eyes.2c Reviews

Tsalmoth  (Vlad Taltos #7) by   Steven Brust  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Vlad Taltos is a boss with the House of Jhegala. It’s taken him some time, major capers and quite a few books to get to the being a boss let me tell you. He’s an Easterner and human. He’s an assassin in the Dragaeran world, involved in gang run gambling establishments, sometimes killing and a lot of other simple but nefarious doings. I just plain enjoy him. A laconic, wise cracking thief. A thief with powerful friends, an assassin for a fiancé and his familiar Loioish who sits on his shoulder. He’s sort of like a hard boiled gum shoe detective though he’s no goody two shoes, he does solve mysteries, he has his own standards, and a soft heart. But don’t tell anyone. I’ve read all of Brust novels in and out of the Dragaeran series, and when a new one makes its way onto the shelves, I’m there. This is the 16th in the series, although chronologically a flashback happening in previous times. Vlad gives us a discourse on...

How to Best A Marquess  (Widow Rules #3)   by Janna MacGregor      ⭐️⭐️ This second chance romance started out with great promise. Part of a series that’s had at it’s center three women who’d found out that they’d been all married to the same person, Lord Meriwether Vareck. Beth (Blythe Elizabeth Howell) has promised herself to never marry again, and find out what has happened to her lost dowry. Only her self-centered brother has decided to marry her off once more to an older lord in exchange for money, just like her first non marriage. I am at a loss to understand why Beth couldn’t find her voice to say NO! Of course she’s a scandalous figure—even more so after she and Lord Meriwether’s two other wives/widows became friends. (Sister wives almost!) So Beth is chasing down what’s happened to her dowry with longtime friend and foresworn would-be-husband Lord Julian Grayson. Grayson caused her heartache as a young woman. Julian is now a Marquis who requires funds t...

A Fatal Encounter in Tuscany  (Miss Ashford Investigates #3) by Vivian Conroy     ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Atlanta Ashford’s relationship with racing car driver Raoul Lemont (he later declares he’s Italian by heart, not birth) is somewhat of an unknown, punctuated with Atlanta’s inner moonings of does he like me or not. Atlanta seems to be attracted to Raoul but is unsure, or scared of, his responses. Sometimes she’s looking forward to his company, other times his perceived chauvinism annoys her, or the prejudices of others frustrate her, particularly when he’s referred to over her because he’s male. It’s like Atlanta’s metaphorically pulling the petals of daisies to uncover her feelings, with jealousy only a nanosecond away. Anyway Atlanta’s decided to take time out from detecting and go on a holiday with Raoul, as a ‘travelling companion’, (Atlanta’s unsure of what that means) motoring through his beloved Tuscany, stopping off at little towns and inns along the way. No investigating! Pu...

Not the Ones Dead  (Kate Shugak #23) by   Dana Stabenow    ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Another satisfying novel by Stabenow. I can smell the cold crisp of the air, and taste the frozen mountains. Stabenow’s descriptions of this awesome, spreading Alaskan National Park are a delight. Less delightful is what happens here! Unexplained! A group of settlers are denying people access to public tracks. The roadhouse, center of the community, burns down. A mid air crash near the Quilaks, mountains a few minutes flight on from Paddy Murphy’s airstrip. Murphy’s sold his claim and up and left. But then there’s a mysterious extra dead body at the crash sit. What’s going on? Duane Jackson, the new post master, warns Kate about the new owners of Demetri Totemoff’s lodge?! And drones! I’ve had my reservations about them but post this read they’re now amplified.  What’s going on is exactly what Kate Shugak and her partner Jim are trying to find out, accompanied of course by Mutt, Kate’s half-H...

A Problem Princess (Lords of the Armory #6)  by Anna Harrington               ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Oh my! Not quite the Pauper and the Princess but near enough to feel the heartbreak. Clayton Elliot found that protecting Princess Cordelia of Monrovia was more than he’d bargained for. No spoilt petulant young woman aware of her own importance, but a sweetly innocent person who is being controlled by her uncle, Prince Ernest. Although Cordelia doesn’t see it. She sees her uncle concerned for her country and her well being. She sees her Duty. Cordelia is hiding a secret, a secret related to her family that’s breaking her heart.   Cordelia must marry and she’s been brought to England to be looked over by the three Royal Dukes, Clarence, Kent and Cambridge, as a potential bride. Duty above all else! Someone tries to kidnap her and is thwarted by Clayton. The situation becomes more dangerous for Cordelia and Clayton’s determined to protect her, supported by h...

