#BookReview: Pity Play by Whitney Dineen

Gilmore Girls Yet Not Gilmore Girls. He’s Luke and he works in a diner. She’s Lorelai and she wants to run a bed and breakfast. Stars Hollow? NOPE! Equally fictional and equally charming Elk Lake. But yes, the Gilmore Girls comparisons, at least at a very high level, are simply too blatant to be completely ignored.

This noted, Dineen *does* do her own thing and *does* manage to tell a tale completely different than anything I remember from Gilmore Girls. (Don’t hate me, but despite Lauren Graham being hot, it just wasn’t a series I could ever really get into. Sorry, ladies!)

Here, the angst is arguably done better than the romance, and indeed it often seems at times that this ostensibly romance book keeps its central couple apart far more than they’re together, with the togetherness coming in very tentative and awkward steps at first before “suddenly out of no where” kind of exploding… after a damn near fatal implosion first, of course.

But truly the most relatable part of this for me personally was in fact Luke’s story, and even his dad’s story. While I know at least *some* of my dad’s story (more than Luke does throughout a large part of the tale here), like Luke, there are absolutely things I don’t know – and will never know – about my dad’s childhood and my grandfather (who in my case died just five weeks after my birth). Like Luke, as an adult I’ve had to try to come to understand my dad through the bits and pieces of his history I’ve learned, and how that has shaped him into the man he chose to become… and thus how it shaped how he raised me and shaped me into the man I chose to become. While I never lost years of our lives due to a misunderstanding, that’s not to say there haven’t been misunderstandings along the way (including one particularly infamous one when I was a teenager that was perhaps the closest we ever got to this level of blowup). So… yeah, Luke’s story absolutely hit a touch harder here.

Overall while this seemed to be probably the most angsty book in the series, there really was quite a bit of fun and self discovery along the way as well, and it really was both a solid entrant in the series and a solid setup for a seeming near-direct sequel.

Very much recommended.

This review of Pity Play by Whitney Dineen was originally written on March 25, 2025.

#BookReview: The Retreat by Nicola Marsh

More Dual-Timeline Suspense Than Hotel California. For whatever reason, I went into this book thinking it would be some level of Hotel California type story. Maybe the whole “bed and breakfast where people seem to wind up dead” thing? Just to clarify for anyone who may be getting that vibe as well… this is not that, not really. Instead it is more of a dual timeline suspense with secrets and connections both obvious and not. A lot of people are tossing around the word “gothic”, but I’m not quite sure I personally picked up on that. But maybe I’m just not as certain of what a “gothic” story is supposed to be? Regardless, this was truly a well written and well told story, one that is both compelling and creepy enough to keep the reader engaged without being so over the top as to compel the reader to throw the book out the nearest window (which is even rougher on Kindles than it is on paper books, just sayin’). As I’ve noted with at least a couple of other authors who normally do romance books (as Marsh is more known for) but who open themselves up to more suspense/ thriller/ etc… Marsh does a truly excellent job in both spaces, and seeing her expand her stories into these new (to her) spaces is quite interesting and a mark of a strong storyteller regardless of chosen genre. Very much recommended.

This review of The Retreat by Nicola Marsh was originally written on January 13, 2023.