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Today I am on the tour for Owen by VH Nicolson, thank you to Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources for organising it and inviting me to take part and thank you to the author and the publisher for my copy.

Pages: 378

Synopsis: A runaway groom strangers to lovers unforgettable steamy romance from VH Nicolson. Perfect for fans of Ana Huang, Catharina Maura and Meghan Quinn
Don’t play the game, change it…

I was born into privilege. I had it all; the house, the car, more money than I knew what to do with. But it came at a price. Duty. An arranged marriage for the sake of the family empire to a woman who couldn’t bear to look at me. As I stood at the altar, the weight of that burden became too much. So, I did the only thing I could. I ran.

To another country and unintentionally straight into the arms of another woman. Jade is strong, independent, and a single mom. And brick by broken brick she dismantles the wall I’ve built up around my heart. But where once I had everything, now I have nothing. No home, no job and no idea what the future holds. All I do know is, Jade makes me feel more alive than I’ve ever felt before.

But there is always the risk my past could catch up with me. Because the weight of my family’s expectation is likely to cause me to crash land and send my world up in flames. Can I save myself and Jade before that happens?

My Thoughts: oh my heart, I think there will always be a place for Owen in mine!

Now this book 3 in the Billionaire Boys series and although it will read as a standalone I highly recommend you start from book one to truly appreciate the character growth in Owen because I think it’s one of the biggest turnarounds I’ve read in a long time & I was here for it!

Owen ran away from his fiancé on his wedding day, it was an arranged marriage, neither of them wanted it and neither of them were happy… however he kneel it would have disastrous consequences with his parents so he fled to his cousin in Cyprus.. where he meets Jade & believe me when I tell him she is a force to be reckoned with and isn’t afraid to give him a run for his money and ask for exactly what she wants 🥵

Seeing Owen go from an arsehole in previous books to a total golden retriever with Jade and Poppy to then giving total touch her and die vibes at one point had me just wanting more and more from the pair of them.

This book is hot & steamy but also has a lot of heart and vulnerability too, I’m almost sad to let the characters go.

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Pages: 478

Synopsis: 𝗜 𝗽𝗿𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮 𝗺𝗶𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗺𝘆 𝗱𝗮𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁𝗲𝗿, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗚𝗼𝗱 𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗺𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗹 𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲-𝗽𝗶𝗲𝗰𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗶𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱. 𝗛𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗲? 𝗠𝘆 𝗯𝗼𝗱𝘆, 𝗺𝘆 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗹, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝗺𝘆 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘁.

My little girl has a life-threatening heart condition, and I’d like to think I’d do anything to save her.

Anything at all.

But it’s not until the most lucrative, shameful opportunity falls into my lap that I learn just how far I’ll go to protect her.

The opportunity? A “full-service” executive assistant role through the discreet agency Seraph, putting my body and my soul at the mercy of a ruthless billionaire who has a reputation for eating women like me for breakfast:

Brendan Sullivan.

He’s disarmingly handsome, disgustingly wealthy, and disturbingly depraved. The things he has me do are beyond sinful, and I’m way out of my depth.

He can never know that I’m just a desperate, duplicitous single mother and not the professional sexpot he thinks he’s hired.

He can never know just how terrified I am every time he and his debauched friends lay their hands on me.

And he can definitely never know that, the more he corrupts me, the more he affects me.

I’m falling hard. Against all odds, this role seems less like a means to an end and more like a glimpse of the Happy Ever After I know he and I can never have.

My Thoughts: I’m not sure how she does it but with every book Elodie writes she makes me fall in love with the characters just a little bit more than the last.

Brendan and Marlowe’s story was everything I wanted and more.

I found this book to be less about the spice, which is a strange thing to say given the premise of the series – don’t worry, it’s still there and it’s perfect as always!

But I found this one was more character focussed & that really helped me become invested in the story.

Marlowe is a single mum to Tabs, an 8 year old girl with a heart condition, she’s doing everything she can to stay afloat but life is just hard, made worse when she loses her job after yet another unavoidable hospital visit!

