One Good Book Deserves Another

Genre: Urban Fantasy Romance
Series: Goddesses Rising, Book 1
Rating: 3 Stars
Length: 300 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Entangled Publishing via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




Moon Goddess Quinn Caldwell is feeling the strain of managing her bar and doing her goddess consultations while holding off on using her very willing best friend Sam to enhance her power. He's in love with her, and as much as she loves him, she just can't return his feelings. Her heart is otherwise occupied on her own hopeless love interest. Still, having sex with Sam during the full moon just doesn't seem right any more. It's holding him back from finding real love.

The conflict between them has made work difficult, though, and the strain of tension between her and her best friend is stressing her out. So much so that Quinn would relish any distraction. She should have been more specific.

When Nick Garret, her official goddess protector and unrequited love interest, calls her with an ominous...and unexplained warning, then shows up at her bar before his normal guarding rotation, Quinn is concerned. That concern turns to shock and alarm when he tells her that goddesses are being attacked and drained of their power and she may be a target.

She tries to contact the Society for Goddess Education and Defense, the ancient society she serves as a board member, for answers and guidance, but she is shut out by the very organization that she has served so faithfully. Then a rumor of Nick going rogue starts swirling around, along with rumors of some mysterious family connection between Quinn and the perpetrator of the crimes against goddesses.

Her life is caught up in a confusing, scary maelstrom of suspicion and fear, and soon she and Nick and Sam are racing across country, investigating the source of the danger and rumors as Quinn tries to stay a step ahead of a power-hungry madman. What she will find at the end of their journey will either change everything in her life...or end it.


I wanted to like this book more than I did. I liked the idea of a paranormal story without any vampires, shapeshifters, or Fae. Instead we have goddesses, but that's where the trouble started. Though the overall storyline in no way resembles another book featuring goddesses that I read a few months ago, there were a wealth of similarities in the main character and setting. Quinn draws her power from the moon, like the goddess in the other book, she owns a bar, like the goddess in the other book, and sex plays a part in her ability to use her power, like the goddess in the other book.

Being hit with all of that so early into this book made me feel like I had picked up a more fully fleshed out and heavily edited version of a story I've already read. Fortunately, the similarities pretty much ended there.

I have to admit, the concept for this story is original, and the world Damschroder created was obviously well thought out and clearly conceived. I didn't get the sort of detailed definition of that world that I needed to make it real to me, though. The focus of the book stayed tight on the main character and those secondary characters surrounding her, not leaving much room for world view.

The characters were another issue. They were okay, but something about the story kept me from feeling connected to them. Part of the problem could very well be that I was expecting more romance. I thought it was a paranormal romance when I started reading it, but it reads more like an urban fantasy - or, because of the relationships involved, a paranormal romantic suspense, but the romance was almost ancillary to the story. It was more like Quinn and Nick rotated around each other instead of a romance between them evolving alongside the other story threads.

The reader knows Quinn has loved Nick for years, but Nick's feelings are questionable to both Quinn and the reader throughout most of the book. Their relationship doesn't actually start to change from friendship and protection until late into the story. That prevented the romance elements from satisfactorily translating to me as a reader, and the romantic climax lacked much of a punch because of it.

I liked the concept of the Big Bad in the book, but my enjoyment was tempered by the haphazard investigation by Quinn, Nick, and Sam. I was also never clear on why they would be the only ones really doing any serious investigating, given the world and the organizations connected to the matter. Especially given the lack of significant connection to the victims.

A couple of goddesses Quinn was moderately friendly with are attacked and Quinn gets treated weird by the organiztion she belongs to, so she abandons her work and throws herself into stopping a power-hungry madman. There just didn't seem to be enough motivation on Quinn's part for the massive effort she expended given the seeming ambivalence of everyone else.

And while the trio were driving across the country, trying to stay away from a threat they weren't even sure was targeting them, the story dragged. I felt like I was spending too much time with three fairly average characters as they wandered around, failing to gather much pertinent information. Add to that a habit of jumping to conclusions and getting into trouble before dashing off to trace the next clue.

It's not a bad read, though. I didn't dislike the story and I don't mean to sound like I did. Damschroder created a world with an interesting mythos and a conflict that was a serious threat to the characters, then she set it all in motion with sheer force of will. It just didn't do it for me, through a combination of false expectation, reading preference, and story issues. Too many questions went unanswered (how the heck did he get her sock?), too many coincidences to be believed (Sam's roommate, really?), too many things lacking emotional impact impact. This one was just okay for me because of all of it.

