Carries Book Reviews

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Strut
Jay Hogan
(The Style Series, #2)
Publication date: July 14th 2022
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, LGBTQ+, Romance

New Zealand farm boy turns New York fashion model.

Fairy tale? Maybe. But it hasn’t been easy. A year in this crazy city, working my tail off just to survive in a ruthless industry where sex sells and boundaries are too readily crossed.

A year and a reassuring ocean away from Hunter Donovan—a sexy, humiliating mistake that I’m not about to repeat. Distance is good. Distance is safe.

But now Hunter is back. In New York. In my life. In all those treacherous feelings that haven’t gone anywhere. But when my world suddenly crashes and I have to piece myself back together and fight for my career, will Hunter be there when I need him? Will we have what it takes to make it through this, together?

Note: This book contains themes of sexual harassment and sexual assault.

 

Goodreads / Amazon

—

EXCERPT:

Halfway down the block I came upon a small queue outside a tidy brick establishment which proved to be Color. The distant thrum of Ariana Grande leaking through the double wooden doors onto the sidewalk reminded me I was close to a generation older than most of the guys ahead of me waiting to get in.

I joined the line, ignoring a low whistle of interest from one of the guys as I passed. I took his appreciation as reassurance that my skinny black jeans paired with one of Rhys’s new season tight black-and-white-checked T-shirts passed muster. I checked my phone as I waited and fired off a text to my younger sister knowing it was afternoon in New Zealand. A few seconds later the phone rang in my hand, and I smiled and swiped it open.

“Hey, sis.”

“Hey, you. I’m heading to the supermarket. What’s up?”

The line shrank by a couple of guys, and everyone shuffled forward. “Not much. I’m waiting to get into a bar and thought I might catch you.”

Silence. “Hunter Donovan is in a queue?” She chuckled. “You don’t do queues, bro. I thought you rarefied fashionista types skipped those pesky things.”

“It’s not that level of club,” I explained. “Think popular, off-the-beaten-track gay bar. I doubt I’ll see anyone I know and certainly no one who knows me.”

“A gay bar? Ohhhhh, are you on a date?”

“No, I am not on a date. You know me. Besides, I’ve only been here two days.”

“You’re right. I do know you. Which means you’re cruising for some pretty arse. You after a bit of downtown rough, big brother?”

“Jesus, Patty, you sound like a low-budget movie, and we are not having that conversation. Ever. If you must know, I met a guy I worked with in Auckland and he happens to tend bar here. I said I’d drop by.” Kind of, almost.

“Riiiight.” She sounded sceptical. “Do I know them? You’ve always said the best thing about your trips to New York was all the great clubs. I’ve never known you to waste your time on suburban bars.” My sister was way too perceptive.

“True, but this is that model from fashion week last year? The guy Rhys discovered—”

“Oh my god,” she blurted. “That gorgeous hunk of drool you shot for Flare. Alec someone, right?”

“Alec Williamson. He got signed by Cage Talent after the show and has been in New York since. I ran into him quite by chance.”

Patty was quiet for a few seconds as the cogs in her brain ticked over. “But you liked him, right?”

What the fuck? I said nothing

.

“You can’t lie to me, Hunter. I know you. He’s the one hanging in your office on your wall of fame, aka my personal wall of hotness. He’s wearing Rhys’s design. Holy shit, Hunter. Do you have a thing? Are you—”

I needed to shut this down fast. “He’s hanging there because it was my best friend’s signature shoot for his new label,” I argued. “Not because it’s Alec.”

“Mm-hmm.” There was an irritating smile in her voice. “Pull the other one. I called into Flare that day, remember? You couldn’t take your eyes off him. Neither could I, to be honest, but you were a little smitten kitten.”

I so was. “I so wasn’t. You’re dreaming. Alec is a great model, that’s all. If I was smitten, it was on a purely professional level.”

“And yet you’re queuing to have a drink at the place he works?”

