In My Mailbox: Week of February 17

In Samantha’s Mailbox:

Title: Flirting with Magick

Author: Leigh Bennett

Received: Via CLP Blog Tours

Synopsis: When a new-age remedy fixes Abby Williams’ career rut, the twenty-five year old figures a spell could heal her broken heart too…

Suddenly, she’s having hot sex with an even hotter musician, which might work as long as she doesn’t get in the way of his rock stardom. Her work colleague is flirty and fun, but could he be keeping something from her? And now, the guy who broke her heart wants to rekindle their relationship. Can she trust him enough to give it another shot?

So far, it seems Abby’s spell hasn’t worked. Or then again, perhaps it has?

Title: Saving Saffron Sweeting

Author: Pauline Wiles

Received: Via CLP Blog Tours

Synopsis: Grace Palmer’s British friends all think she’s living the American Dream. But her design business is floundering and when she discovers her husband is cheating with her best client, she panics and flees home to England.

The tranquil village of Saffron Sweeting appears to be a good place for Grace to lick her wounds, but the community is battling its own changes. Reluctantly, Grace finds herself helping her new neighbours as they struggle to adjust and save their businesses. However, not everyone has the same opinion on what’s good for the village. The charismatic new man in her life may have one speculative eye on Grace, but the other is firmly on profit. How will she navigate the tricky path between her home and her happiness?

With gentle humour and generous helpings of British tea and cake, Saving Saffron Sweeting explores one woman’s need to define herself through her career and community, before she can figure out who should be by her side.

Title: Reckless Abandon

Author: Jenn Flynn-Shon

Received: Via CLP Blog Tours

Synopsis: How far would you go for love? Young Adult fiction Author, Shaw McLeary, returns from Whole Foods to discover her husband, Danny, is gone. So is their stash of cash, his clothes, passport, and her wedding rings. He took off in a hurry and left her behind. While trying to piece it all together Shaw witnesses a cop’s murder in her home. Determined not to become the next victim, she flees. She fears dirty cops are involved in Danny’s disappearance. There’s only one person she can trust to help her – JJ Anderson, Private Investigator. Also, her ex-fiancé.

A retired Phoenix cop turned PI, Shaw hopes JJ will be inclined to take her case. Despite his resentment for how their relationship ended, he agrees to help her track down leads on Danny. They chase the clues from Phoenix to Manhattan to upstate New York. In such close quarters Shaw finds it difficult to maintain a professional distance from her first real love. Then what happens if she finds Danny? Can she still love a man who abandoned her or is she too drawn to fixing her past mistake to let go of JJ again?

Title: Outside the Men’s Room

Author: Rose Gonsoulin

Received: From Rose Gonsoulin

Synopsis: Who hasn’t wanted to tell the boss he’s a jerk and quit on the spot? It’s the principle, right? Yet most people never do it. They swallow their pride and either suck it up or find another job. Except Sidney Sinclair, a hard-working but naïve young engineer entering the work place when college educated women were still a novelty item. It was a time when they were graduating in droves, like a bumper crop of ripe corn, flooding the market with their career aspirations. But can girls raised on Chatty Cathy and the Dating Game succeed in a man’s world?

After facing blatant discrimination, Sidney resorts to deception to break into the good ole boy’s club of engineering and construction. Once inside she’s thwarted at every turn—open hostility, intentional sabotage, and worse, an attraction to the man who holds the reins to her career. Was Sidney chasing a dream, or just running from her fears? Can she survive the traps and land mines waiting for her in a man’s world, or will she succumb to the goons who want her out of the way?

Set in the early 1980’s in Houston this retro chick lit novel has all the native nuances of living in the Bayou City at a time when many young women were caught between two worlds—Work and Love.

Title: 33 Valentines

Author: Stephanie Monahan

Received: From Stephanie Monahan

Synopsis: All Sophie wants for her thirty-third year is a calendar without a February—and without a Valentine’s Day. The unlucky month haunts her with regrets, loss, and missteps she can never take back. But this year, she’s determined to make a change— and she’s going to start with telling her best friend, Sam, how she feels about him.

