Downtime by Tamara Allen 
Fractured Hymns by A M Arthur
The Alpha’s Hunger by Renee Rose
An Ordinary Girl by Barbara Elsborg
Ricky by Ashley John
A Cowboy’s Christmas Promise Maggie McGinnis
Talking Trouble by Barbara Elsborg
Chosen by Barbara Elsborg
Downtime by Tamara Allen
Morgan Nash is a 21st century FBI agent. He is somehow accidentally ‘summoned’ back to the 19th century by some scholars who were testing their Latin.
The book with the spell in it is stolen and as they hunt for the means to send Morgan back to his own time, he becomes embroiled in the legendary Jack the Ripper case (irresistible to an FBI agent!) and starts falling for Ezra, his housemate.
Sometimes when writing time travel novels, authors go to the ridiculous (or tedious) trying to convince us that they are familiar with the time period and to help us ‘see it’. In this case, the author focuses on the characters and the plot, and the time periods are secondary, to the point where they feel natural rather than forced. It’s well done.
I actually ended up researching ‘Prince Eddy’ online to find out more about the real man and what happened to it. It’s always great when an historical story prompts you to do real research.
Talking Trouble by Barbara Elsborg
The plot was good, but I would have enjoyed it more without all the gratuitous sex scenes.
Chosen by Barbara Elsborg
Kate is kidnapped by Jack. He not only rapes her, but threatens every good Samaritan that Kate tries to seek help from, and kills the one man who does try and help her. Then Jack kidnaps a child from a McDonalds and takes Kate and the child to live in a remote house in the woods where they are going to be happy families. The raping and violence continues, and Jack threatens the child to help keep Kate in line. She tries desperately to seek freedom for herself and the child, enduring increasingly more violent punishments each time she is caught. Meanwhile, Jack’s half brother Nathan has been stalking and monitoring Jack ever since he came out of the mental hospital he went into after sleeping with Nathan’s fiance. He doesn’t really have any better motive than revenge, but it does mean that he is the one that notices that Jack has disappeared right after buying flowers for a mystery woman. He hunts Jack down and when Kate appeals to him for help, Jack draws Nathan into his sick and violent plot. When Nathan and Kate finally manage to escape with the child, Jack goes straight to the police with a twisted sob story that is practically impossible to unravel. Now Nathan and Kate are wanted for kidnapping and the police believe that Kate is not only mentally unbalanced, but involved in an S&M relationship with Jack and not only enjoys the pain but invites it. There is little hope of ever being free of Jack’s machinations.
For me, this wasn’t a romance. Kate and Nathan don’t even meet until 75% through the book, and by the time the book has finished, they’ve probably only known each other a week. That week has been spent either in the hospital or on the run and filled with constant danger. They really know nothing of each other. On top of that, Kate has just endured rape as well as physical and mental torture by Nathan’s half brother. There is no way she is in any state of mind (or body) for what is her first consensual relationship. No way. It was completely unbelievable.
The plot was incredibly convoluted. I haven’t even gone into all the twists and turns the plot takes. Not only is there the current events which are convoluted, there is Jack’s twisted interpretation of events which are exceptionally complicated, there are events from history which feed into the current events that we learn about in bits and pieces, and on top of all that, there are other people manipulating the main characters. By the end of the book I was so confused. It would have been a better story without all the drama from the past, and without the other people who were doing the manipulating.
It is an incredibly dark story. There is a lot of violence, both sexual and not. The violence escalates as the book progresses, and I simply can’t imagine that Kate could come through it without horrific mental scars to go with the physical scars she would bear.
The writing style itself was good, and easy to read. It was the convoluted plot and the fact that the romance was not only far from the focus of the plot but also utterly unbelievable that led me to give it two stars.
