Review: Divorced, Desperate and Dating, by Christie Craig

Divorced, Desperate, and Dating
Divorced, Desperate, and Dating
Christie Craig
Get it from Amazon.com >>

Just as people with healthcare jobs probably like to read about characters who work in their profession, I like to read novels and watch movies with writers as main characters. It makes sense then, that when I read about Christie Craig’s fun, flirty novel Divorced, Desperate and Dating over on KindleIQ.com, where it was being offered for FREE, I had to have it. After all the protagonist of this novel, Sue Finley, is a mystery writer.

Despite the fact that I don’t read traditional romance novels all that often, I found myself completely engaged by this book. Maybe it was the element of mystery, or maybe it was the fact that the author made a point of having her characters bring up birth control, or maybe it’s just that Ms. Craig is that talented, but I found the story – Sue is being stalked by someone using incidents from her as-yet-unpublished book, and developing feelings for a cop who happens to also be a friend of a friend, as well.

While I haven’t read any of Craig’s other work, this one feels like a sequel, and, once I have a slightly smaller to-be-read stack, I’ll most likely snag the others.

Until then? If you want fun, escapist reading that is still smart and sexy, I recommend this book.

Goes well with strawberries dipped in chocolate.

Second Attempt: Touchstone, by Laurie R. King

Touchstone
Touchstone
Laurie R. King
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I’m struggling with the reading of Touchstone, by Laurie R. King, and I’m not certain why, because I love her writing. I mean, the woman can make asset based lenders seem like interesting fodders for novels, and her contemporary detective series set in San Francisco is as much a favorite of mine as her wonderful Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell series.

But this is my second attempt at reading Touchstone and while the premise is right up my alley, I just can’t get into the book. If this were an author whose work was unfamiliar to me, I’d discard the novel, but since it’s someone whose writing I always enjoy, I feel like the fault is mine, like I’m missing something important that is preventing me from getting lost in the story.

In any case, here’s the Publishers Weekly description of the novel (via Amazon.com):

Set shortly before Britain’s disastrous General Strike of 1926, this stand-alone thriller from bestseller King (Keeping Watch) offers impeccable scholarship and the author’s usual intelligent prose, but a surfeit of period detail and some weighty themes—the gulf between rich and poor, the insidious nature of both terrorism and the efforts to curb it—overpower the thin plot and stock characters. When Harris Stuyvesant, an investigator for the U.S. Justice Department, arrives in London to look for the mastermind behind a series of terrorist bombings on American soil, he tells Aldous Carstairs, a sinister government official, that his prime suspect is Labour Party leader Richard Bunsen. Carstairs suggests Stuyvesant should talk to Bennett Grey, whose brush with death during WWI has heightened his sense of perception to the point that he’s a kind of human lie detector (he’s the touchstone of the title), and to Lady Laura Hurleigh, Bunsen’s lover and a passionate advocate of his brand of socialism. The threat of violence at a secret summit meeting held at the Hurleigh family’s country house about preventing the strike provides some mild suspense.

Booking Through Thursday: Current

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On Thursday, September 23rd, Booking through Thursday asked:

What are you reading right now? What made you choose it? Are you enjoying it? Would you recommend it? (And, by all means, discuss everything, if you’re reading more than one thing!)

I have a stack of books I have to review that is growing exponentially this week, but I’m reading three of them at once. I’m almost done with When Life Throws You Lemons, Make Cranberry Juice, by Shari Bookstaff, midway through The Wedding Gift, by Kathleen McKenna (I’m really enjoying it, but I’m savoring it because I love the tone she uses.), and I’m about three chapters into Key Lime Pie, by Josi Kilpack (and with a title like that it should have come with an actual key lime pie.)

I have more to review after that, but once I get a break, I’m planning to rediscover Dick Francis, because even though his mysteries involve violence, I’m in the mood for slightly befuddled Englishmen who smell of leather and horse tack and drink tea and stout between races, and fumble their love affairs, and, oh yes, solve crime. I tend to read a lot more mysteries in autumn. It might be the weather, or it might just be that’s what’s available.

And speaking of mysteries, I have Sara Paretsky’s latest V.I. Warshawski novel on the Kindle, and I’m trying hard to resist the urge to start THAT because I have to, Have To, HAVE TO, finish the review stack, first.