She needs money & fast, her daughter can’t wait for the NHS to be able to fit Tabs in, but the procedure in America is an eye watering amount of money! This is when she decided to follow in her best friend Athena’s footsteps and become a full service EA for the disgustingly rich Brendan Sullivan!

Both characters are equally flawed and I really enjoyed watching them both not only come to terms with that but also slowly allow the other in to their world & actually deal with it together. Although I’ll be honest their communication skills left a lot to be desired at the start, starting a relationship (even a working one) based on a lie is never a good idea we all know the truth comes out eventually and normally with disastrous consequences!

That however is where this book differs, the truth coming out was actually the making of them 😍

I honestly could waffle on forever about these two, so many cute moments that I want to share but my reviews have always been spoiler free!

Just know that I laughed, I full on sobbed, I swooned.

This book is literally everything & I think they may just stay my favourite Elodie Hart couple forever.

If only I could go back in time and experience the whole thing for the first time again *sighs*

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Today I am on the tour for Happy Is The One by Katie Allen, thank you to Anne at Random Things Tours for organising it and inviting me to take part & thank you to the author and the publisher for my copy.

Pages: 385

Synopsis: What if halfway through your life was just the beginning?

Robin Edmund Blake is halfway through his life.

Born in 1986, when Halley’s Comet crossed the sky, he is destined to go out with it, when it returns in 2061. Until that day, he can’t die. He has proof.

With his future mapped out in minute detail, a lucrative but increasingly dull job in the City of London, and Gemma to share his life with, Robin has a plan to be remembered forever.

But when Robin’s sick father has one accident too many, the plan starts to unravel. Robin must return home to the tiny seaside town of Eastgate, learn to care for the man who never really cared for him, and face the childhood ghosts he fled decades ago.

Desperate to get his life back on schedule, he connects with fellow outsider Astrid. Brutally direct, sharp-witted and a professor at a nearby university, she’s unlike anyone he’s ever met. But Astrid is hiding something and someone from Robin.

And he’s hiding even more from her…

My Thoughts: what an incredible book this was, thought provoking and incredibly emotional, I laughed, I cried I shook my head in disbelief.

Robin thought he had is whole life planned out until the last minute, but one thing changes and it all unravels, instead of his high end job in London with the woman he loves, he ends up moving in with his I’ll father, losing his job and Gemma and essentially starting over.

Watching him essentially starting over whilst also confronting parts of his past was strangely addictive, it felt like we were prying but also like we were meant to be there?

I love it when’s book just blows your expectations out of the water & this one definitely did that for me.

Settle in, make sure you have drinks and snacks ready because this is one because you’re not going to want to put down.

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Today I am on the tour for Cordial Convictions by Kateri Stanley, thank you to Zoé at Zooloos Book Tours for organising it and inviting me to take part and thank you to the author and the publisher for my copy.

Pages: 314

Synopsis: The truth cannot be hidden.

Greg Weaving took a gun to his workplace and killed several of his colleagues, before turning the weapon on himself.

A year on, plagued by guilt and humiliation, Marcus Weaving has been nursing a serious case of amnesia at The Barbary hospital. His son’s crimes caused a ripple effect in the local community and the media pointed fingers in his direction. As a former mental health professional, how could he not know that his own flesh and blood was planning on committing mass murder?

Determined to recover from his public scars and resume civilian life, Marcus is notably distracted by another patient at The Barbary. Lily is a traumatised young veteran suffering from depression and severe PTSD. She is just as intriguing as her beauty is unsettling for him.

Marcus observes questionable things happening at the hospital. Being a man of principle, he runs to the most logical possibilities, but even they are failing to alleviate his worries. Lily seems to be a conduit for these bizarre events and they are pulling at a familiar string in his spirit.

What should he do? What does this all mean?

My Thoughts: this book took some getting into, partly because it follows on from the last book & it had been so long since I read it, but then it all started falling back into place!

