Jan 2012 Book Cover Award WINNER! Alternative-Read.com: Reviews by Elizabeth Coldwell
Showing posts with label Reviews by Elizabeth Coldwell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reviews by Elizabeth Coldwell. Show all posts

REVIEW | The Cougar Book | Edited by Jolie du Pré | Logical-Lust

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Reviewed by Liz Coldwell
Alternative-Read.com
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Link to book on Amazon UK and USA
 
Lusty cougars are on the prowl, in this intriguing anthology from Logical-Lust. The archetype of the older woman on the hunt for young male flesh has come to prominence in recent years, thanks to fictional characters such as Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones in Sex and the City, and Courteney Cox’s Jules in Cougar Town, and real-life examples including Madonna and Demi Moore. As Valerie Gibson, author of Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men, says in her introduction to this book, ‘women who embrace “cougardom” openly without fear or reservation, are ... not only acknowledging their continuing sensuality and sexuality, but embracing it wholeheartedly’. Society has tended to write off women in their forties and fifties as no longer having anything to offer as a potential bed partner, and the heroines in these 23 stories are determined to prove that’s far from the case.

In Jeremy EdwardsBoston. Breasts. Bohemian. the owner of a small, arty publishing house takes her pick of the young men her company employs as editorial assistants, bringing a new meaning to ‘entry-level position’. In Heidi Champa’s Spring Training, a woman with a dull job on a university campus finds her days being brightened by the sight of Derek, the cutest member of the baseball team, who she watches training from her office window. In Donna George Storey’s Comfort Food, a recent divorcée develops a taste not only for the butterscotch pudding on the menu of the hotel where she’s taking a much-needed holiday, but also the hot chef whose recipe it is. And in Brenna LyonsMine For The Night, a middle-aged scientist in a future where society has been decimated by plague has the enviable task of initiating genetically engineered young men in the art of sex before they are allowed out of the laboratory to join the female-heavy remnants of the world’s population.

If The Cougar Book has a fault, it’s that a few too many of the stories feature rich bitch divorcées with flawless bodies and insatiable appetites, characters whose adventures offer a deal of wish fulfilment, but who all tend to begin to merge into one after a while. More interesting are the stories where the cougar might not be so aware of her own potential as a seductress, like Adriana Kraft’s A Taste of Ginger, where the eponymous heroine hooks up with a young stud on her first visit to a swinging club, much to her delighted disbelief, or Craig J. Sorensen’s Adrian’s Lover, where the older woman is a blues guitarist whose biggest successes are long behind her, but who can still inspire awe and lust in the young journalist charged with the task of interviewing her.

If you’re looking for stories in which older women enjoy sex on their own terms, and teach the young men they seduce plenty about love and life along the way, you’ll find much to enjoy in this collection. Watch out – these cougars have claws!


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Jan 2012 Book Cover Award WINNER!

REVIEW: Bedroom Eyes | Desiree Holt | Ellora's Cave

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Bedroom Eyes (Skin Deep, Book One)Bedroom Eyes by Desiree Holt
Length: 83 pages
Reviewer: Elizabeth Coldwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Bridget is an aspiring writer whose dreams of literary success and finding the man of her dreams are blighted by a medical condition that has left her with deformed eyelids. Though her friends reassure her it’s really not a problem, she hides away behind dark glasses and remembers every negative comment that’s been made about her appearance. Corrective surgery is available, but it costs more than she can afford. She lusts after her next-door neighbour, Clay, a Navy SEAL who always has a woman on his arm, but she doesn’t have the courage to let him see her without her glasses. 

An invitation to a masked ball enables Bridget to share a night of unbelievable sex with Clay, and when she discovers she fits the criteria of a trust that offers to pay for cosmetic surgery in suitable cases, she knows she has the chance to change her life for ever. But how will Clay react when he learns the true identity of his masked lover, and will there be an unexpected price for Bridget to pay as a result of finally getting bedroom eyes?

