Review - - CORNERED

CORNERED

by Suzanne Ferrell

Neptune's Five - Book 3

Publisher: Suzanne Ferrell Productions

Release Date: May 9, 2023

Reviewed by PJ

August, 1941
America remains neutral in the war in Europe, but signs of the Axis army’s expanding power grab have many in America believing their involvement in the war is only a matter of time. In preparation for that event, they begin gathering information from all areas of conflict.

A Moroccan Mission
A descendant of the Pirate Blackbeard, Warren Smith, aka Chief, has spent his life on the sea, and now he pilots the Folly for the undercover Neptune Five team. As war rages in Europe, danger lurks everywhere, even in remote parts of the world. The Neptune Five embark on a perilous mission to map safe passage up the Sebou river in Morocco to a crucial airstrip, without drawing the attention of the Vichy French navy or the Nazis soldiers stationed there.
Enter Elizabeth "Betty" Devereaux, a missionary nurse with a secret. She knows the Sebou river and needs to deliver life-saving medical supplies to the Bedouins living along the shores. She agrees to guide the Folly's crew up the river. As Betty and Chief navigate the treacherous waters of Morocco, they find themselves drawn to each other despite the dangers threatening to tear them apart.

November 1942

America has entered the war. On the eve of Operation Torch, the invasion of Morocco, Chief and the Neptune Five team has another mission—to find Betty who has gone missing. They fear she’s landed in the hands of the Nazi SS. With the help of the Bedouin resistance fighters the team races across the desert to a kasbah fortress prison to free her before she’s killed.

PJ's Thoughts:

Suzanne Ferrell's Neptune's Five has become one of my favorite romantic suspense series and book three, CORNERED, one of my most anticipated books this spring. After two clandestine, highly suspenseful missions ferreting out spies stateside, the team heads to Morocco for something new. This time, they are the spies, gathering intel in the months leading up to America's entry into WWII. There's plenty of action, suspense, danger, and a bit of romance to keep readers flipping pages right up to the breath-stealing conclusion. 

Ferrell's grasp of time and place in this book is impeccable, bringing to the page the tension, secrecy, and danger of missions such as those assigned to the Neptune's Five team. Her descriptions of the foreign locales allowed me to visualize everything experienced by the characters, from weather to terrain to customs, dangers, and more. I really felt like I was right there with them every step of the way, whether navigating treacherous rivers, outsmarting the enemy, or racing across deserts to rescue one of their own. The secondary characters are well developed, adding another layer of complexity to the story, especially the villains. The author doesn't shy away from atrocities perpetuated by Nazis, which may make some of the scenes difficult to read. Good triumphs over evil - with justice served in a particularly satisfying way - but there is also pain in the journey to get there. Such are the realities of war. 

I love the complexity of this team, the nuances of the individual members, all of whom come from a variety of backgrounds, the range of ages, experience, and skills. It lends a realism and authenticity to these characters, making them more approachable and engaging. By now, I've become invested in all of them and feel like I'm coming to know them better with each book published. 

The romance between Betty and Chief is one that hits quickly then slowly plays out over time in a series of letters. Typically, I prefer face-to-face growth between a couple but in this case the tensions, heightened emotions, and sacrifices of war lend believability to their unconventional "courtship." The letters provide a viable method of getting to know one another while separated, allowing both of them to reveal the depths of their feelings and fears, creating a strong bond between them that deepens into an enduring love. It gave me everything I needed.

While CORNERED can be read and enjoyed as a standalone, it's my opinion that you'll have a much better understanding of the characters if you read the books in the series in order. I highly recommend them all. 

Review - - Close Up

Close Up
by Amanda Quick
Burning Cove, California - Book 4
Publisher: Berkley (Hardcover)
Release Date: May 5, 2020
Reviewed by PJ
  

Welcome to Burning Cove, California where 1930s Hollywood glamour conceals a ruthless killer…
 
Vivian Brazier never thought life as an art photographer would include nightly wake-up calls to snap photos of grisly crime scenes or headshots for aspiring male actors. Although she is set on a career of transforming photography into a new art form, she knows her current work is what’s paying the bills.
 
After shooting crime scene photos of a famous actress, the latest victim of the murderer the press has dubbed the “Dagger Killer,” Vivian notices eerie similarities to the crime scenes of previous victims—details that only another photographer would have noticed—details that put Vivian at the top of the killer’s target list.
 
Nick Sundridge has always been able to “see” things that others don’t, coping with disturbing dreams and visions. His talent, or as he puts it—his curse—along with his dark past makes him a recluse, but a brilliant investigator. As the only one with the ability to help, Nick is sent to protect Vivian. Together, they discover the Dagger Killer has ties to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood royalty and high society. It is a cutthroat world of allure and deception that Vivian and Nick must traverse—all in order to uncover the killer who will stop at nothing to add them to their gallery of murders.

PJ's Thoughts:

Regardless of the time, place, or pseudonym, Amanda Quick (a/k/a Jayne Ann Krentz) is a master crafter of mystery. In Close Up, the fourth book of Quick's Burning Cove series, the author takes us into the fascinating world of Hollywood's Golden Age and the deadly evil of a murderer lurking within. She begins weaving the threads of the mystery from the first pages of the book and keeps them tightly bound through several twists and turns until the final, stunning conclusion. I was hooked from beginning to end.