Genre: Romantic Suspense
Series: N/A
Rating: 4 Stars
Length: 90,000 words
Formats: Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Carina Press via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




Driven by the murder of the elder brother she idolized, Kennedy Smyth has spent a decade building an elite security business with the sole purpose of protecting companies and charities working in dangerous countries. Her team is the best in the world. She's the best of the best.

When a family friend asks her to take a job providing security for his son's movie production, Kennedy wants to dismiss the job as frivolous. She doesn't do frivolous. Plus, she has doubts about the legitimacy of the threats against the director and lead actors, regardless of some of the dangerous rhetoric they've been receiving. Still, there are jobs she can decline, and those she can't, and a personal request from a family friend is definitely one of the latter.

Once on set, Kennedy and her crew are all business, doing their level best to secure the actors and director and make the environment as safe as possible. Complications, though, arise quickly on what should have been a simple job, complications in the form of the actor who is the movie's leading man. Try as she might to keep a professional distance between her and the good looking, charming Rogan St. James, he is intent on pushing through her defenses from the moment he sees her.

If she hadn't already been wrong once, and the danger to the set and the crew hadn't been proven to be all too real...and if she dared to be at all honest, she would be just as interested in him. Not that she would ever act on those feelings. No matter how enticing he is.

Those good intentions may be blown to hell when the job's complications turn critical. The machinations of a determined madman have become all too personal...and are targeting neither the movie nor its cast and crew, but Kennedy herself. If she doesn't stop a deadly foe she can't see or find before he can kill her and anyone close to her, she may lose more than her life, she may lose the man who - despite herself - has become the leading man in her heart.


Okay, I'm just going to rip that bandage off right away, because I had some issues with this book. The premise for the external plot conflict was a stretch for me. I just couldn't quite buy into the actions and motivations of the Bad Guy or understand why 'they' (as a gender-nonspecific pronoun) would go through the convoluted gyrations 'they' went through to achieve what 'they' wanted to achieve. Because of that, the security job on the movie set and the subsequent introduction of Roman and Kennedy came off as a bit contrived to me after the dust had settled.

I also wish more attention had been given to the relationship between Roman and Kennedy as it evolved. What was there was okay, and I did like them both as individual characters and as a couple, but Roman just didn't seem to be as significant a presence in the story as I would have liked him to be, and the romance arc suffered just a little for me because of that.

There, now that's said, let's get to the parts that I loved, which far outweighed those petty issues. I adored Kennedy as a lead character and love, love, loved that she was not only the top of her field in a very male-dominated occupation, but that she started and built her own company around that field. Yes, I freely admit, I have a wide and large soft spot for kick-ass heroines, but what I admire more in my fiction are women who excel at unconventional jobs, work hard, and command respect for it all.

That she was also a flawed and slightly broken woman still haunted by the death of her brother and was someone who definitely sacrificed a lot to be where and who she is just made it all the better. Loved her.

My hat, were I wearing one, would also be doffed for Damschroder for doing such a remarkably superb job creating and executing such an intensely complex security job. With seemingly effortless aplomb, she manipulated and wove together the myriad pieces of characters, setting, and suspense, and produced one of the most detail-oriented and believable scenarios of a realistic security detail that I've read in romantic suspense. Ever. And considering the proliferation of security teams/bodyguard organizations in the RS genre and the number of books featuring them that I've read, that's saying something.

I may not have totally bought into how Kennedy came to provide security for that movie, but I have nothing but admiration and respect for how bloody well written it was once they were there. Everything from the initial preparation of her team to the rising anxiety as the threat level increased to the actions and decisions made as a result of that increased threat worked perfectly for me. It was intense, compelling reading and I adored it.

The secondary characters that made up her security detail, while perhaps not excessively fleshed out, were given enough definition to seem completely individual and believable to me. I do wish Diane had been introduced a little earlier in the story, because I loved her attitude and thought she had a fantastic presence on the page. I would thoroughly enjoy a book that featured her as the lead character. That Damschroder was able to just plop her down, flesh her out, and make her so damn respectable and likable in such a short period of time shows off her impressive storytelling chops.

Without doubt, I thought the scenes surrounding the security detail job were brilliant and the plot - beyond the premise - was chock full of action, suspense, and intense emotion. The characters were well drawn and the storyline packed with enough depth to keep me engaged throughout. I wish the romance had as much emotional impact as the suspense, but what was there didn't disappoint, either. The excellent storytelling and strong characters made for memorable romantic suspense and created for Damschroder a new fan of her writing. I can't wait to see what else she has out there, and wonder what's coming next.