this the first time, but it came to mind for a recommendation request, and I went to look for a specific quote, and, well. I re-read the entire thing. Grief was like the great Southern Ocean; it moved in […]
Two Rogues Make a Right (2020) Cat Sebastian (Seducing the Sedgwicks) Set in London ~1817-1818 Will Sedgwick’s best friend, Martin Easterbrook, had been found fevered and somewhat delusional in the attic of Hartley Sedgwick’s home (a home that by rights should have belonged to Martin). So Will stole him away to the country in the […]
A Delicate Deception (2019) Cat Sebastian (Regency Imposters) Set in England in 1824 Amelia Allenby fled London to escape what she felt was an impending madness. She’s now comfortable in Derbyshire, but still tries to avoid everyone. But a hulking man interrupts her daily walk, and eventually her annoyance changes to something else. Sydney may […]
Something to Talk About (2020) Meryl Wilsner Jo Jones is a Big Deal in Hollywood. She started out as a child star, then went on to script-writing and producing, and although she’s currently working on an award-winning show, she wants to do something else–a super hero movie. He didn’t come out and say it was […]
Finders Keepers (2018) N.R. Walker After reading two Roan Parrish books–which are very angsty–I needed something super fluffy and happy. This is it. Griffin Burke has moved from Brisbane to Coolum Beach to take a new job–a promotion and a new place to explore. But when he finds a lost dog, he may be starting […]
Invitation to the Blues (2018) Roan Parrish (Small Change) This story is not for everyone. So there I was, working in my younger brother’s sandwich shop to make rent after moving out of my parents’ house, where I’d gone to temporarily lie low when I was released from the hospital I ended up in after […]
Raze (2019) Roan Parrish (Riven) Huey has spent a decade focusing on being sober, and helping others by being a sponsor. But in building his life, he hasn’t allowed anything unplanned or unexpected. I liked the dishes to be done in a particular way, and the routine was important to me. For as long as […]
Hottie Scotty and Mr. Porter (2017) R. Cooper I’m still struggling, and remembered this is a cute story, so I borrowed it again from the library. Scotty left the city and moved to a small down to help his sister care for her kids. And he likes working for the fire department. But it’s hard […]
The Pursuit Of… (2018) Courtney Milan Set in the United States in 1781 – 1784 At Yorktown John Hunter almost kills a British soldier–but instead ends up giving him his coat so he can escape. When told he’d repay the kindness, John things nothing of it. People say lots of things, and they almost never […]
Spooky Business (2020) S.E. Harmon (The Spectral Files) Rain Christiansen is settling into life with Danny. They both work for the cold case unit, which uses Rain’s (non-publicized) talent as a Medium to help solve cold cases. The fact that Rain worked as a profiler for the FBI doesn’t hurt. But the FBI wants him […]
Love, Marriage, and a Baby Carriage (2016) C.S. Poe It’s been a rough couple days. I desperately needed something light and funny so I decided a reread of Love, Marriage, and a Baby Carriage was necessary. This is a short story, and currently you can’t find it anywhere, but OMG it is one of the […]