*sigh*

I love Julie Garwood. She was one of the first romance writers that I read and after reading Saving Grace, I went out and stocked up on Garwoods because that book was beautiful. Unfortunately, she was branching out into her contemporary market and they just aren’t as strong, and honestly, they’ve been getting worse with each one, culminating in this.

Her heroines are always perilously close to Mary Sue territory, and her heroes are usually the same–gruff teddy bears whose barks are worse than their bite. But the plots are good and she’s a meticulous researcher. When she tackles a historical period (for the most part) the details are good and her one saving grace (heh) is that there are elements to this novel that kept from outright putridness.

Ellie is too perfect for my tastes — she’s absolutely gorgeous, incredibly smart, and the perennial victim. She had a bad stalker from the age of eleven and then becomes the target of a criminal duo, who aim to eliminate her as a witness. It’s exhausting to read Ellie. Garwood makes her absolutely perfect and then makes her sisters vastly one-dimensional. Annie is sweet and Ava is mean. (Seriously mean and selfish, she makes *my* sister look like Mother Teresa) Ava has no redeeming quality for most of the book and then out of nowhere, for one brief page, she helps Ellie out with her wardrobe and but the entire novel, she insists Ellie be in the wedding when Ava is marrying Ellie’s former fiance. Holy crap. Like said — EVERYTHING happens to Ellie and it’s just too much.

So before I’m even out of the starting gate, I don’t identify with this absolutely incredibly gorgeous heroine, who by the way is so smart and is the best trauma surgeon EVA. Oh my goodness.

And then you meet Max, the alleged hero. I think Garwood is going for the gruff teddy bear. She achieves asshole whose entire redeeming quality is his knack for showing up to save the day. He’s uncommunicative to the point that he takes an entire plane flight between SC and MO without explaining to Ellie that he’s not going to be able to contact her for a while because he’s going undercover. He just drops her off after the flight and heads to HI. And it might be because he wasn’t sure he loved her. In fact, he’s denying it until the last pages and then tells Ellie they’re getting married after this absolute asshole-ness.

I didn’t buy they were in love, but I could see where Max’s alpha male-ness could be hot, so yeah, physically I get it. I just don’t see the love. My biggest pet peeve in romance is an author trying to sell me forever after when all I see is physical attraction and then telling me in they’re in love. Show me. Don’t tell me.

So what saves this book? The stalker story is engaging. I mostly like Ellie’s parents, there’s some depth there. Garwood’s attention to detail is, as usual, impeccable. I’m just left feeling…slightly unsatisfied. I hope Garwood returns to historical novels and allows for some variations in her female and male characters. It’s just too much of the same and it breaks my heart, because Saving Grace is an absolute sentimental memory for me and the book still holds up on a reread. (Ransom and The Bride are also wonderful).

I love you, Julie Garwood, but you’re testing that devotion.

I have two things to say before I explain why I thought this book was bad. First, I like series–I like to get to know my characters before they have their own book, I like that I get to see what happens to my characters after their book and one of the strong things about Linda Lael Miller is that she uses a lot of the same characters due to her McKettrick series. I also love Linda Lael Miller in particular, mostly because I like westerns and I can always count on her to write them.

What went wrong with this book is what usually goes wrong with series. A good romance series is connected but books should stand alone and this didn’t happen. Melissa O’Ballivan didn’t work as a character because I feel like I was obligated to read her siblings’ books to understand her. I also have a very big problem with her occupation — Miller writes Melissa as Maricopa County prosecutor, who has very little to do at all the entire day. That doesn’t work for me and Miller should know better. It’s her misfortune that I was watching an episode of Cold Case Files the day after reading this book and saw Maricopa County’s District Attorney’s office interviewed and saw that were many people involved in the office and that Scottsdale and Phoenix are part of the county. It’s population is over 3 million. It’s office wouldn’t be in Stone Creek, AZ and Melissa would have more to do. If it’s just a satellite office and she’s one of many attorneys, fine. But that’s now Miller’s Melissa O’Ballivan is written.

So the heroine is weakly written and kind of just walks through the book. The hero is even worse. There’s too much about his cute adopted son, his cute adopted dog, and his complicated family. He doesn’t like strong female lawyers because of a past relationship. And what’s all I know about Steven Creed. Oh, and he’s sexy.

I never saw relationship that was more than physical in nature. I never saw why Melissa would decide to marry Steven over a past relationship. I didn’t understand why Miller wrote a conflict between the two with Melissa as prosecutor and Steven as a defense attorney, and rather than have them work it out, Melissa decides she’ll change her job after her term is over. That’s not much of a strong female character.

The ending is rushed, as if Miller realized she had about two chapters to get these two together and instead of fixing the conflict, she just eliminates it. I didn’t really get that Melissa was all that disatisfied with her job, so her decision to change it based on a guy she doesn’t know that well isn’t satisfying.

