Review: TAKEN WITH YOU

TAKEN WITH YOU by Lisa Ann Verge
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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Review: Shadow Music

Shadow Music by Helaine Mario
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

SHADOW MUSIC

By
Helaine Mario

SYONOPSIS
Late in the Cold War, a young woman escapes from Communist Hungary, vanishing into the night with a priceless painting and a baby girl, setting in motion a decades-old secret that will change lives for generations to come.
Many years later, classical pianist Maggie O'Shea is drawn to Cornwall in search of a long-lost Van Gogh and the truth behind her husband's death. A journal from World War II Paris holds many of the answers, but only two people know where the Van Gogh is hidden now—a courageous nun and a man presumed dead.
Set against the backdrop of the international music and art world, Maggie finds herself on a collision course with three dangerous Russians who threaten all she holds dear—including her life and the life of the man she has come to love.
Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 2 is at the heart of this story that strikes the chords of every human emotion. Past and present converge in this haunting tale of loss, courage, vengeance and love.

REVIEW
My first “Maggie” novel was The Lost Concerto. Helaine invited me to read the beautiful work several years ago and I dove into a world of music, art, and love wrapped in skillful intrigue that had me mesmerized and lost to the world outside the pages of the book. I cried because it ended. The second novel, Dark Rhapsody was no less compelling and I am in the midst of rereading it as I want to revisit several of the lines of intrigue and look closer at how the characters have developed and grown with the telling of their stories.
Shadow Music reminded me of why this series cherishes precious space on my Much Loved Shelf in my library. Not many books can reach in and strike the deep chords that allow the reader to identify on so many levels with the characters in a book. Helaine has accomplished this with me in this series.
Maybe it is because I am a pianist, but the music literally floats up off the pages of the book and around the room and my body physically aches with Maggie’s as she lifts her head from the keyboard. The same plays for the artistic descriptions and the art history background that she weaves into the story. Only someone who has lived and breathed in this world could fully understand the true depth of how well Helaine spins the picture so that we all can get a full sense of the breadth of emotion and physical commitment a creative person devotes to their craft.
Helaine’s characters are not flat or two dimensional. They full-bodied and complex. They are not always who you first perceive them as, and there is not a character in the book that can be easily skimmed over. Each one is complex and has a multi dimensioned place in the story.
Interwoven with all this is an intricate, twisted plot of evil vs. good that twists over generations and across continents and countries that leaves the reader breathless and their head spinning. Life is interconnected. Only a brilliant, creative mind could pull a consistent thread through such a tangled web and keep a focus on it all. Helaine did just that and takes us along for the wild ride and barely allows us to breathe.
I have read the classics, the old greats, the new. There are authors that write books. Those that write novels. Those that write stories. Then there are authors that make the pages sing, that make the reader a part of the story. They draw you in and immerse you in the world they have created out of letters and words. They drown you in the world they have created and don’t allow you, the reader, back out until the last words of “The End” come floating up off the page. This is Helaine Mario. This is Shadow Music. Discover it for yourself.

Helaine Mario

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Helaine Mario is the author of four novels of suspense. Firebird (Amazon 2012) is a stand-alone Cold War suspense novel. The three novels in the Maggie O'Shea Classical Music Mystery series are The Lost Concerto (Oceanview Publishing, July 2015), Dark Rhapsody (Oceanview Publishing, July 2018), and Shadow Music (Oceanview Publishing, September 2021).

New York City born and raised, Helaine is a Boston University graduate. She married in 1969 and moved to Connecticut to raise her two children, volunteer at Save the Children, and write for the local newspaper.

In 1985, Helaine’s life took an unpredictable turn when her husband’s career brought her family to Potomac, Maryland. For all eight years of the Clinton Presidency, she was a White House volunteer for Tipper and Al Gore, and continues to be a passionate advocate for public service and women & children’s issues.

Because Helaine believes strongly in “giving back,” she has worked on several non-profit boards and, in 1998, founded The SunDial Foundation, Inc., which benefited our most vulnerable women, children and families for 20 years. She also created Project PJs, offering new books, bears and pajamas to under-served children in the community. Now, the Helaine and Ronald Mario Fund continues to support some 40 charities. All royalties from book sales go to programs that support reading programs and the well-being of children and families.