Well, when you put it like that. “Maybe.” It was all she was getting. “It’s the friendly thing to do, right?”

“Aha. Yep. Very neighbourly of you. Oh, here’s a thought. If you like him, how about you keep it in your pants for once, at least for more than a day? Get to know him.”

Too fucking late. “Oh, look at that, the bouncer’s waving me in. Gotta go, sis. Nice talking to you.” I stabbed the End Call button, stared at the double doors for a second, took a deep breath, and then pushed through.

The immediate assault to my eardrums almost rattled my brain from my skull. Add that to the heaving crowd and multicoloured light display circling the room and dripping down the walls, and I needed a minute to orient myself. I passed the coat check desk and slid against the closest wall to take a look around.

The place was humming, the music pulsing loudly above the thrum of a hundred different conversations, while the surprisingly spacious dancefloor writhed with every possible combination of couples, throuples, and dogpiles of slick bodies. Like the queue outside, it was a younger crowd, mostly early twenties, but with enough around my age to drop the creep factor to acceptable. I watched the dancers for a bit, appreciating all the hot skin and tight muscle on display before scouting the bar.

“You wanna dance?” A warm body leaned close, and I turned to find an attractive dark-haired man just inches from my face. He had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen and a pouty mouth made for sucking cock. He licked his lips and ran his hand up my arm. “You’re fucking gorgeous.”

On any other night I would’ve had him down the back and on his knees with my dick down his throat in about five minutes flat, but I wasn’t even tempted—a disturbing fact that was worth an alarm bell or two. Instead, I simply smiled and covered his hand with mine.

“Thanks. You’re pretty hot yourself, but I’m meeting someone.”

 

Author Bio:

Heart, humour and keeping it real.

Jay is a 2020 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Gay Romance and her book Off Balance was the 2021 New Zealand Romance Book of the Year.

She is a New Zealand author writing mm romance and romantic suspense, primarily set in New Zealand. She writes character driven romances with lots of humour, a good dose of reality and a splash of angst. She’s travelled extensively, lived in many countries, and in a past life she was a critical care nurse, nurse educator and counsellor. Jay is owned by a huge Maine Coon cat and a gorgeous Cocker Spaniel

 

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Title: Out of Her Depth

Author: Lizzy Barber

Publisher: MIRA

Publication Date: July 12, 2022

Page Count: 381

My rating: 4 stars

About the book:

Rachel lands her dream summer job at a luxurious Tuscan villa. She’s quickly drawn into a new group of rich and beautiful sophisticates and their world of partying, toxic relationships, and even more toxic substances. They’ve never faced consequences, are used to getting everything. But then someone goes too far. Someone dies. And nothing will ever be the same.

Lizzy Barber’s debut A Girl Named Anna won the Daily Mail First Novel Competition. In her newest and even more unputdownable work, she weaves a clever and deadly web of manipulation and desire. A summer thriller rife with back-stabbing, bed-hopping, and murder, Out of Her Depth is a perfect escapist read for fans of Euphoria, J.T. Ellison’s Her Dark Lies, or Rachel Hawkins’s Reckless Girls.

Find this book online:

Goodreads  /  Amazon  /  BookShop.org / Harlequin  / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s / Books-A-Million

Excerpt:

Before you judge me, remember this: a girl died, but it wasn’t my fault.

I know that seems like a pathetic confessional. Even more pathetic because the confession itself has, until this point, never been uttered.

I’ve wanted to. Believe me, I’ve wanted to.

The words have formed themselves on the precipice of my tongue, palpitating with their ugly need to be heard, to make me part of the narrative. To declare to the A-level students when I see it coming up on their news feeds, languorously debating it, now, once more, as it has risen into public consciousness twenty-one years after the fact: I was there.

When they stumble in late to my lesson, less eager to talk of the trapassato prossimo than about who fucked whom at last night’s social, and whether crimped hair really is making a comeback.