Divine Rivals : A Novel  (Letters of Enchantment #1) by Rebecca Ross    Series note: (Iris at the Front #1) on Amazon ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Iris Winnow has always wanted to be a writer. When offered a trial job with the newspaper, the Oath Gazette, she seizes it. It turns out she’ll be in competition with an Ivy League type, handsome and rich, Roman Kitt. Iris does delightful things to annoy Roman, like moving his precisely arranged pencils.  Working from home on her Nan’s old type writer she puts a letter into the wardrobe. The next day she receives an answer. What!? Iris believes she’s writing to her brother. Her corespondent sets the record straight and tells Iris he’s not Forest. They continue to write sharing their deepest secrets and painful memories. Forest is off fighting the war for the Skyward goddess Enva against a defeated god of the Underling, Dacre. Later, after some life changing moments, Iris resigns and becomes a war correspondent with a rival newspaper, the I...

Winning Maura's Heart  (Hangman’s Daughters #1)   by Linda Broday    ⭐️⭐️⭐️ I’m not big on Western romances but thought I’d give this a whirl. It has it all, a feisty heroine and her sister, a tall gunman who appears to be a Deputy US Marshal, a vicious baddie and his gang, a drunken Uncle, three wonderful French nuns and a host of delightful children. The action takes place in and near to San Antonio, Texas in 1867. How they all come together is quite a satisfying yarn. Maura and Emma Taggart are the daughter of the Hangman, rendering them outcasts as far as the local society’s concerned. They are ostracized and worse by the “kindly christian citizens” of the town. Yellow Fever had plagued San Antonio with many dead. The girls had tended the dead and dying with kindness and determination with no thought of payment. These are two big hearted women. They'd looked after the growing number of orphans.  After the worst was over, when there services were no longer ne...

The Secret Pocket  by Peggy Janicki, ills. Carrielynn Victor   ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ A tale that tugs, confronts and horrifies. The Residential Schools are a byword for all that’s wrong with what happened to First Nations people’s in Canada. (This story is universal in its scope of what happened historically to First Nations people’s throughout the new world) The lengths the children had to go to to survive is a stain on any nation’s soul. To my mind the tale has a First Nations storyteller’s lyrical cadence.  The illustrations match the voice.  I was not aware that some children were able to go home. Interesting to note that “home” was always in different colors to those used for the school experience. The ingenuity of the girls sewing their pockets gave hope to their small community. The fact that they had to go to these lengths speaks louder than words as to the treatment they were receiving. So many talking points to open up discussions of the past, present and future for F...

Heart of the Nile  (Barker & Llewellyn #14) by Will Thomas          ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ London, 1893. Thomas Llewellyn and Cyrus Barker have their hands full with an intriguing investigation of a disappeared gentleman who was last seen   at midnight, with hints of a major discovery in an unto-now looked at mummy. One of a glut of mummies the British Museum has bought or been gifted by those English travellers who’ve done their Grand Tour, and now find that so desirable artefact has lost its sheen back in England. Most find their inglorious way to the Museum basement needing to be catalogued. Phillip Addison had taken on the task. Unpaid, a volunteer, often working through the night, as a way to further his interest in Egyptology, perhaps even to be part of a dig one day. He was an Oxford man, ancient history enthusiast by night, and a school teacher by day. He’d developed a new and applauded system for designating information about the mummies. But now Add...

The Fourth Enemy  (Daniel Pitt #6) by   Anne Perry      ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Daniel has at last married Miriam fford Croft!. I’m ecstatic about that! Her father Marcus has decided to retire and has invited Gideon Hunter to be the new Barrister for their rooms. For the firm to maintain its position a King’s Council, a Silk, is needed. Gideon’s first case with Croft’s is one of fraud against a powerful financier. No-one will testify against Malcolm Vayne. Two people agree, an elderly woman who has done the organizations bookkeeping, and a man whose family is no longer in the country. Both have accidents or something more sinister before they are to testify. Sir Thomas Pitt is also interested in Vayne. He sees connections between Vayne, the home government, other nations, and powerful interests abroad. Things begin to deteriorate with Hunter and Daniel’s case, and as they attempt to shore it up Daniel receives shocking news that has all other thoughts flee! Dr. Evelyn Hall ...