This is such a fun read, it has fantastical elements like demon who spend a lot of their time trying to influence the humans and get a reaction out of them.

Then on the other hand we have Lily and Marcus in the Barbary hospital recovering from the events in the last book.

I love Lily and Marcus as characters, they had a lot of depth and a lot of honesty when interacting with each other! – I loved the mental health rep in this book too.

Once I’d got to the point where I understood what was happening I was that invested that I finished the book in practically one sitting.

I really enjoyed the multiple POV’s in this story, it meant I was never really left ‘wondering’

I can’t wait for the next book in the series (assuming there will be one)

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Today I am on the tour for Room 21 by Jessica Huntley and I have a review for you, thank you to Zoé at Zooloos Book Tours for organising it and thank you to the author and the publisher for my copy.

Pages: 282

Synopsis: They say blood is thicker than water. I say blood is just harder to wash off your hands.

My name’s Kimberley. I’m twenty-five. I have epilepsy, a seizure alert dog named Muffin, and a job I love as a senior housekeeper in one of London’s top hotels. I’m used to being invisible. Overlooked. Safe.

But that was before Jennifer Clifton checked in. She’s rich, powerful, terrifyingly calm — and she asks for me by name.

She offers me my dream job, working in her exclusive hotel in the Scottish Highlands. It’s more money than I ever imagined.

There’s just one catch: Don’t open the door to Room 21.

How hard can that be?

But something is wrong in this hotel. The guests give me the creeps. The staff whisper behind closed doors. And that room — the one I promised not to enter — calls to me.

I took this job for a better life. Now I’m trapped in a nightmare.

Warning: This book contains dark and disturbing themes.

My Thoughts: Jessica is just an incredible author, most of her thrillers you know the premise and you have a rough idea where the story is going.. with Room 21 all of that logic goes out of the window!

The pacing of the story is weird out starts off slow which really builds the suspense but when the twists hit boy do they pack a punch and just keep coming.

You’re almost left feeling like you’re in limbo.. it’s a psychological thriller so you know damn well that the story isn’t going to be straight forward but you also have no idea who the bad guy is, what’s actually happening or why there are so many bloody secrets.. it all just comes out of left field but at the same time it all makes sense 🤯🤯

So much depth and so may levels I think I had to pick my jaw up several times along the way 🤣

Yes I’m being vague, but that’s because I’m not really sure how to articulate my thoughts, just honestly go pick this up!

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Today I am on the tour for The Last Wife by Matt McGregor, thank you to Zoé at Zooloos Book Tours for organising it and inviting me to take part and thank you to the author and the publisher for my copy.

Pages: 283

Synopsis: The perfect husband. The perfect house. The perfect lie.

When waitress Olivia meets charming, wealthy Lachlan Gibson, it seems too good to be true. A fairytale wedding. A magnificent house in the beautiful town of Rosford. Freedom to pursue her passion for painting.

Everything she ever wanted.

But beneath the surface, something isn’t right. Lachlan has some strange rules for his new wife. There are unsettling accidents which don’t seem random. And disquieting whispers about what happened to Lachlan’s previous wife, now deceased.

Olivia begins to suspect that her dream man may have a sinister agenda, that her perfect new life might actually be a carefully designed cage.

But it’s so much worse than that. As Olivia digs deeper into her husband’s past and discovers the terrible secret he has been hiding, she finally understands she may lose everything – her freedom, her sanity, even her life.

My Thoughts: I have not stopped thinking about this book and I finished it over 24 hours ago!

This is the first book in a long time that creeped me out so much that I had to space it out, I couldn’t read it all in one go because it felt so real and I was genuinely worried it would give me nightmares!

I was so invested in the book though I couldn’t wait to pick it back up, I adored Olivia right from the start I was rooting for her and just wished I could climb into the book and pull her out of the situation she found herself in!

