2026-05-12
Carolina Reaper Spicy Romance With Atypical And Controversial Message. First thing to know about this book: Not for the "clean romance" crowd. AT. ALL. Y'all don't need to bother reading a word of it, because there are at least three instances where you will need the fucking *emergency room* from the heart palpitations you'll get, rather than just smelling salts. But for those that enjoy actual porn level (Fifty Shades level, if not exact type) spice... hey, I've got a book for you. (Though to be clear, there is actual plot here. This is *not* erotica. Just *very* spicy romance. If only in like 3 scenes.)
Now that the romance crowd has sorted themselves already...
2026-05-11
Solid Women's Fiction/ Romance Blend. This is one of those tales the genre blends between women's fiction and technically satisfying all known RWA/RNA "romance genre" requirements... while being around habanero spicy to boot, at least in once instance. (Others are closer to jalapeno or even milder, though still stronger than a warm glass of milk.)
Told from a few different characters' perspectives and thus allowing them all to feel fully fleshed out, one weakness here is that many characters outside these specific perspective characters often feel... not as fully fleshed out. Indeed, at least a few are "I need a character in this role" thin - but for the most part they're also barely relevant to the story at hand, so it does make at least a degree of sense that they aren't as strongly written. Par...
2026-05-09
Solid Travelogue/Memoir Needs Documentation To Be Solid As History. This is one of those books where read as a travelogue/ memoir from a 40 ish yr old dude who has lived a life few of us can really imagine (though far too many can imagine quite well, at least in some experiences discussed herein), it really works quite well. Fitzgerald found an esoteric thing connected (ish) to his home area and childhood and uses that in midlife as a way to both connect with people he otherwise would never have met and to examine his own life, and in these aspects the tale here really is ...
2026-05-08
Strong Christian Fiction Law-Based Thriller From A Long Time Master. For those who are unaware that this is a Christian Fiction book even though Robert Whitlow has spent this Millennium building a career as a Christian Fiction author and even though the description explicitly mentions "faith" or "redemption" in three of five paragraphs... yes, this is an explicitly Christian Fiction book that is going to have people praying and talking about Jesus as much and as explicitly as a jalapeno (or maybe even habanero) level "spicy romance" has sex scenes. (Ok, so with the level that praying in particular happens, it is definitely more akin to a habanero or maybe even Carolina Reaper level spicy romance with their sex scenes.) If you have a problem with that... this won't be the book for you. Just skip it and leave Whitlow and his fans in peace.
For those that can at...
2026-05-06
Solid Near Stand-Alone Sequel Will Be Divisive. This is one of those books where a co-author was added... and makes an immediate and obvious impact. How you like that impact will likely depend on your own politics and worldview. Making one character from the previous book explicitly LGBT in this book - when this character's sexuality was never discussed in the previous book at all - is a choice. As is adding in a nonbinary character, introducing them with pronouns, and then explicitly saying of an older character that this older character "needed to get it together". Allegations that this book curses more than the...
2026-05-06
Deja Vu / Rinse And Repeat. Either Works. I do believe this is the first time in over 1,800 reviews over the last decade where I can truly say that literally everything I said about the author's previous book - in this case, 2024's Strange Religion - still applies to this one. Simply swap out any references to the "early church" to the "Pauline epistles" instead, and truly literally that entire review could be here with just those changes.
And so, the rest of the review is a versi...
2026-05-04
Dense Yet Intriguing Tale Won't Be For Everyone. This is one of those dense tales that starts off very slow - through nearly the first half of the book - with a lot of what would actually happen if a suspicious object exhibiting these properties was found. Including all the damn meetings. Once "the action" begins, it gets into technical diatribes the likes of which would give Andy Weir or Tom Clancy (RIP) wet dreams. Pages on pages of how a drill works and similar, for example. And there is a lot of real world political commentary on ever...
2026-05-03
Low Stakes Medium Spice Sarah Morgan/ Hallmarkie Summer Tale. Sarah Morgan basically has two settings: summer and Christmas, and she seems to make it a point to release both types of book every year. This being a May release and given the title, it is obviously her summer version. Which does involve coastal/ beach living and general summer-ish vibes without being too country or culture specific. (Well done ...
2026-04-30
Ipse Dixit - Bare Assertion Mars Needed (If Politically Slanted In Presentation) Call. This is one of those texts that so many American Christians are going to need to read... and yet because it *is* so politically slanted in a somewhere left-of-center/ social justice warrior direction, not enough on at least one side likely will. A more balanced presentation, perhaps referencing more right-oriented issues like being truly pro-life from conception through natural death in addition to those presented here, could have gone a long way to making the overall presentation of the arguments here that much stronger.
But that isn't actually the star deduction here. No, the star deduction is exactly what the title noted - there is *zero* bibliography in this Advance Rev...
2026-04-30
Interesting Insights From An Atypical Perspective. How often have you ever heard the term "business anthropology"? Hell, how often have you ever heard the term "anthropology" and not pictured some remote tribe somewhere in some jungle or maybe desert? My guess is that your answer to both of those questions is somewhere in the range of "Rarely" to "Never" for nearly anyone reading this review. Even as widely read as *I* am, my answer would have been right there with you.
Yet here Sweet, a Xennial Londoner with a clearly leftist political bent - as in, he frequently villainizes pretty well anything white and/ or male - actually uses his experiences with both psychology and anthropology to show how the two interact to form culture in ways that you likely never even actively thought of... e...