Helaine and her husband, Ron, now spend their time in Arlington, Virginia—where she continues her advocacy work—and Cape May, New Jersey.

She is grateful to be a cancer survivor and is most proud of her two children and five beautiful grandchildren. Her son, Sean, is the pianist who inspired the classical music background in The Lost Concerto.

When it comes to writing, Helaine wants, more than anything, to tell a good story, create characters with depth, and paint pictures with words. To make people feel. She wants to be a storyteller forever.

AVAILABLE FOR PRESALE THROUGH AMAZON

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ALONE WITH YOU by Lisa Ann Verge

  

Alone With You

Lisa Ann Verge

 

SYNOPSIS

 Jenny was sure the cabin was hers, until she stepped out of the shower to surprise a brawny man in her bedroom.

The sexy-as-sin stranger leaned his six-foot frame against the doorjamb and stripped off her towel with his gaze. Then he asked what the hell she was doing in his cabin.

His cabin?  She had a key from the owner. He sank a hand into a pocket and pulled out a match. 

No way was she letting a man into her sanctuary. She wasn’t a people-person in the best of times.  How was she going to get any work done under the glow of that slow-fuse grin?

But what choice did she have?  It was only for two weeks.  

Hardly long enough for any man to seduce her...never mind melt her frozen heart. 

Alone with you is a sexy, stuck-together, enemies-to-lovers romance, the first book in the Cabin Fever Series.  It can be read as a stand-alone, with a guaranteed happily-ever-after.

REVIEW

Lisa Ann Verge is known for charming hunks of male flesh that ladies turn into melting puddles of passion when they get within range, no matter the defense system they have built around themselves.  Alone With You is no exception to this scenario. From the opening gambit, our strapping but wounded of spirit doctor (aka the charming male) sends the bombshell unsuspecting lady into a tizzy of visceral reactions as she first lays eyes on his smoldering form standing in the door of HER bedroom as she steps from the shower…  GREAT opening.  Not necessarily great way to meet a guy,  LOL, but Lisa had me hook-line-and-sinker for the rest of the book from that opening of chapter one.

Lisa is one that doesn’t settle for shallow romance novels. Her stories are filled with a depth of character to her protagonists.  She takes the time to drill them down so that you feel like you lived next door to them for years and have had traded postcards from the far corners of the earth over the years.  You feel their pain, you giggle at their foibles, and all but reach into the page to pull them back from their worst mistakes.  In short, Lisa allows her characters to be so human, you can feel their breath fluttering the pages of the book and steaming your glasses as your nose inches closer and closer to the action.

Add to this her scientific knowledge, there is accuracy and living convincing detail in her storylines that carry the story forward with interesting details that keeps this person on the edge of her seat.  I can see, feel, and smell the wilderness scenes that a good portion of this book takes place in.  Only someone who has spent a significant time out there and knows and understands the fauna and flora and the science of it could weave it into the storyline like a second skin.

This book has been worth the wait to get back into reading a story by Lisa Ann Verge.  I look forward to the next in her series.  She is getting better with time and life, if that is possible.

Available on:

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STAIRCASE TO THE MOON - Elizabeth Haran

STAIRCASE TO THE MOON

By

Elizabeth Haran

SYNOPSIS:

Perth, Western Australia, 1913:

When her conservative family tries to force Emily into an arranged marriage with a much older, wealthy man, she decides to take destiny into her own hands and escape her strict father and overbearing brothers. She embarks on a ship to North-Western Australia to take up employment as a private seamstress for a large and rich farming family, who welcome her with open arms. Surrounded by the breathtakingly beautiful and remote landscapes of the Kimberly region, Emily starts to believe that happiness and love really are possible in her new life. But storm clouds are gathering, and as the men of Kimberley march off to war in Europe, Emily must step up to prove herself against all the odds.