I love Linda Lael Miller, but the only thing this book did was set up books for Steven’s family and tie up the last unmarried O’Ballivan. The only aspect I enjoyed was the subplot of Byron Cahill’s redemption, but even that was relegated to the background and not well dealt with.

It’s such a disappointment to me and I know Miller can be better than this.

The best thing about Laura Lee Guhrke’s newest series, Abandoned at the Altar, is the time period. I find so few romance novels set in the very late Victorian/early Edwardian age and I’m not sure why. The aristocratic world was fighting to keep everything exactly the same, but the rest of the world was jumping forward and this pre-war Britain is the perfect time setting. I hope Guhrke continues to mine this era for gold.

The first book was amazing and I’ll find time to review that, but this second book was even better. Julia as a divorced woman was one of the most fascinating heroines I’ve read in a long time. The conservative Aidan was so uptight, that like Julia, you wanted to ruffle his cravat (or whatever fashion men were wearing at that point). The chemistry between Julia and Aidan just poured from the page and it was wonderfully complicated by their history together, which was not quite that Aidan thought it was.

My one criticism, and it is very small, was that Julia’s marriage wasn’t fleshed out until three-quarters of the way through the book. It was clear almost from the moment Julia appears in Wedding of the Season that her marriage is disastrous and her behavior stems from a desire to push her husband into divorce. We know the lengths Julia has gone, up to and including deceiving Aidan and dragging him into the divorce proceedings, which is a very large stain on his reputation. But we don’t know why and by the time Julia reveals it, it’s lost of a little of the punch. I don’t disagree that the timing in the book was right for Aidan’s discovery, but the reader ought to have been included somewhat earlier.

That’s a very small problem that really don’t detract from my enjoyment of the boy. Everything Guhrke writes is beautiful and her characters and plots are some of the most engaging and original novels on the market. This? This makes my expectations of her next book even higher.

The resolution of Julia and Aidan’s story happens nearly on the last page, but the story is well-paced and I was sorry to see it end. I’ve reread the last scenes between the two and it’s as satisfying as it was the first time I read it.

Could she be the brazen lady who posed for the scandalous portrait?

But Peter has his own ideas about this sham “engagement” to the exquisite beauty who’s always been just out of his reach—and he’s willing to incite yet another scandal to make her heart truly his.

Widowed Julia, Lady Winterset, has inherited a book — a very shocking book — that every gentleman in London seems to want. For a charismatic businessman, it’s a chance to build an empire. For a dashing novelist, it could guarantee fame. But to a proud, domineering earl, it means everything…

Harrison Landingham, Earl of Mountdale, can’t let the obstinate Julia release the shameless memoir that could ruin his family’s name. But the only way to stop her may be equally sordid — if far more pleasurable. For his rivals are intent on seducing the captivating woman to acquire the book. And Harrison isn’t the sort to back away from a competition with the stakes this high. Now the winner will claim both the scandalous memoirs and the heart of their lovely owner…

This book had a lot of things going for it. I liked the heroine, her son was realistic, the kick-off for the plot regarding her nieces being left alone after their father was sentenced to prison.

And then there was the supposed hero of the piece. I suppose my main beef with Mallery’s Ethan Hendrix was that there never enough from his point of view, and without his point of view I just didn’t feel connected to his character. The physical attraction between Ethan and Liz was very evident, but I suppose I couldn’t figure out why she’d be bothered with him. She spent the book in a town surrounded by people who accosted her and were downright vicious and Ethan didn’t get around to defending her until the end of the book.

Like the first book in the series, Chasing Perfect, the book was carried by the charm of the heroine, but even that book was propped up by the second half. Almost Perfect never really got going, in my opinion, and Ethan and Liz seemed to get together at end simply because Mallery decided it was time.

I couldn’t find myself rating it any higher than a C, and if I hadn’t been able to finish it it might have been lower. This book exemplified one of the characteristics that I like least about romance novels — it depended on a physical attraction to depict love and then told me the characters loved one another without any evidence in the first 200 or so pages to explain it.

Married young to a charming but improvident army officer, Eve Hawthorne was widowed with little left except for a few extravagant trifles. Desperate to avoid her domineering stepmother, she accepts employment as chaperone to the Earl of Stewkesbury’s American cousins. Who better than a levelheaded widow to remind these young girls that they no longer live on a frontier? But when she flirts with a handsome stranger who turns out to be the earl’s brother Fitz, Eve worries she’s given the wrong impression. Trying to prove herself responsible—with Fitz challenging her at every turn—is hard enough, but a blackmailer with an interest in Eve’s prior marriage proves far more troubling. With the earl away, Eve can turn only to Fitz for help. But dare she confide in him, when getting too close to this confirmed bachelor might risk her heart to his alluring ways?