Book Review: Some Like it Red Hot by Robin Merrill

Thank you Carl Brookins for another review to share. This one is for a hot romantic suspense novel. 

Some Like It Red Hot
By Robin Merrill
Acacia Publishing, Inc
ISBN: 978-0-9774-306-4-2
2008, Trade Paper, 276 pages

Lotsimina Hannon (Lotsi to her intimates) is forced by an evil corporate empire to retire before her time. Lotsi, for want of something else to do, decides to start a whole new life. What better way to do so than buy an old RV and a new motorcycle and hit the road? The fact that she’s never in her life driven either a large recreational vehicle or a high-powered motorcycle is no deterrent.  

Since she’s looking for a little excitement in  her new life, she heads to Las Vegas, home of opulent RV parks, saunas and hot tubs. And men. Oh yes. Older and retired, but far from sedentary, Lotsi has the heart and the attitudes of a much younger woman. You might say the fires are low but still burning. All it takes is a delectable hunk with the wit and the knowledge of the desires of the more mature woman, and a certain level of experience, to bring those embers to a raging inferno. It also may be said that starting a relationship in a hot tub can get things off to a quick start.

Then of course, murder and associated chicanery intrudes and Lotsi is forced into a game of clues, a game that soon turns deadly. What’s worse, Lotsi becomes a target of the killers even while desperately learning to ride the motorcycle and speed out of trouble.

Smartly written, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, author Merrill presents a romp through the RV culture with pokes at aging  baby boomers that is just askew enough to keep you reading and chuckling all the way along. While the story is realistically presented with enough straight and freaky characters to keep readers guessing, this frank romantic mystery is not aimed at fans of the realistic or the noir. A fun read. I hope the author is able to bring us further adventures of the mature.
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Carl Brookins www.carlbrookins.com  BLOG:  http://agora2.blogspot.com  -BOOKS:  Case of the Great Train Robbery, Reunion, Red Sky

Book Review - Where Danger Hides by Terry Odell

 Since I didn't post my usual book review yesterday, here is another one from Carl Brookins. Keep 'em coming Carl. And here's a link to Daily Cheap Reads where a number of authors have books mentioned that are on sale for only 99cents. One Small Victory is one of the books on sale until the end of May.
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Where Danger Hides
By Terry Odell
ISBN 978-1-43282-512-6
Five Star Mystery from Gale
May, 2011

The novel is a suspenseful thriller with a healthy dose of romance.  Or maybe it’s a romantic thriller with a good deal of suspense that keeps this moving at a sometimes alarming pace.  “Where Danger Hides” is both, and it’s also a fantasy in particular in the way and the speed with which the two principal characters are drawn together.

Miri Chambers is the caretaker and overseerer of a San Francisco shelter primarily for abused women.  Galoway House also manages to shelter and care for a number of children and men, as well. There’s a lot more to Miri Chambers. She is adept at disguise, light-fingered and as prickly as one can get. Two wrong words and she is liable to go off like a rocket. That propensity for shoot-from-the-hip judgments and attitude may also be the reason for her nearly unbelieveable hormonal response to the hunk she meets on a clandestine foray into the home office of a wealthy art patron.

Her reaction to “just” Dalton isn’t much different from his.  He works for a private security firm that has a large well-funded and mostly covert group of operatives working well outside the usual legal limits. Dalton, one of Blackthorn’s elite black ops operatives has an appreciated eye for female anatomy, wherever he finds it, including hiding under the desk of the aforementioned wealthy San Francisco Art patron.

Dalton and Miri Chambers are all fire and sparks and hot sex throughout this rollicking novel.  The author has created a pair of characters who could each carry the novel solo, but when you pair them, look out.

The action carries Dalton and Chambers from posh and elegant settings to gritty exceedingly dangerous operations.  Readers are not likely to predict each succeeding move.  One is required to suspend disbelief and recognize from the outset that explicit play, both sexual and firearms, is integral to the story.

Nevertheless, the plot is carefully and fully laid out, the dialogue is mostly logical and the tension carries well through the entire book. Gritty, tender, frustrating by turns I did feel that there were times when both characters exhibited too obtuse attitudes and were slower on the uptake than they should have been, given their life experiences.

Nevertheless, this is a fun read that makes several important points along the way.

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Carl Brookins
www.carlbrookins.com, www.agora2.blogspot.com Case of the Greedy Lawyer, Devils Island,
Bloody Halls, more at Kindle & Smashwords!

Trading Places

L.J. Sellers is my guest today. We decided to do something fun and trade places for a day, so I am guesting on her BLOG today. I hope you enjoy what she has to say today, and please do check out her books. She writes some terrific mystery/suspense.

What Makes Me Keep Reading
I recently posted on my own blog about what makes me put down a novel, so to be fair, I thought I’d post about what makes me keep reading.

1. A great opening in which something unusual, unexpected, contradictory, or violent happens. For example, in Secret Dead Men by Duane Swierczynski, the third sentence caught my attention. “..but a couple of kids organized an impromptu club with a mandate to experiment on her corpse.”

2. Intriguing characters who are unusual, unexpected, contradictory, complex, or compelling. From the first page of the same story: “Then again, what do I know? I was a dead man impersonating an FBI agent.”

3. Characters who don’t fit the current clichés. I like cops who aren’t cynical, FBI agents who aren’t workaholics that can’t handle relationships, private investigators who aren’t alcoholic loners, and women who are soft on the outside and tough on the inside.

4. Complexity! I like parallel plots, interwoven stories, and multiple points of view. And if it all comes together in a way that surprises me and makes perfect sense, I pick up the next book by that author.

5. Passion about a subject. I like politics, religion, and social issues in novels as long as it works for the story and doesn’t overwhelm it.

6. Multiple plot points and plots twists that leave me thinking: Wow! Stunning, but believable.

7. Moderate levels of crime and violence written with sensitivity to the subject, the victim, and the reader.

8. Just enough detail (setting and character) to make the story real. I like Elmore Leonard’s approach: Only write the parts that people will read.

9. Believable relationships of any and all kinds.

10. Fast-paced narrative with a great balance of dialogue and action, in which the surprises just keep coming.

Of course, these are the kind of stories Maryann and I write. (smile)  What makes you keep reading a novel?

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L.J. will give one lucky person an electronic copy of Passions Of the Dead. Leave your e-mail address in the comment box and we will draw the winner at the end of the week.
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L.J. Sellers is an award-winning journalist and the author of the Detective Jackson mystery/suspense series. The Sex Club, Secrets to Die For, and Thrilled to Death have been highly praised by Mystery Scene and Spinetingler magazines. Her fourth Jackson story, Passions of the Dead, has just been released. All four novels are on Amazon Kindle’s bestselling police procedural list. L.J. also has two standalone thrillers, The Baby Thief and The Suicide Effect. When not plotting murders, she enjoys performing standup comedy, cycling, social networking, and attending mystery conferences. She’s also been known to jump out of airplanes.

About Passions of the Dead -- A working-class family is brutally attacked in their home and only one survives. Detective Jackson is assigned to investigate and soon uncovers a blackmail scheme. But the forensic evidence is confusing, and the girl who survives has no memory of the horrific event.
When another home invasion occurs, Jackson is confident they’ve nailed the perpetrators. Yet the case grows even more entangled. When the survivor disappears, Jackson fears for her life—but can he find her in time to save her?


Read an excerpt  HERE  http://ljsellers.com/wordpress/jackson/passions-of-the-dead