I was there.

When they blink at me from faces still etched with yesterday’s makeup, reeking of the top-shelf vodka and menthol cigarettes that their house mistresses will studiously ignore.

I was there.

When they declare they “really struggled with this week’s essay” so they only have notes, and they say, “About that C on the mock exam… Did you know my parents funded the library?” and they don’t even bother to wait for the response as they pull out their laptops and glance at their watches, and they think to themselves, Boring bitch has never lived.

I was there.

I imagine each letter incubating in the saliva that pools in the side of my gums. I picture myself standing, drawing the blinds. An illicit eyebrow raise that will make them pause, look up at me anew, place their laptops on the floor as I edge toward them.

Screw Dante. Let me tell you a real story about Florence.

..….

Now

I am just leaving for dinner when I hear.

People talk of remembering exactly where they were when great events happened: Princess Di, the Twin Towers, Trump. I know this isn’t quite on the same scale, but I’ll remember exactly where I was, all the same.

I’ve had back-to-back lessons all day, but now, at last, I have an hour to myself, the only person left in the languages office. I spend it working on my paper “Pirandello and the Search for Truth” for the Modern Language Review, barely coming up for air. This is the part of academia I enjoy the most: the research, the pulling together of an idea, the rearranging of words and thoughts on the page until they start to take on a life of their own, form arguments, cohesion. I’m hoping that this will be the one they’ll finally agree to publish.

I am the only French and Italian teacher at Graybridge Hall, 

have been for the last ten years. When they decided to introduce Italian for the younger years, as well as the older students, I did suggest that perhaps now it would be time to look at hiring someone else. But Ms. Graybridge, the eponymous head—and third of that name to have held the position—reminded me that the school’s ethos was “personal and continuous care for every girl.” Which didn’t really make sense as a rebuttal, but which I knew was shorthand for no, and which she knew—because of certain circumstances under which I assumed my position in the first place—I wouldn’t argue with.

Not that I don’t enjoy teaching. Sometimes. “shaping young minds” and all that seems like it should be a worthy cause. When I was younger, much younger, I imagined maybe I would do a PhD, b_ecome a professor. I also thought about diplomatic service, traveling the world as a translator, journalism, maybe, why not? Instead I sit through mock orals on topics as ground-breaking as Food and Eating Out, Cinema and TV, and My Family.

My rumbling stomach is the first signal I have that evening is approaching, and when I tear myself away from my laptop screen to look at the darkening sky, I decide to ditch my planned root around in the fridge, and be sociable instead. Wednesday is quiz night at the pub near school. A group of teachers go every week, the little thrill they get as their cerebral cortexes light up with a correct answer just about making up for a day spent asking the girls to kindly not look at their Apple Watches until break, and maybe not take their makeup out of their Marc Jacobs backpacks until class is over just this once.

I close down my laptop and do a brisk tidy of the room before slipping on my coat and scarf, and am just about to slide my phone into my rucksack when an alert catches my eye—specifically, a name, bouncing out of the BBC News push notification, one I have avoided all thought of for a long while, as much out of circumstance as necessity.

Sebastian Hale.

I freeze in the doorway—phone clutched in my hand as preciously as though it were the Rosetta stone—and look again, not quite believing I saw it right, presuming perhaps it was just wishful thinking, a long hour of screen-staring playing tricks on my eyes, that could have conjured his name before me.

But there it is. That name. Those five syllables. The six vowels and seven consonants that have held more significance for me than any word or sentence written in my entire attempted academic career.

And next to them, three words that throw my whole world off kilter, that see me reaching for the door handle and wrenching it shut, all thoughts of dinner gone from my mind:

Sebastian Hale Appeal Proceeds Tonight.

I sit at my desk, lights off, face illuminated by the white glow of my phone screen, and read someone else’s report of the story I know so well. The story I have lived. I place the phone facedown on the desk, snuffing out its light, and press my palms into the woodwork. The feel of my flesh rubbing against the desk’s smooth surface grounds me, helps me process the report—think.

