If wishes were horses...

They painted Vegas red, then they woke up with hangovers, wedding bands and the vague memory of an Elvis impersonator.

Henriette Gyland delivers a dark, brooding and sinister RS reminiscent of the great Alfred Hitchcock movies of the 1930's and '40s.

Not all bad, but this book kind of drove me insane. Creepy possessive H with magical powers. The h should have run...of course she didn't.

Thorne isn't a good guy, but Nadia needs his help to find her mom who's a victim of human trafficking. Sexy steamy romantic suspense.

After being robbed Jack hunts down the bandit. But she's quite a handful.
A plucky heroine, a dashing hero and a dastardly villain.

I set up this Booklikes Profile at a time when another site I use (Goodreads) had made an arbitrary and somewhat autocratic decision to censor the content of users who were critical towards authors.  Most notably they had banned "Authors Behaving Badly" shelves.  

I always wanted it to be different to the 250 word reviews I write on Goodreads and my blog and when I realised it wasn't all that different I stopped adding new content.  

I'm going to try something a little different and see how it goes.  I'm going to write reviews with the same 140 character restriction as Twitter.  So...spelling and grammar are going out the door (please don't throw things at me), and abbreviations will be....errr....well everywhere.  

Jane Yellowrock is the last Cherokee Skinwalker, two souls inhabit her body, her own and the soul of a mountain lion named Beast.  Jane can not only take the form of a mountain lion, but when she is in human form Beast lends to Jane her strength, agility, speed and predatory senses...and the occasional piece of unwanted advice on mating.

When her oldest and dearest friend, Molly vanishes on her way to visit her, it's up to Jane to find and rescue her. But as her job as the enforcer for master vampire Leo Pellissier demands even more of her time, not to mention the confusing scents of unknown witches and vampires showing up all over the city and an old enemy trying to kill her, it's proving difficult to keep all the balls in the air.  

With time running out an Molly possibly being used to power evil blood magic, magic which always demands a life, Jane is in a race against save her.  

Black Arts is book seven in the Jane Yellowrock series but in a lot of ways it feels like a beginning. A lot of things that have been bubbling away over the last few books are resolved, for both good and bad.  It's also the best book in the series since book one, Skinwalker in my opinion.  This book has left me feeling good about the future of the series and excited to continue.  

Many thanks to Berkley and Netgalley for providing me with this ARC.

Twinkie is the mayor of a small town in Texas that has fallen on hard times. She is desperate to turn the town's fortunes around so when Cole rides in on his motorbike claiming to be on a scouting mission for a big Hollywood movie, she pulls out all the stops to impress him.  

Cole shows up in town undercover and searching for his sister who was kidnapped by a religious cult. He quickly discovers she and a bunch of young pregnant women are being held captive in a former military base on the edge of town. 

There are some good things about this book.  There are a bunch of cute and quirky characters. There is a bit of a paranormal twist with ghost lights that save people who are lost in the desert. There is a healthy dose of suspense with the young women being held captive by the religious cult, and there is a bit of a romance going on between Twinkie and Cole. 

But the good in this book isn't nearly enough to save it from the way story ended.  Everything in this book was leading in a particular direction, and then completely out of the blue, almost as if the author got bored, the story finished.  I don't usually mind a few loose ends, but when those loose ends are key plot points it leaves you a little miffed.  

Macmillan is a hunter. His weapon is words. From a person's speech patterns he can know where they come from and who they've been with. He is in Bangkok hunting down the Jazzman, an arms dealer who is planning on selling a weapon that could bring governments to their knees.  

After she handed the evidence to throw her violent and abusive husband into prison, Laney immediately went on the run. She knows Rolly won't forgive and she knows that if he finds her a fate much worse than death awaits.

When Macmillan sees Laney singing in the hotel where the auction is set to take place, he immediately knows she is running.  He understand her songs are more than just background noise in the hotel's restaurant. Then he discovers she might hold the key to finally identifying the Jazzman.

I have so much love for this book.  There aren't many books that surprise me, but I've read four books by Carolyn Crane and they've all blown me away.  Read this book, especially if you're a lover of Romantic Suspense.  It's worth it. 

Hope For Paws received a call about a dog living on a trash heap.  When they rescued Miley, she was suffering severe malnutrition, had a severe parasite infestation and was basically waiting to die.

With proper veterinary care, medicated baths to help with her many skin infections and some gentle grooming, things are now looking up for Miley.

But there are thousands of animals just like Miley, and if you have a spare dollar or two it will go along way towards helping some animals who have already suffered too much.  