Lachlan had my back up from the beginning.. he was the epitome of “if something seems too good to be true it probably is” but I can’t lie his charm and charisma probably would have won me over too!

As we get snippets of what happened to “the last wife” my heart was honestly in my throat, it made me sad & angry, I promise I knew it was fiction but this just hit me right in the feels.

I cannot recommend this enough, definitely one of my favourite books so far this year!

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Today I am on the tour for Call Forth The Moonlight by Z.M. Celestaire, thank you to Zoé at Zooloos Book Tours for organising it and inviting me to take part and thank you to the author and the publisher for my copy.

Pages: 401

Synopsis: Deubrise is a land blessed by the breath of the slumbering gods. Magíq lives within nature, powerful and beautiful. Few else can harness it besides the gryphons that reside in the mountains near Nico De Falco’s home, and the rare magíqon like Nico’s little sister. But magíqon are shunned and feared by modern society.

To protect himself from such treatment, Dr. Ackerleigh Sebring keeps his magíq a secret. Yet his “radical” teachings of magíqal history gets him fired from Ravensbourne University. Desperate, he finds a gamekeeper job caring for an imprisoned gryphon. Finally, he can be his whole self.

That is, until Nico follows a misguided impulse and frees the gryphon, injuring Ackerleigh accidentally.

Their fates-and feelings-become entangled in their determination to protect the sacred magíq of the gryphon. Ackerleigh and Nico will stop at nothing for the sake of liberation.

My Thoughts: this was another one of those books that I went into not really knowing what to expect.. l prefer to go into my fantasy books blind, I often find that otherwise I feel like the book is ruined, I don’t know why!

I thoroughly enjoyed it, I found myself feeling really sorry for Ackerleigh quite early on, it felt like he was being unfairly attacked & I just wanted to give him a big cuddle! Having to uproot his life and his dreams all because some bloke got rejected!

Little did I know at the time that that would be the making of him, he’d find new friends one being a gryphon who will mean more to him than he’ll ever expect & possibly even fall in love too?

Told in 2 perspectives we have Ackerleigh and Nico which is always my favourite kind of format as you get a more rounded look at things, I really appreciated the way the story was written, it was almost like each chapter was a lesson.

So many emotions whilst reading because it almost felt like nothing was guaranteed, so many twists that I didn’t see coming but the book had a very satisfying ending, but I’ll be honest I’d love to read more about these characters.

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Today I am on the tour for No Red Lines by Michelle Kidd, thank you to Zoé at Zooloos Book Tours for organising it and inviting me to take part and thank you to the author and the publisher for my copy.

Pages: 404

Synopsis: DETECTIVE JACK MACINTOSH IS BACK — BUT SO IS A KILLER WHO KNOWS NO LIMITS.

After a three-month recovery from his last brutal case, Detective Jack returns to his desk expecting a fresh start. DS Cassidy hands him a cheese toastie and a reassuring grin. ‘Everything’s under control here, sir. You’ve got nothing to worry about.’

Then his phone rings.

The body of a young woman has been found hanging from a curtain pole in a vacant office building — but it’s the sinister detail that stops Jack cold. Stuffed in her mouth is a copy of the London Underground map. White City station circled in red.

He’s back.

Seventeen years ago, six young women were found strangled to death. Their bodies strung up in abandoned buildings throughout the city. In their mouths, a copy of the London tube map.

They called him the Central Line Killer. He was never caught.

Jack is now in a race against time to unravel the twisted clues left by a killer who’s always one step ahead — and willing to go further than ever before.

My Thoughts: as is typical for me this is the first book by Michelle Kidd I have read and this is book 7 in a series 🫣🫣 I don’t know how i do it 🤣

Now if this is any indication of how brutal and fast paced the rest of the series in then I might just have to go and read them all because this one had me hooked from start to finish!

Poor Jack is just returning to work after an injury expecting to be eased back in gently, but in reality what he gets is a call about a murdered woman in his first day… should he have known better?!