I knew there had been requests for appeals over the years, all denied by the Corte d’Assise d’Appello. A change of lawyer, probably hoping that new eyes on the case could find something that was missed. But they’ve all come to nothing. How did I miss this?

If he is retried, if there is any possibility that he might be released…everything would change.

After the initial trial, after my part was done and I could finally go home and resume the life I had worked so hard to live. I tried—I really, truly tried—to put it behind me.

That was what she did, after all, and I wanted to follow her lead. I have always wanted to follow her lead. But that time has never truly left me. Sometimes, it will take the smallest thing—the light filtering through a window just so, a particular kind of humid heat, walking past a patisserie and being hit with a waft of baked vanilla sweetness—and it all comes back to me with cut-glass clarity. The sound of our laughter ricocheting off ocher-colored walls. The clink of glasses and the taste of hot weather, raw red wine. The touch of sweat-dewed skin. The scent of pine. The giddy, delightful feeling of being young and happy and having the rest of our lives spooling out in front of us.

These are the good things—the things I want to remember.

The bad things…those I have no choice but to remember.

And now, at the sight of his name alone, I am instantly transported: flying on the wings of a deep déjà vu, away from the cold late-autumn day and the dusty corners of my tired office and back, back, back to that time—that summer.

To those gold-tinged days and months that crescendoed so spectacularly into those final, onyx hours.

To the start.

Excerpted from Out of Her Depth by Lizzy Barber. Copyright © 2022 Published by MIRA Books.

Out of Her Depth by Lizzy Barber is a suspenseful thriller novel. The story in Out of Her Depth is one that is told by alternating timelines with one from the past, around twenty years before and one in the current time.

During the summer before Rachel begins her time at university she is given an opportunity to travel to Tuscany. Rachel will spend that summer working at the Villa Medici surrounded by glitz and glam that is foreign coming from her modest background.

During this summer that shaped Rachel’s life twenty some years before Rachel met Diana. Diana came from a world where money was no object and Rachel became obsessed with their friendship. Rachel also began to like one of Diana’s rich crowd friends, Sebastian, and enlisted Diana’s help to get to know him but when the summer came to an end someone had died and Sebastian had goen to prison.

Out of Her Depth by Lizzy Barber is a slow burn thriller which I’m not always the biggest fan of but I did find myself intrigued with the toxic friendship and interested in finding out what would happen. The characters in Out of Her Depth are not ones that are likable but one that make you pick up some popcorn and watch as one would a train wreck. It was easy to lose myself in Tuscany in the past but also follow along easily as the story switched to the current as I waited for the big finale where it all comes together.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

About the author:

Lizzy Barber studied English at Cambridge University. Having previously dabbled in acting and film development, she has spent the last ten years as head of marketing for a restaurant group. Her first novel, A Girl Named Anna, won the Daily Mail and Random House First Novel Prize. She lives in London with her family.

Author Website / Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / Goodreads

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The Crash
Skye Warren & Amelia Wilde
Publication date: July 12th 2022
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Romance, Suspense

Carter Morelli works alone, but his orders are clear. Pilot the small aircraft carrying the renowned geologist to a remote island. Except the plane malfunctions at a crucial moment.

June Porter wants to stay on solid land. She doesn’t want to fly, but it’s the only way to get to the dig site. Then her worst fears come true.

A heavy storm. A swift fall from the sky. And a heart stopping crash.

An emergency landing leaves them stranded.

A shadow moves through the trees. They aren’t alone in the jungle.

 

Goodreads / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / iBooks / Kobo / Google Play

—

EXCERPT:

It’s a sunny day. Fluffy white clouds in a blue sky. No turbulence jostles us again. We couldn’t have asked for a better day to fly. It’s perfect, except for the sense of foreboding.