REVIEW:

The Staircase to the Moon was a wonderful period piece not just about Australian history, but about a beautiful telling of the struggle of young women at the end of the Victorian age and through WWI. This was a time when their role was being re-defined and independence and self-reliance were being forced on many as men went off to fight "The Great War to end all Wars". What it showed me was that the struggles and stories that I have been well aware of about women in the U.S. are far more international. That the event of women coming forward and seeking autonomy was generational, not national. What an exciting discovery.
Elizabeth Haran told a compelling story of one young lady and her struggle for this self-autonomy but also told the stories of a family of ladies and the changes that they went through during this same period that helped to bring on their own independent spirits and growth. She gave depth to her characters that allowed the reader to feel the breath of life flying across the pages as the struggled to survive the battles of living in the "outback" while the men were gone to parts unknown to protect their way of life. I have no doubt that I could walk down the roads and through the halls that Ms. Haran built and recognize them if I came across the crossroads and buildings today. She was able to communicate the emotions and realities of living with such clarity, that the readers felt deep empathy with the characters, laughing and crying as triumphs and tragedies passed through their daily lives. There was no putting down this book. The pages seemed to turn themselves as I walked side-by-side with the characters through sand and mud, seeking a better life, striving to find fulfillment and love - hoping that what they knew their heart longed and desired for would be there for them, in the end. What a journey, what a read. It was as wild as the land from which it grew.

I give this book, Staircase to the Moon, a FIVE STAR review.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, when it was known as Southern Rhodesia. It was a wonderful time to be living there, and I have many happy childhood memories. Some of the earliest include spending hours in my tyre swing in a tree, watching chameleon’s change colour as they moved through the branches, and sitting in the chook house (we kept a couple of hundred at one time) with a big chicken on my knee. Thankfully there are a couple of incidents I was too young to remember, like when I was playing with a poisonous snake that I thought was a favourite and harmless ‘giant millipede type creature’ called a chunkalooloo, and mum and my brother beat it to death with a broom while I screamed, and another when I was grabbed by a neighbor’s monkey, understandably irate at having to live it’s life on a chain.
Dad was building houses in Bulawayo at a time when the building industry was booming, and ‘colonial’ life was good. I began school at 8 a.m. and finished at midday. After lunch, at the hottest time of day, we all had an afternoon siesta. (very civilized) By the sixties, dad thought the ‘climate’ was becoming unsafe, so we moved to England, my mother’s birthplace. After surviving the coldest winter on record (barely) in 1963, we migrated to Australia.
I would like to be able to say I wanted to be a writer from the time I was four, but alas that is not the case. I’m one of those people who firmly believe everyone has a talent, but it took me a long time to find mine. I now refer to myself as a “late bloomer”. I just thank God I did bloom! It would be awful to go through life and not ever discover your God given talent. Still one question I am most asked is where did my writing talent come from. My brother is an author and retired journalist, but up until a recent trip to Ireland, my father’s birthplace, I was at a loss to answer this question with any conviction. But while in Sligo, I discovered the city was full of writers and artists. So although dad’s family were farmers, perhaps back there somewhere, hidden in the family tree, there are some writers. They may never have been published, but they might have sat huddled around a turf fire after tending their animals all day, and written stories, or just their thoughts and feelings.
Apparently dad always complained to mum that I was a daydreamer. He was right; I was always imagining scenarios between people and working out the dialogue in my head. I still do it, but now I put those scenes down and paper, and get paid for it. Dad passed away many years ago, but I like to think he’s smiling down on me and thinking all that daydreaming is finally paying off.

I returned to Zimbabwe in 1986 with my brother, sister and mother. It was wonderful to see where my sister and I were born, and the house that dad built and we lived in when I was just a baby, which still looked good. Unfortunately, Bulawayo had made no progress. If anything it had gone backwards, with many shortages, e.g. food, petrol and the general standard of living was very low. With the present political climate, tourism has suffered also. I don’t know what will happen to Zimbabwe, because as it is now, it has a very dismal future, which is a pity because it’s a very beautiful country.
To learn more about Elizabeth Haran and here many novels, visit http://elizabethharan.com/ .  

Review: The Engagement Plot

The Engagement Plot by Krista Phillips
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ready for a weekend read that will keep you in stitches? This comedic rendition of the story after the story of the reality show Price of Love.
The set up of the series hero choosing the "Christian" contestant for his wife, even though she made her stance public and strong to the point of earning the nommer Holy Hanna. What William did in an interview immediately following the show, set the tone and setting for this adorable tale of the foilables of two people in love who don't communicate, and deal with fight or flight all the way to the alter.
This book was a great read and left me laughing and shaking my head time and again.
This book was provided to me for assessment and review through Net Galley.
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