Fin­ished Just One of the Guys by Kris­tan Hig­gins. This is one of her con­tem­po­rary romances.

In this one, jour­nal­ist Chastity O’Neill moves back to her home­town and takes a job with the local news­pa­per. Chastity also wants to find Mr. Right, get mar­ried, and have sev­eral babies. Too bad she’s still hung up on her ex, hunky fire­fighter Trevor Meade. Chastity’s fam­ily prac­ti­cally adopted Trevor years ago, and he’s like a son to her par­ents. But the two of them spent a steamy week­end together in col­lege — a week­end that Chastity can’t quite forget …

Hig­gins has a fun, breezy, first-person style that’s easy to read, and Chastity is a lik­able char­ac­ter for the most part. One of the things that I really enjoy about Hig­gins’ books is that she gives her hero­ines inter­est­ing hob­bies. In this one, Chastity likes to row, which was some­thing dif­fer­ent to read about. I also thought that the jour­nal­ism stuff was fairly well done, although Chastity is far hap­pier and more excited about her job than most real-life jour­nal­ists that I know. (Most of us are sar­cas­tic, jaded cynics.)

But I had some prob­lems with this book. Mainly, that Trevor wasn’t a big­ger part of the story. Chastity spends a lot of time think­ing about Trevor, but we never really see how he feels about her until the very end. I would have liked to have known if he was as hung up on their week­end together as she was — or at least got­ten some more hints about it as the story went along.

Now, I write first-person books myself, so I know that it’s hard to get the hero’s point of view, along with what he’s thinking/feeling, in the story. But I still wish that Hig­gins had found a way to do just a lit­tle more of it. (I had this same prob­lem with another one of her books, Catch of the Day.) It just made it hard for me to really believe in Chastity and Trevor’s hap­pily ever after in the end.

Some­thing else that both­ered me a bit was Chastity her­self. She comes from a large fam­ily, and she wants to get mar­ried and have kids like every­one else in her fam­ily does. I can under­stand that, but Chastity came off as a lit­tle obsessed about the whole thing — like her life wouldn’t be com­plete if she didn’t marry Mr. Right and have babies. That’s just not a char­ac­ter quirk that appeals to me as a reader.

On the other hand, I did like Chastity’s mom and how she decided that she wanted to travel in her golden years — instead of sit­ting at home wait­ing for her ex-husband to finally retire from firefighting. At some points in the book, I actu­ally found the suplot involv­ing Chastity’s par­ents and their divorce more inter­est­ing than Chastity and Trevor.

Over­all, though, this is a fun con­tem­po­rary romance with lots of fam­ily drama. So thumbs up.

Up next: Hard to Hold by Stephanie Tyler.

Books in my TBR pile: About 20.

I’m glad that it’s Fri­day. Come to think of it, I’m always glad when it’s Fri­day.

I’m hop­ing to fin­ish up my final pol­ish on Ele­men­tal Assas­sin #5 this week­end so I can send that off to my agent next week. If noth­ing else, I’d at least like to have read through the man­u­script and marked my changes on it. We’ll see how much I actu­ally get done on it.

Hope every­one has a great weekend!

Fin­ished Plea­sure of a Dark Prince by Kres­ley Cole. This is the lat­est book in her Immor­tals After Dark para­nor­mal romance series.

In this one, Lucia the Huntress is a Valkyrie who’s known for her skill with a bow — and the ago­niz­ing pain that she expe­ri­ences when­ever she misses a shot. She also hap­pens to be the mate of Gar­reth MacRieve, a Lykae prince (think were­wolf). Gar­reth relent­lessly pur­sues Lucia, who runs from him for a year before the two of them find them­selves on a rat­tle­trap boat headed deep into the Ama­zon. Gar­reth is happy that he’s finally caught up with Lucia and sets about seduc­ing her. Lucia finds her­self attracted to Gar­reth as well, but two big obsta­cles stand in the way of their hap­pi­ness – Lucia’s vow of chastity and her mis­sion to kill an evil god …

I like Cole’s Immor­tals After Dark series because it fea­tures magic, action, and mem­o­rable char­ac­ters all tied together in a fun, sexy way. Her books are just enter­tain­ing reads, and Plea­sure of a Dark Prince was no exception.