This is the first book in the Skin Deep series, tales which revolve around one of the characters’ desire to have plastic surgery, and Desiree Holt picks up the brief and runs with it. She generates plenty of heat in the relationship between Bridget and Clay. Bridget might be the typical sparky but vulnerable heroine and Clay the hard alpha male with a soft centre, but they’re believable characters for all that. There’s plenty of sex packed into the book’s relatively short length, including a particularly sizzling scene where the lights are out and Clay and Bridget have to discover each other’s bodies in the dark.

Of course, the more intriguing storyline would have been one where Bridget doesn’t have the surgery and Clay falls in love with her anyway, but perhaps that’s going to be addressed in another book in the series. As it is, Bedroom Eyes is a sweet, nicely paced story that can’t fail to satisfy Desiree Holt’s many fans.

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REVIEW: Sex Symbol | Tracy H. Kitts | Ellora's Cave | Reviewed by Elizabeth Coldwell

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Author: Tracy H. Kitts
Publisher: Ellora’s Cave
ISBN: 978-1-41992-992-2
Genre: Paranormal, horror, erotica, shifters
Format: ebook
Length: 202 pages
Reviewer: Elizabeth Coldwell | Blog
Life in the small town of Peace, Mississipi is pretty ordinary as far as Lucy Harper’s concerned. She’s trying to manage the decorating business she co-owns with her best friend, Justina, while getting over her break-up with her long-term boyfriend, James. So when a hunky guy moves in next door and starts digging in his garden, shirtless, it’s a more than welcome distraction – until Lucy learns that her new neighbour, Erasmus Creed, used to be a bounty hunter, chasing down werewolves. If that’s not bizarre enough, he had to retire from the profession when he was bitten and turned. Still recovering from the news that the most gorgeous man she’s ever met is actually a werewolf, Lucy finds more of the creatures turning up. It seems she’s suddenly irresistible to the beasts, and drastic action is going to have to be taken if she’s to escape their clutches so she can surrender herself to Erasmus, the wolf of her dreams…

I wanted to like this novel a lot more than I actually did. The central premise – that Lucy’s new tattoo is actually a symbol designed to make her a potential mate for an alpha werewolf – is smart and original, and Tracy Kitts’ chatty, conversational style draws you in, helping you to believe in Lucy’s dilemma even as events unfolding around her become ever more monstrous. There are also a couple of scorching hot sex scenes, most notably one involving sex on a car in the pouring rain. The problem is, those sex scenes only make up a tiny percentage of the book’s two hundred plus pages. Sex Symbol comes across as a horror novel spiced up with some erotic content, rather than a full-on erotic romance – which is fine if that’s what you’re looking for, but personally I prefer a little more sausage with my sizzle. And when Lucy’s first coupling in the book – the aforementioned car scene – is fuelled by having had her drink spiked by a friend, it raises issues of dubious consent that some people won’t be comfortable with. But if you like Punk’d-style humour and a hefty dollop of gore with your romance, Sex Symbol should appeal to you – and it’ll make you think twice about booking that appointment at the tattooist’s…
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REVIEW: Fairie Bound | Jenna Castille | Ellora's Cave | Reviewed by Elizabeth Coldwell

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Faerie Bound
Author: Jenna Castille
Publisher: Ellora’s Cave
ISBN: 978-1-41993-084-3
Genre: Paranormal, erotica, m/m, BDSM
Format: ebook
Length: 120 pages
Reviewer: Elizabeth Coldwell
Alternative-Read.com

Garrick is the Alpha of the Las Vegas Lupin Pack, the most powerful group of wolf shifters to survive the Paranormal Wars. It’s a role that doesn’t sit easily with his overwhelming need to be submissive to a strong, experienced master, as he knows there are plenty in the pack willing to challenge his position as leader if they suspect a weakness in him. In desperation, he turns to the Divine Intervention matchmaking agency, set up to pair paranormals with their perfect lover. But the ideal man for Garrick isn’t anything like he’s expecting. Faolan is deliciously dominant, all right, with enough piercings and tattoos to make him stand out from the crowd, but he’s a fairie – the sworn enemy of the shifters, even if he has been in exile since his refusal to fight in the war. How will the two men reconcile their inherent differences once it becomes clear Faolan is Garrick’s intended mate, and how will the rest of the wolf pack when this unlikely coupling comes out in the open?