But February isn’t making it easy for her. Sam’s got a date with his dream girl, and Sophie finds herself in the hospital. Then there’s her father, who has a surprise that’s about to turn her world upside-down, and her little brother, who doesn’t seem to have any room for her in his life. While everyone else seems to be living life, Sophie is stuck in neutral.

Now, Sophie must come to terms with everything that’s holding her back in order to fight for what she wants before she loses the chance to turn her luck around.

Title: Speaking of Love

Author: Ophelia London

Received: From Ophelia London

Synopsis: Speech teacher Mackenzie Simms decides she needs to find a new girl for her friend, handsome newspaper tycoon Rick Duffy. Though they’re each other’s go-to dates for events, Mac and Rick couldn’t be more different: she is outspoken, sarcastic, and completely loathes his privileged lifestyle. He’s laid back, unassuming, and comfortable at an upper-class charity function. So why can’t she stop thinking about him?

Rick knows he and Mackenzie are better off just as friends, so he agrees to the double date getaway Mac plans at his family cabin. But seeing Mac cuddle up with her “friendly” date rankles Rick beyond reason, and Mac’s more affected seeing Rick set up with her beauty queen cousin than she’d like to admit. Can Mac ‘fess up to what’s really in her heart, when speaking her mind puts everything at risk?

 

In Sara’s Mailbox:

Title: The Adoption

Author: Anne Berry

Received: Lucy @ Ebury Publishing

Synopsis: ‘I was fourteen when my Mother said that she needed to speak to me…And then she told me – just like that. I was adopted. And what I felt was not shock or grief but the most enormous sense of relief’. Growing up as the only child of strict, God-fearing parents, Lucilla has always felt her difference. But it is not till adulthood that she discovers the real reasons behind her adopted mother’s often times violent indifference. As for Harriet, she would have readily sent her longed for baby back if she could, having discovered she falls all too short of her expectations. And then there is Bethan, a young girl in 1940s Wales, whose only mistake is falling in love with the wrong man…

Title: The Sunshine When She’s Gone

Author: Thea Goodman

Received: Leyane @ FSB Associates

Synopsis: A fresh, funny, and wisely observed debut novel about marriage—about the love, longing and ambivalence exposed when a husband takes the baby on a highly unusual outing

When Veronica Reed wakes up one frigid January morning, two things are “off”—first of all, she has had a good night’s sleep, which hasn’t happened in months, and second, both her husband and her baby are gone. Grateful for the much-needed rest, Veronica doesn’t, at first, seriously question her husband’s trip out to breakfast with baby Clara. Little does she know, her spouse has fled lower Manhattan, with Clara, for some R&R in the Caribbean.

Told through alternating points of view, The Sunshine When She’s Gone explores the life-changing impact of parenthood on a couple as individuals and as partners. Thea Goodman brings us into intimacies made tense by sleep-deprivation and to losses and gains made more real by acknowledging them. Here is the story of a couple pushed to the edge and a desperate father’s attempt give them both space to breathe.

Title: Rock My World

Author: Sharisse Coulter

Received: Sharisse Coulter

Synopsis: Jenna Jax-Anders hit rock bottom in high school. Or so she thought. From rock star heiress to knocked-up has been, she turned it all around, marrying the punk rock baby daddy love of her life. The perfect Hollywood fairytale. Until the day she walked in on him kissing her best friend.
As she struggles to find herself and redefine the world around her, she faces the challenges of raising her over-achieving teenage daughter, the heartbreak of losing her best friend (backstabbing aside), and emerging from the shadows of two famous last names to find her own identity. Oh, there’s also the tiny issue of her husband’s record label, backed by an anonymous mogul whose morally ambiguous creative direction may ruin them all.
But she doesn’t know about that yet.