The engine stutters. It’s not precisely wrong, but it’s not precisely right.

“Carter? What’s happening?”

“Nothing.”

It’s not unprecedented. Engines make noise. They’re mechanical. It happens. I check the gauges. Nothing. It’s a small plane, but top-of-the-line. Well-maintained. I checked it over, tip to tail, when I arrived at Heathrow. Nothing was out of order then.

Nothing should be broken now.

Another stutter. This one’s bigger. Fuck.

The fuel gauge swings down toward empty, ticking by line after line.

My entire spine chills. That’s a malfunction. That’s a fucking problem. We’re dumping fuel on a delay, out over the ocean, almost like…

Someone planned for this to happen.

Fuck. Is that what my handler was calling about? How would she know something is wrong on the plane, thousands of miles away? I reach for the landing gear controls.

They try to engage. They fail. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

What’s happening is that the landing gear are stuck halfway open.

Worse, I don’t trust the navigation equipment.

The paper map in the panel above my head resists coming out, but I force it. Open it. Check my bearings one last time. Trust them one last time.

Angle the plane in a slightly different direction.

Off the flight plan, but toward the only land within range on the map.

What the hell is going on? I’ve logged over half a million nautical miles. This has never happened before. The plane drops. A few hundred feet before I can steady it. June gasps, clapping a hand over her mouth.

And then the engines cut out.

It’s silent in the sky. Wind skims over the fuselage. My heart pounds in my ears. I ignore all of it.

Because we’re going down.

There’s nothing to keep this plane in the air.

Not a prayer in the world could keep us flying without engines.

“We’re going to land.” It’s the truth and nothing but the truth. There are no other choices. It’s land the plane or die. “Brace yourself.”

“No,” she breathes.

It’s only a whisper of breath, but I hear it. I feel it, brushing over my skin. I’m tuned in to her. Into the plane. Adrenaline floods my veins, making me tuned into the fucking universe. And every single signal is telling me that we’re fucked.

A patch of green in the ocean comes into view. It looks impossibly small. Too small to land on, much less reach, but as we hurtle forward, it gets larger. Becomes an island. The island I saw on the map.

That’s it.

Our only chance at survival.

 

Author Bio:

Skye Warren is the New York Times bestselling author of dangerous romance. Her books have sold over one million copies. She makes her home in Texas with her loving family, sweet dogs, and evil cat.

Author links:

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—

Amelia Wilde is a USA TODAY bestselling author of steamy contemporary romance and loves it a little too much. She lives in Michigan with her husband and daughters. She spends most of her time typing furiously on an iPad and appreciating the natural splendor of her home state from where she likes it best: inside.

Amelia is a USA Today best selling author from northern Michigan. Be her friend!

Author links:

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Damaged Doll
Jennifer Bene
(The Beth Series, #2)
Publication date: July 12th 2022
Genres: Adult, Gothic, Romance, Suspense

The long-awaited sequel to Breaking Beth is finally here!

“I’m too broken for love.”

After everything Beth has been through, all she wants is to feel normal.

To be normal.

But the weight of her past won’t let her go easily.

“Wanting her is wrong.”

All Jake wants is to be a hero.

To save as many as he can from the monsters of this world.

But when the monsters come for Beth Doherty…

he isn’t thinking like a hero.

Ripping her out of her life was bad enough.

Wanting her is worse.

But resisting her might just be impossible.

 

Goodreads / Amazon

—

EXCERPT:

She felt like she was underwater. Floating in emptiness, with no ground to stretch her toes out for, and no air to swim toward.

It was endless… but not in a peaceful way. Someone had told her once that drowning was peaceful, that the brain gave a sense of euphoria as the lungs filled up with water, but Beth had never felt anything like that.

No calm. No peace.

Just a flickering memory of panic, and an absolute fear of the surface.