Faerie Bound is the second in the Matched By Magic series, which revolves around various couples brought together by Divine Intervention. It can be read on its own, though it would be nice to have more background information on the Paranormal Wars woven in the storyline, to help provide some context for newcomers.

At first, it seems as though Jenna Castille may be trying to bring together too many genres in one novel. Shifters and fairies and m/m and hot BDSM interaction? There’s also the potential for Garrick to become just another clichéd alpha male with hidden submissive tendencies who needs to be brought down and controlled. But the relationship between Garrick and Faolan is sympathetically portrayed, as Garrick struggles to balance his duties to his pack and his mate, while Faolan is capricious but good-hearted, in contrast to his evil mother, the Fairie Queen, and her wicked court. Lovers of slave training and collaring scenarios will find much to enjoy here, as Garrick is taught to tame his inner wolf and obey Faolan’s every command, and Ms Castille conjures up a genuine heat between master and sub. There’s more than enough potential to weave these two characters into a sequel, or build a spin-off story around Faolan’s best friend, Aindreas, who’s that rare character in BDSM fiction, a switch – unless Divine Intervention have other customers to match first, of course…

Liz Coldwell's Blog
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REVIEW: Rein Me In | LARISSA LYONS & ALYSSA BROOKS | Ellora's Cave

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Authors: Larissa Lyons and Alyssa Brooks
Publisher: Ellora’s Cave 
ISBN: 978-1-41992-8-802 
Genre: Contemporary, erotica, cowboy, BDSM 
Format: ebook
Length: 299 pages
Alternative-Read.com

After a series of disastrous experiences with men, Susannah Miller has sworn off them completely – except for two weeks a year, when she takes a vacation designed to indulge her passion for cowboys. At the Lusty Lady, a place that brings a whole new meaning to dude ranch, she becomes sinful Suzy, hiring dominant men to punish and pleasure her in the nicest ways.

Visiting the Bottoms Up bar, Suzy makes the mistake of hooking up with a man who won’t take no for an answer. She’s rescued from danger by a tall, handsome cowboy with the power to make all her submissive fantasies a delicious reality. By a strange twist of fate, he’s Jonah McKenzie, whose family owns Bottoms Up and who she very briefly loved and lost during her college days.

Picking up the pieces of that original relationship, destroyed in tragic circumstances, Jonah and Suzy act on their growing passion for each other. Jonah is enthralled by sexy Suzy, who relishes the feel of his belt on her backside, but he also loves soft Susannah. But if he’s ever to truly rein in his reckless beauty, Jonah must overcome both his interfering grandmother, who’s determined to disinherit any of her grandsons who don’t marry and produce a family, and the barriers thrown up by an emotionally scarred Suzy.

Rein Me In is the second in Larissa Lyons and Alyssa Brooks’ Bottoms Up series, but it runs parallel to events in the first volume, Restrain Me, so you don’t need to have read that to make sense of this. If, like this reviewer, you don’t quite understand the appeal of cowboys, you won’t learn much from the novel apart from it involving some combination of muscles and chivalry, but if you already lust over men in stetsons, there’ll be much here to enjoy. Lyons and Brooks write seamlessly as a team, creating a believable romance between a solid, dependable hero (albeit one wracked with fits of needless jealousy) and a closed-up heroine who needs to be taught how to love and trust. The scenes where Suzy submits to Jonah generate real heat, and will appeal to those who like to see BDSM themes explored outside a traditional master/slave setting. Unfortunately, some of that heat is diluted by the antics of the supporting cast, intended to provide comic relief which isn’t always necessary. The worst offender is God-fearing matriarch Nana, who the McKenzies all appear to love deeply despite her being the worst kind of fundamentalist Christian stereotype, believing extra-marital sex to be a sin.

Throughout the course of Rein Me In, various plot lines featuring McKenzie siblings are carefully developed for future books, so expect the Bottoms Up series to ride the range for quite a while to come.

۞۞GIVEAWAYS۞۞ --
A giveaway with Carol Gambill, Closes 12th June
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