Jane Litte's Blog, page 52

REVIEW: Code Name Edelweiss by Stephanie Landsem

“What I am looking for—what I desperately need, Mrs. Weiss—is a spy.”

Adolf Hitler is still a distant rumble on the horizon, but a Jewish spymaster and his courageous spies uncover a storm of Nazi terror in their own backyard.

In the summer of 1933, a man named Adolf Hitler is the new and powerful anti-Semitic chancellor of Germany. But in Los Angeles, no-nonsense secretary Liesl Weiss has concerns much closer to home. The Great Depression is tightening its grip and Liesl is the sole supporter...

REVIEW: The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen by KJ Charles

Content warning: child abuse, neglect

Dear KJ Charles,

What a delight this book was! So cleverly and tightly plotted and so very romantic. There were only a couple of things I had questions about – but given that this is billed as “the Doomsdays book 1”, I’m hoping we’ll see Gareth and Joss in future books and those answers will be provided then.

Notwithstanding how much I enjoyed the book, readers should note that there is some explicit child abuse on page involving one of the Doomsday cousins...

REVIEW: One Extra Corpse by Barbara Hambly

May, 1924. It’s been seven months since young British widow Emma Blackstone arrived in Hollywood to serve as companion to Kitty Flint: her beautiful, silent-movie star sister-in-law. Kitty is generous, kind-hearted . . . and a truly terrible actress. Not that Emma minds; she’s too busy making her academic parents turn in their graves with her new job writing painfully historically inaccurate scenarios for Foremost Studios, in between wrangling their leading lady out of the arms of her army of ...

REVIEW: Off The Map by Trish Doller

Content notes:  dementia and

Spoiler: Show

death of a parent

Dear Trish Doller,

Readers first met Carla Black and Eamon Sullivan in Float Plan where Carla’s best friend, Anna, and Eamon’s brother, Keane, found their HEA. Now, Anna and Keane are getting married. The wedding is in Ireland and Carla has flown from Florida to Dublin where she will meet up with Eamon and they will travel together to Tralee where the nuptials are to take place. Tralee is only about a 3 hour drive from Dublin but ...

REVIEW: A Noble Cunning: The Countess and the Tower by Patricia Bernstein

A thrilling tale, based on a true story, of one woman’s tremendous courage and incomparable wit in trying to rescue her husband from the Tower of London the night before he is to be executed.

The heroine of A Noble Cunning, Bethan Glentaggart, Countess of Clarencefield, a persecuted Catholic noblewoman, is determined to try every possible means of saving her husband’s life, with the help of a group of devoted women friends.

Amid the turbulence of the 1715 Rebellion against England’s first Germ...

Open Thread for Readers for March 2023

Got a book you want to talk about? Frustrated with a book or series? In love with a new one? Found a buried treasure? An issue that keeps popping up in the books you are reading? Just want to chat about stuff in general? Post about it here!

Jayne’s Latest Reading List

Georgie, All Along by Kate Clayborn

Longtime personal assistant Georgie Mulcahy has made a career out of putting others before herself. When an unexpected upheaval sends her away from her hectic job in L.A. and back to her hometown, Georgie must confront an uncomfortable truth: her own wants and needs have always been a disconcertingly blank page.

But then Georgie comes across a forgotten artifact—a “friendfic” diary she wrote as a teenager, filled with possibilities she once imagined. To an ...

REVIEW: OCME: Life in America’s Top Forensic Medical Center by Bruce Goldfarb

Perfect for fans of Michael Lewis and David Simon (Homicide, The Corner, The Wire, We Own This City)

Real life is different from what gets depicted on procedural crime dramas.

Equipped with a journalist’s eye, a paramedic’s experience and a sardonic wit, Bruce Goldfarb spent ten years with Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, where every sudden or unattended death in the state is scrutinized.

Touching on numerous scandals, including Derek Chauvin’s trial for the murder of George Fl...

JOINT REVIEW: The Eidolon by K.D. Edwards

Janine: Sirius introduced me to K.D. Edwards’ Tarot Sequence series, which we both love, and we decided to review his new spinoff novella, The Eidolon, together.

We’ll begin with the blurb:

In the epic conclusion to K.D. Edwards’ first blockbuster trilogy in The Tarot Sequence series, readers followed Rune on a race against time as an age-old threat rose to threaten the city of New Atlantis. Now, for the first time, The Eidolon tells what really happened to Max, Quinn, and Anna as prisoners in t...

REVIEW: Silk and Stone by Dinah Dean

Sometimes the miracles you were praying for were there all along…

Norman-born Elys de Wix fills her time with embroidery on the long pilgrimage to Rome to pray for healing of brother’s injury. She never thought much of it, until their new traveling companion, Saxon master-mason Aylwin, admires her skill. While not as handsome and diverting as Sir Fulk, when Elys is dreading entering a nunnery, it is Aylwin who whispers a solution: she could make a living from her embroidery.

On her return to En...