An intriguing but improbable romance.
An academic meets a movie star in this contemporary romance.
Dee Schwartz is an arts researcher who likes to push the envelope. Her publisher thinks her latest manuscript is too controversial (“on page one, there’s an explicit oral act in the balcony of a church”). She meets film star Ryder “Rye” Field one night at a bar in Los Angeles. Rye has a checkered past; Dee’s friends warn her about him because there’s a lot of gossip swirling around the actor. She goes out with Rye anyway. They bond over the fact that they both lost their mothers at young ages. There’s a lot of talk on that first date, as they tell each other their entire backstories before they sleep together. Soon, he invites her as his date to a business dinner in which he tries to iron out the specifics of his next movie. Dee impresses everyone at the dinner. After just a few days, Rye and Dee declare their love for each other and everything seems blissful. Some fun secondary characters, a well-drawn setting, and an exciting eleventh-hour kidnapping plot propel Leavy’s story. The author also offers rich details about Rye’s Hollywood world and Dee’s opinions on art (“I love art more than anything; it’s sacred to me. Artists need to be free. Art shouldn’t have to apologize for itself. It should provoke, inspire, unsettle, and disrupt—or at least aspire to”). Unfortunately, there’s no conflict at all between Dee and Rye, which feels like a missed opportunity given the actor’s dramatic backstory and the constant presence of paparazzi. Instead, they are just happy and in love, which comes across as more cloying than romantic. Dee is also a little too perfect. Everyone is completely dazzled by her; Rye’s Hollywood friends all know about her work and, on meeting her, want her input on their projects. In one scene, a hip-hop artist asks Dee to comment on her music. Dee demurs, saying she doesn’t know anything about hip-hop. But then she listens to a song and immediately figures out how to fix it. She is suddenly an expert on trap music, which will strain readers’ credulity.
An intriguing but improbable romance.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781647422967
Page Count: 224
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.
A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way.
Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn’t been able to get her head together, and it’s affecting her performance. Plus, she’s trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction—until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it’s something neither of them can stop thinking about. It’s Lukas who suggests they have a fling—purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett’s friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas’ relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood’s latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms.
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641057
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
A satisfying crime novel with a side order of romance.
A TV producer and a detective try to stop a strange pattern of young women disappearing.
In “Auclair, Loooziana,” disillusioned detective John Bowie reluctantly meets in a bar with Beth Collins, producer for the true crime show Crisis Point. She needs to interview him about the disastrous case of the missing Crissy Mellin, but he refuses. The teenager disappeared three years ago on the night of a blood moon and hasn’t been found, but a suspect hanged himself in jail after signing a confession. Case closed, says John’s boss. But John is convinced that their prisoner could not have been guilty, and he’s deeply upset at his failure. “The Mellin case messed up your life,” Beth tells him. She persuades John that Crissy’s disappearance is the latest of a series that happen on the night of a blood moon, the colloquial term for a total lunar eclipse. “It’s going to happen again,” she predicts. And wouldn’t you know, another blood moon is coming in four days. Tick, tick, tick. Beth’s boss at Crisis Point insists on airing an update on the case, but Beth knows the show is going to get it wrong, and its reputation will be ruined. Meanwhile, there’s an electric sexual tension between Beth and John that the author toys with nicely—do they, or don’t they? The answer plays out in detail more than once. The characters are fun if easy to pigeonhole: the detective angry at his failure, the honest (and beautiful) outsider eager to do her job but susceptible to love, the hero’s corrupt (to say the least) boss, and the ogre who carries out said boss’s dirtiest deeds. Even John’s dog, Mutt, plays a small but vital role. When John found him, he’d been “a flea-bitten hide wrapped around a skeleton that whimpered.” Little plot devices are easy to spot, like the phone that rings at a crucial moment, or the handgun that John places in Beth’s hand for her protection. Does Chekhov’s guideline apply here? The romantic angle leavens the dark theme, and readers will have plenty of incentives to turn the pages.
A satisfying crime novel with a side order of romance.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781538742983
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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