One of the many things at which Quick excels is creating atmosphere within her stories. Close Up is no exception. She transported me to the 1930's of the many Hollywood movies I've seen that were filmed in that era. The clothes, cars, nightclubs and mansions in the hills above Los Angeles. The beautiful young men who gathered in what would become Muscle Beach, who provide artistic inspiration to photographer Vivian. And the throng of crime beat photographers who rush to the scenes of murders in the middle of the night, flashbulbs popping, jostling one another in a bid to get the best shot, the front page photo, and the newspaper money to carry them through another day. It all played out, like a black and white film reel in my mind.

I adored Vivian. She's a wonderful representation of the bold, "modern" women of the time who were venturing out into the world (she's cut off by her wealthy father), forging their own paths, using their voices, and creating careers, and lives, of their own choice. Nick, a man who admires her fortitude, respects her skill, and shares the desire blooming between them, is her perfect partner. And, while the suspense is more heavily weighted in this book, their romance is grounded with an emotionally satisfying depth...and a flash of sizzle. Vivian is also the right woman to help Nick deal with the emotional trauma of his past and stand strongly by his side into the future. I so enjoyed these two and loved watching them work together to unravel the mystery. A mystery, with many moving parts, that kept me trying to figure everything out right up until the end of the book. I love when an author is able to do that.

Close Up is the fourth book in Quick's Burning Cove series but stands on its own. While a few characters from earlier in the series make appearances, reading their stories first is not necessary to thoroughly enjoy Vivian and Nick's journey in Close Up. It has my enthusiastic recommendation.  

Review - - Garden of Lies

Garden of Lies

By Amanda Quick

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Release Date: April 21, 2015

Ursula Kern, proprietor of the Kern Secretarial Agency, refuses to accept the official conclusion that the death of her employee and friend Anne Clifton was due to either suicide or natural causes. A note clutched in the dead woman’s hand leads Ursula to believe that her friend was murdered. Since the police won’t investigate, Ursula decides to conduct her own investigation, and the logical place to begin, since Anne, like her employer, was an unmarried woman with no family, is with Anne’s last clients, Lord and Lady Fulbrooke. But first, Ursula must inform her own client, legendary archaeologist Slater Roxton, that another client’s work takes priority over cataloging antiquities for him.

Slater is not pleased with the news. The illegitimate son of actress Lily Lafontaine and wealthy aristocrat Edward Roxton, Slater is a legendary figure who miraculously survived being trapped in an ancient burial chamber and thus became a media sensation. Abandoned by his companions who thought he had been crushed to death beneath the falling stones, he lived for a year on Fever Island, thought to be uninhabited. The island was actually inhabited by a monastery belonging to the Order of the Three Paths, a philosophical rather than a religious order, whose ideas and meditative practices transformed Slater. Despite the fact that his father recognized him, provided him with a gentleman’s education, and even made Slater sole trustee of the Roxton fortune, Slater has never been at home in society. He senses in the heavily veiled Ursula a kindred spirit. Unhappy with Ursula’s decision to play detective and concerned about her safety, he insists on joining her investigation.

Ursula has mixed feelings about Slater’s role as co-investigator. She is aware that his background gives him access to his mother’s theatrical connections and to his father’s upper-crust world, access Ursula lacks. Also, she knows his experience recovering lost and stolen treasures could prove useful. But she is jealous of her independence and fears that he will not see her as an equal. Theirs is at times an uneasy alliance, but each brings something unique to the partnership.

Although superficially different from one another, Ursula and Slater are alike in fundamental ways. They are both proven survivors remade by experience. Ursula recreated herself when a disastrous marriage, a poverty-stricken widowhood, and an epic scandal made her former life impossible. Although Slater did not change his name and he does have some close family ties, he is a very different man from the young archaeologist who chased a myth. As each observes independently of the other, Ursula’s veil and Slater’s glasses serve the same purpose—to limit the view others have of them and to keep the larger world at a distance.

It is Slater who discovers that Lord Fulbrooke is connected to the Olympus Club, a mysterious private club that offers a hallucinogenic drug and the companionship of high-class courtesans to its wealthy members. Ursula uncovers a locked room in Lady Fulbrooke’s conservatory in which the melodramatic poet is growing the plant from which the drug is made. Together Ursula and Slater uncover a web of drug trafficking, blackmail, and murder that stretches from London to New York. Can they find the evidence they need before one of them becomes the next victim? Their courage to complete their quest is unquestioned, but is their courage strong enough to open their lives and their hearts to one another and to move beyond shared passion to commitment and love?

Garden of Lies is vintage Amanda Quick, a winning combination of breath-catching mystery and sigh-worthy romance with an independent, active, intelligent heroine and a hero who is a bit of a misfit with definite quirks. He matches her intelligence and is confident enough of his masculinity to support her independence, with occasional lapses due to his need to protect where he loves. This one is set in Victorian London at a time when advances in the typewriter were opening the world of work to women at an increasing rate. Quick uses this setting in interesting ways.

The early Amanda Quick novels such as Ravished, Mistress, and Dangerous remain some of my all-time favorite historical romances, and although I don’t rate this one quite on par with those classics, I did find it a solid read. Quick (aka Jayne Ann Krentz) can be depended on to give readers smart, unconventional characters, a real sense of period setting, and a balance of mystery and romance in which neither genre overpowers the other. For me, that is a winning combination. If you are a fan of Amanda Quick, I expect you will find Garden of Lies a thoroughly enjoyable read. If it has been a while since you read Quick or if you like historical romantic suspense but have never read Amanda Quick, I recommend you give this book a try. I think you will be glad you did.

~Janga