Certain parts of the body and the crime scene in general seem familiar to him and he realises it’s a very similar MO to that of a serial killer who was active 17 years ago.

Told in multiple timelines to give you a well rounded picture and to make you really feel the emotions of all involved that it was happening again.

I was totally engrossed the whole time, full of characters that you don’t know wether you can trust and a whole host of twists and turns that will have you wondering where the story could possibly go next!

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Today I am on the tour for Shatter Creek by Rod Reynolds, thank you to Anne at Random Things Tours for organising it and inviting me to take part and thank you to the author and the publisher for my copy.

Pages: 300

Synopsis: Hampstead County Police Department is embroiled in scandal after corruption at the top of the force was exposed. Cleared of involvement and returned to active duty, Detective Sergeant Casey Wray nonetheless finds herself at a crossroads when it becomes clear not everyone believes she’s innocent.

CORRUPTION

Partnered with rookie Billy Drocker, Casey works a shocking daytime double-homicide in downtown Rockport with the two victims seemingly unknown to one another. And when a third victim is gunned down on her doorstep shortly after, it appears an abusive ex-boyfriend holds the key to the killings.

MURDER

With powerful figures demanding answers, Casey and Billy search for the suspect, fearing he’s on a murderous rampage. But when a key witness goes missing, and new evidence just won’t fit, the case begins to unravel.

DANGER

With her career in jeopardy, Casey makes a shattering discovery that threatens to expose the true darkness at the heart of the murders… with a killer still on the loose…

My Thoughts: this is book 2 in the Detective Casey Wray series & although it does read perfectly well as a standalone there some themes that are following on from the events Black Reed Bay so I would suggesting starting there if you can!

I loved being back with Casey or Big as her team call her, as a female lead goes she’s formidable, she’s not afraid to push the limits that others wouldn’t but is very aware that because of this she is closely watched which obviously isn’t always ideal 😂

In this one she is sent to the scene of a shooting where someone very well known to the higher ups in the police force is killed, it is assumed he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and that the real victim is the female who was also shot..

It feels like Casey is chasing her tail as every lead she gets turns out to be a dead end and more shootings happen and more dead bodies appear.

With there being a new lieutenant to contend with and unrest within her team can Casey knuckle down and unravel the truth before anyone else gets hurts?

This book was so tense it had me gripping the book so tight I always ripped the pages, the writing is so immersive that it feels like you’re right in the middle of the action.

I am already eagerly awaiting the release of book 3!

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Today I am on the tour for The Friday Friendship Group by Anne Brooke, thank you to Hannah at Hygge Book Tours for organising it and inviting me to take part and thank you to the author and the publisher for my copy.

Pages: 216

Synopsis: The lives of prime-time friends Leonora, Selena and Dorothea are about to take a very interesting turn.

Leonora discovers her husband is having an affair and struggles to come to terms with this crushing blow. Selena is about to meet the love of her life but is utterly unprepared for the heartbreak it might bring. Finally, Dorothea’s beloved career is under threat, but her job is the only way she can make sense of herself and she can’t see a future without it.

Can the three friends support each other through life’s challenges, and is there the slightest chance of a happy outcome for any of them?

My Thoughts: I found this book to be a lot of fun on the surface, 3 women in the prime of their lives meeting up every week having a drink and putting the world to rights.

But as you get more into the book & delve a little deeper you soon realise that they all have things going on privately that for whatever reason they’re keeping from each other despite being best friends.

I loved Lenora, Dorothea and Selena separately they were all likeable characters but I found them almost a force to be reckoned with like nothing could come between them – not even cheating husbands/brothers 🤣

I read this book in one sitting whilst in the garden with the sun shining which was the perfect setting, an easy read to lose yourself in.

This book had me smiling, it had me angry and wanting to throw the book and even had me close to tears at one point & what an achievement for the author make me feel so many different emotions in a book that’s just over 200 pages.

Highly recommend that people pick up a brew, grab a snack, clear their afternoon and see what these ladies get up to!

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