There are a lot of good causes which deserve our support.  Help For Paws is one of them.

If you want to see Miley's story, or maybe Fiona's story, here they are.

Miley's Story:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1Xg2G_oINqc

Fiona's Story: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YJkZXh9v_i4

Anna gave up the life she knew to escape from her violent husband. On the run she has moved from town to town, escaping in the night every time her husband comes close to finding her.

Caleb is is a bounty hunter just on the shadier side of the law. He’s also a werewolf. When a collection goes wrong and he gets shot, and nearly run over (twice), Anna steps in and saves him. Unfortunately in the course of her rescue, her car and all her possessions go up in flames. Desperate to get to Anchorage so she can collect her new identity and find another bolt hole, she reluctantly agrees to join him on the road.

How to Run with a Naked Werewolf continues the story of the Graham Pack of loveable but slightly redneck werewolves in Grundy Alaska. Think less Twilight and more Duck Dynasty. It’s what Molly Harper does best, cute and quirky romance with snark. She has the remarkable ability to blend a moral message into her stories without ever sounding like she’s preaching. Another great book from one of my favorite authors.

Many thanks to Pocket Books and Edelweiss for providing me with this ARC

Loup was born in Outpost, a border town in Texas under martial law.  Her father was a wolf man super soldier who escaped from his military masters and for a time found comfort in the arms of Carmen, but before she was born he was discovered and had to escape to Mexico.

Apart from the gift of her name, she inherited super strength, agility and speed from her father, and after witnessing injustices perpetrated by the military she and her friends decide to revive the legend of Santa Olivia and get justice for the towns folk.  

But even with her super abilities, she knows that her time is short and the military will eventually capture her.  

I have a lot of love for this book.  Honestly, I was tempted to walk away in the early stages but I persevered and it was worth it.  After that initial grind, when it finally gets to Loup's story, the payoff is big.  

The Spider is the tenth book in Jennifer Estep’s Elemental Assassin series.  In it, we return to the very beginning of Gin’s life as an assassin, way back before Fletcher was murdered in book one, Spider’s Bite. 

Gin has been hired to kill Cesar Vaughn, and with his daughter showing signs of abuse, Gin is champing at the bit to get the job done. But Fletcher smells a rat and wants Gin to be cautious.  

When she runs into Sebastian,Cesar’s charismatic son, she knows there is no hope for a future, but she just can’t stay away. 

The Spider feels a little like a ticker tape parade with younger versions of all the characters showing up for the party. It reminds me a little of a car I drove in the late 1980s, a lime-green Alfasud. It wasn’t perfect, occasionally frustrating, but all in all it was a great car. A lot of fun and much loved.

Tessa has a gift, though she would call it a curse. When she touches people or the objects people have used, she is bombarded with visions. She goes through life avoiding touching anything that has been handled by others. Labelled as a freak, she moves with her family from California to Texas in the hopes of giving her a fresh start, but the town they have moved to is also home to a pack of werewolves. 

After escaping a disastrous party, she gets her first kiss from Dastien, and then Dastien's wolf decides to claim her with a bite. Suddenly all her problems are multiplied ten fold with pack politics piling on top of schoolwork and being a new werewolf, and as an alpha strong enough to rival the other alphas in the pack she is definitely causing a stir. 


Becoming Alpha is pretty damned good. It didn't always click and it occasionally felt a little rushed but overall it was very good young adult paranormal fantasy. The author tells the story with such enthusiasm that it's easy to forgive the occasional misstep. 

Many thanks to Ink Monster LLC and Netgalley for providing me with this ARC

Angelfall (book 1) was Penryn searching for her paraplegic sister Paige after the angel’s kidnapped her. In the climax Penryn and Paige escaped but not before the angels used Paige as an experimental plaything.  Raffe, their angel protector didn’t escape unharmed, the angels took his wings and gave them to his enemy, giving him hideous demon’s wings.

World After has Raffe on his own vendetta searching for his wings, while Penryn and Paige have joined the human resistance. But after Paige feeds on a hoodlum who attacked Penryn, the camp turns against them. Paige runs and Penryn, with her mother and another survivor of the angel’s experiments follow.  

While the themes are a little different there are enough similarities between this series and Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone to invite comparisons. 

World After was great, it was well written and entertaining, but if both were cars I would probably say World After was a 2013 Ford Mustang, while Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a 1968 Ford Mustang.  Both are beautiful in their own way, but there is something special, almost spiritual about the ’68.

Violence against women isn't a woman's problem, it's a man's problem.