I liked Gar­reth a lot, espe­cially how he woos Lucia with every­thing from a but­ter­fly to a quiver that never runs out of arrows while they’re on board the boat (that quiver comes in real handy later on in the story, which I thought was a nice touch). I did get a lit­tle tired of Gar­reth think­ing that he knew what was best for Lucia, that she wasn’t capa­ble of han­dling dan­ger, and his being ready to kill every guy who merely looked at her. But then again, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the alpha male char­ac­ter. The heroes in the IAD series are all seri­ously alpha, but the women are strong enough to han­dle them, so it usu­ally evens out okay for me.

Lucia was also an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter. She was strong and capa­ble but also still had some very real fears and hangups. Cole is really good at achiev­ing that kind of bal­ance with her female characters.

Another thing that I liked is that Cole rewound time a lit­tle bit and showed some behind-the-scenes action with Gar­reth and Lucia that was only hinted at in other IAD books. I thought it was inter­est­ing to see these events again from two dif­fer­ent points of view. It’s a tricky sto­ry­telling device to pull off, though, and I did think that the action dragged a lit­tle bit at the begin­ning of the book, if only because I already knew how some things turned out from hav­ing read the pre­vi­ous books in the series.

This isn’t my favorite IAD book (I still like Bowen and Mari’s story the best), but it’s another solid addi­tion to the series, and I’m already look­ing for­ward to the next book, Demon from the Dark, which comes out later this year. Thumbs up.

A mild spoiler: There is a doozy of an epi­logue at the end of this book, which sets up what I’ve heard is going to be a tril­ogy of IAD books. I hope so!

Up next: Just One of the Guys by Kris­tan Higgins.

Books in my TBR pile: About 20.

What about you guys? Any­one read­ing any­thing good right now? Share in the comments.

So I’m send­ing out e-ARCs of Web of Lies and start­ing to book some guest blogs/giveaways. Today, I just wanted to take a moment to say thanks to all the book blog­gers out there.

I’m always sur­prised and hum­bled when folks want to read my books or when they ask me to do a guest post for their blog. It really is an honor to be asked to guest on someone’s site, and I always try to bring my A-game to any post that I write or inter­view that I do.

Most of the book blog­gers that I know don’t get paid for their sites or all the hard work and long hours that they put into them. They read and review books, as well as work day jobs, take care of their fam­i­lies, and a dozen other things — all at the same time. For them, book blog­ging is a labor of love, just like it is for me here on my own blog.

So I just wanted to say thanks to every­one who’s had me on their site, or linked to my posts, or men­tioned my cover art, or what­ever. I really do appre­ci­ate it, both as a writer and a reader. I can’t tell you the num­ber of great books that I’ve dis­cov­ered by surf­ing var­i­ous book blogs, and I hope some folks have thought the same about my books after read­ing about them somewhere.

Cheers to all the book lovers and blog­gers out there. Keep on keep­ing on, and let­ting the rest of know about all the great books out there just wait­ing to be discovered. ;-)

Gah! I did it again. Once again, I for­got to post the descrip­tion of the book along with the cover art — you know, what the book is actu­ally about. Sigh. Any­way, here’s the back cover copy for Venom to go along with the pre­lim­i­nary cover art.

Warn­ing: There are a few mild spoil­ers below for folks who haven’t read Spider’s Bite. You’ve been warned, so here goes:

It’s hard to be a badass assas­sin when a giant is beat­ing the crap out of you. Luck­ily, I never let pride get in the way of my work. My cur­rent mis­sion is per­sonal: anni­hi­late Mab Mon­roe, the Fire ele­men­tal who mur­dered my fam­ily. Which means pro­tect­ing my iden­tity, even if I have to con­ceal my pow­er­ful Stone and Ice magic when I need it most. To the pub­lic, I’m Gin Blanco, owner of Ashland’s best bar­be­cue joint. To my friends, I’m the Spi­der, retired assas­sin. I still do favors on the side. Like rid­ding a vam­pire friend of her over­sized stalker—Mab’s right-hand goon who almost got me dead with his mas­sive fists. At least irre­sistible Owen Grayson is on my side. The man knows too much about me, but I’ll take my chances. Then there’s Detec­tive Bria Coolidge, one of Ashland’s finest. Until recently, I thought my baby sis­ter was dead. She prob­a­bly thinks the same about me. Lit­tle does she know, I’m a cold-blooded killer … who is about to save her life.

Yep, that’s right. Gin’s long-lost baby sis­ter Bria finally shows up in Venom. Huz­zah! Much fam­ily drama ensues, along with the usual bouts of may­hem, mis­chief, and vio­lence.