Survival was supposed to be an instinct, and she knew she should want to reach the surface. To breathe air again, to stop suffocating in the dark… but all she ever did was dive deeper. The deeper she went, the easier it was to block out the flickering glimpses of the things happening above. All the sounds, the textures, the sensations. The things that were so much worse than drowning.

But it got exhausting to stay down when her body wanted to be buoyant, wanted air, wanted freedom. A constant fight, a battle for depth whenever the water got rough and the waves turned the distant surface into chaos.

It was happening again.

That steady rise to the surface that brought back the panic, heart pounding in her ears as she became aware of the world outside the water. She wanted to dive down, to hide from the pull, but she was so fucking tired — and then there were the voices.

Muffled, blurred by the water for a while… until she got closer. As the light grew brighter, and she started to feel, she could hear them. Too many.

And him.

His voice always stood out the strongest, even though it was always calm. Cold and calm. Just like the water farther down, where she was safer… but she wasn’t safe up here.

Surfacing was always bad. Always.

If she reacted, if she made a sound, then they’d know she could. Then the storm on the surface would just get worse, it would be harder to swim down with the water too rough. Harder to hide.

Despite her best efforts to avoid it, the light got stronger, the world coming toward her, and she clenched her teeth tight to stay silent, to avoid the urge to scream or fight.

And then she broke the surface, instinctively pulling at the cable around her wrist, tethering her to the bed — but it was better to be connected to the bed. Out of the bed was always worse. Out of the bed meant there might be someone new, somewhere new, which always meant pain.

Although the surface was always painful, and she did her best to brace for it as her mind joined her body, as her eyes focused on the light and she felt the texture of sheets against her back and thick plastic around her wrist and –

Curtains. Pale purple.

A poster of a boy band.

She was home.

She kept forgetting that she was home, that she didn’t have to stay under anymore, didn’t have to fight the surface or feel the panic. Of course, knowing it didn’t keep her heart from racing, or her nails from digging into her palms as she pulled at the zip-tie around her wrist.

 

Author Bio:

Jennifer Bene is a USA Today bestselling author of dangerously sexy and deviously dark romance. From BDSM, to Suspense, Dark Romance, and Thrillers—she writes it all. Always delivering a twisty, spine-tingling journey with the promise of a happily-ever-after.

Don’t miss a release! Sign up for the newsletter to get new book alerts (and a free welcome book) at http://jenniferbene.com/newsletter

 

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Welcome to the pre-order event for Invitation to Hell, a dark romantic fantasy by Amber Bunch! Read on for details, pre-order a copy, and enter the giveaway ($25 Amazon e-gift card – open to everyone)!

When you pre-order you get a few extras when your book arrives:

2 Stickers (Including Chibi Sticker of Asmo and Kali)

2 Bookmarks

Art Print of Asmodeus

Signed Book Plate

Invitation to Hell (Goddess of Death #1)

Publication Date: September 22, 2022 (First Edition)

Genre: Dark Romance/ Dark Fantasy/ Mythology

What if, all you’ve ever known was ripped away from you…

You were thrown into a world full of the same creatures that have haunted your nightmares for years. Magic, and the Gods are no longer a myth, but a part of your destiny.

Now, you’re about to lose everything and everyone you love to an evil King known as the Devourer of Souls.

Then, there’s Hades son…

The ruthless Prince that drives you crazy and thinks you are a waste of his time.

You can’t stand him, but he has been instructed to protect you, so now you have to deal with his arrogance on top of everything else.

The two of you must travel across the Realms to find a way to stop King Lucius before all is lost and you still don’t even know how to use your newly awakened power.

Well, this should be fun.

Pre-Order Here and at B&N!

 

About the Author

Amber is an author of spicy romance with a twist…
She isn’t committed to any one genre. She lives in Ohio with her family and her dog. She enjoys the outdoors, reading, playing guitar, and loves to stay active. She is a mother of three and her family is her biggest support group. She has also written a children’s book series that was inspired by her children and their play adventures together.

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