  Return to Satterthwaite Court  (Somerset Stories #3) by Mimi Matthews     ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The opening scene of Lieutenant Charles Heywood newly off his ship at the London docks chasing a mongrel dog to see it doesn’t come to harm, only to try to disentangle it from around a lady’s skirts is a hoot. As is when  he proclaims it to be a valuable dog, “A rare breed. One of only of his kind.” With a nod to Georgette Heyer’s Frederica, Matthews latest novel is off to a fine start and the pace never stops. We have mystery, an historical happening that’s influencing today’s participants, a feisty yet charming heiress, and a villain who’s sleazed his way into society with all the finesse of a snake charmer. I was caught off guard by the closing scenes when his mother and sister turned out to be as nasty as Mr. Elias Catmull. Kate, daughter of the Earl of Allendale, can’t help but fall headlong into scrapes. She’s passionate and intelligent. She’s had to weather three broth...

Lost in Paris by Betty Webb           ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Life in the artist quarters of Paris in the 1920’s. Of course all the greats are present, the artists, writers, sculptors of the time. A deftly woven story that involves the Hemingway’s and our heroine Zoe Barlow as she tries to solve the mystery of a missing manuscript, digging herself deeper into the perceived insults, the slights, and the drama surrounding those involved. When she starts to stumble across bodies, she realizes there’s more here than meets the eye. Webb’s brilliantly captured the time and mood of the heaving mass of artistic temperament and talent that was Paris then. A Poisoned Pen ARC via NetGalley.                                               Many thanks to the author and publisher.

When Last Seen  (Hunter and Tate #2) by Brenda Chapman   ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ A three-year-old child’s disappeared! In the Crystal Beach neighbourhood near the banks of the Ottawa River. Anguish and pain! Charlie McGowan is the half brother to Roddy and Sara from a previous marriage. An AMBER alert is issued. Charlie’s father David has a roving eye and seems to be unable to resist playing around. Detective Liam Hunter and his partner Julie Quade are investigating this and an earlier disappearance of an Asian student, last seen partying at an escort’s party. Liam’s gut feeling is that  Charlie’s disappearance is personal. Wouldn’t it be strange if the two were linked someone joked? It may or may not be beyond the realm of possibility. Ella Tate is a podcaster and journalist. She’s known to Liam from a previous case.There’s an air, a current  of sympatico between them. Liam helps her occasionally and she aids him. With this case Ella is soon deeply involved. She identifies with...

Hotel of Secrets  by Diana Biller    ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ What a delight. Set in Vienna in 1878, this has everything. Spies, murder attempts, romance—all framed against the background of the Hotel Wallner, it’s owners and the scandals surrounding them. A time of balls and waltzes, culminating with the Hotelkeeper’s Ball. A Ball the hotel has been requested to host once again as their competition who had taken over that role when the Wallner was no longer at its peak had suffered a burst pipe and water damage. The hotel has been managed for seventy-five years by the Wallner women. Currently Maria was the manager, advised by her grandmother Josephine. Her mother Elisabeth had not been interested in running the hotel. After it had declined in popularity, and suffered losses and setbacks, Elisabeth had passed the responsibility onto her daughter Maria. Maria was  focused on returning the Hotel to its former place of preeminence in Viennese circles. “It had been given to [her] grea...

Mr. West and The Widow  (Brazen Beauties #3) by Sophie Barnes   ⭐️⭐️⭐️ A young widow struggling to make ends meet as her estate groans under the debts her dead husband had accrued, and for which she is now responsible. A survivor of the Egyptian Campaign against Napoleon, West is badly disfigured and hides away from all. Returning home from an inn during a storm he’s forced to detour and seeks shelter at a property that turns out to be inhabited by his fallen comrade Richard’s sister. A woman he and his comrades had looked for for twenty years. Victoria doesn’t shy away immediately from his injuries but neither is she comfortable, but that’s for her own reasons. In transpires she needs guidance in estate management and Colin West makes an offer for her to come to his home and learn. With the reassurance of company to act as chaperones, Victoria agrees. Of course there’s a cad about and Victoria is somewhat shaken at that encounter. A Beauty and the Beast trope, with sidelines...

Murder Visits a French Village  (Château in Burgundy #1) by Susan C Shea      ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Mention of Julia Child, Beouf Bourguignon, red wine and baguette, and author Shea had me at  the first paragraph. Widowed Ariel Shepherd is astounded to find Daniel,  her beloved husband of only four years had bought her a ruined château in Burgandy. It was to be a surprise. Ariel impulsively sells their Manhattan apartment and moves to France, and hopefully a new chapter in her life. What she didn’t count on was finding the dead body of a woman, a Sorbonne educated academic, whose area of interest was the provenance of châteaux of Burgundy, in the moat. Madame Breton had been looking into Ariel’s legal forms. Something about them had Madame puzzled.   So early on I had my suspicions about things, although they kept being muddied, as bodies piled up. A cozy mystery that had me salivating over the food descriptions more than anything else. A Severn House ARC via NetGal...