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Shivers #4
Darkwood Manor
An estate haunted by over a hundred years of tragedy—and Donovan Black stood at the heart of it. Like Darkwood Manor, Donovan was an utter mystery. An FBI sharpshooter who couldn't break away from his past, he only wanted to make sure that history didn't repeat itself—especially now that the manor had a lovely new owner.
Isabella Ross had either discovered the perfect vacation spot or her final resting place. Now her only hope for survival is a man who doesn't want her around—a man she can't seem to resist. But the secrets in his family's attic threaten to consume them both, and something—or someone—won't rest until the manor house is empty….
Isabella Ross had either discovered the perfect vacation spot or her final resting place. Now her only hope for survival is a man who doesn't want her around—a man she can't seem to resist. But the secrets in his family's attic threaten to consume them both, and something—or someone—won't rest until the manor house is empty….
224 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 17, 2011
3 people are currently reading
115 people want to read
About the author
Jenna Ryan
96 books128 followersJenna Ryan was born in Victoria, British Columbia. After long stints in different cities across Canada, she returned home to Vancouver Island where she has lived ever since. She has had thirty-one books published in the Harlequin Intrigue series. Her ideas come from real life, and she is helped in her writing by her sister Kathy.
She enjoys reading and is a big fan of women's fiction, psychological suspense and mystery novels. She also enjoys watching classic suspense movies. She loves strong heroines, heroes with character, romance stories and a good whodunit by the fire on a rainy night.
Her heritage is a blend of English and Irish — which is probably where the gift of blarney comes from. She is unmarried, but involved with a wonderful man. She also has a little white cat named Sheena.
Whenever she is not writing, she travels as much as time and finances will allow. After North America, Europe is her favorite continent to explore, because it was in those countries that many of the myths and legends she drew upon in her early years of writing were born.
Growing up, she considered various careers and dabbled in several of them, including, after university, the travel industry, tourism, sales and modeling. Work in the fashion industry in Toronto and Montreal gave her an interesting peek into various aspects of that world. She learned that where money, power and people come together, there will always be unpredictability — an element she feels is essential to a strong mystery. Add a healthy measure of personal conflict, an intriguing setting and a spicy romance into the mix, and you have the ingredients for what she believes to be the best of all possible stories — a great romantic suspense.
She enjoys reading and is a big fan of women's fiction, psychological suspense and mystery novels. She also enjoys watching classic suspense movies. She loves strong heroines, heroes with character, romance stories and a good whodunit by the fire on a rainy night.
Her heritage is a blend of English and Irish — which is probably where the gift of blarney comes from. She is unmarried, but involved with a wonderful man. She also has a little white cat named Sheena.
Whenever she is not writing, she travels as much as time and finances will allow. After North America, Europe is her favorite continent to explore, because it was in those countries that many of the myths and legends she drew upon in her early years of writing were born.
Growing up, she considered various careers and dabbled in several of them, including, after university, the travel industry, tourism, sales and modeling. Work in the fashion industry in Toronto and Montreal gave her an interesting peek into various aspects of that world. She learned that where money, power and people come together, there will always be unpredictability — an element she feels is essential to a strong mystery. Add a healthy measure of personal conflict, an intriguing setting and a spicy romance into the mix, and you have the ingredients for what she believes to be the best of all possible stories — a great romantic suspense.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
June 6, 2012
Darkwood Manor holds a special place in my heart for very personal reasons. It was one of those "right place at the right time" books and it was the first book of Jenna Ryan's that I read. I had no idea anybody was even publishing gothic fiction (which seemed to fall out of favor in the 1970s), but when I ran across this one at the bookstore, looked at the cover and read the back cover blurb my first reaction was, "Huh...a modern-day gothic. I should give this a read."
So I did.
And I liked it. I mean, seriously, a straight married guy in his 30s picked up a Harlequin book, read it, and liked it. Seems like that should violate the laws of the universe or something, right? And yet...
It boils down to this: it's just a fun read, with a bunch of characters to like, hate, or laugh at. There's a fog-enshrouded old mansion, a killer on the loose, a small-town sheriff who's more chicken than hawk, a mysterious FBI agent (Donovan Black) with a connection to said mansion, and a young woman (Isabella Ross) who's just inherited it from a wealthy ex-boyfriend who drove his Corvette off a cliff. Oh yeah, and while poking around her new patch of real estate, Isabella's sister Katie disappears which guarantees our heroine is going to stay right where she is until she digs up the truth even if it kills her.
Like I said, modern-day gothic. Beautiful woman, old house, legends of hauntings and ghosts, dark and brooding (and potentially dangerous?) love interest, and peril lurking around every corner. Seriously, why did this sort of thing ever fade into obscurity? It's delicious.
Especially with the cast of secondary characters with all their hilarious quirks and flaws that I now know Ms. Ryan is famous for creating after excursions through several of her other books. That's what I fell in love with: the group of people who, by the end of the book, feel like extended family. I know these guys and gals. I "vacationed" in Mystic Harbor for a few days, and wouldn't mind going back again. Sometimes, that's all you can ask for in a novel that's just a hair over 200 pages long. Sometimes, that's all you need.
It was all this fan needed, at any rate. And it just goes to show that one should never judge a book by its genre. Though in Darkwood Manor's case, you can feel free to judge it by its cover. Yeah, check out that spooky old mansion on the windswept, storm-pounded coast. Try to tell me you don't want to poke around in there for a few hours. Go on. I dare ya.
So I did.
And I liked it. I mean, seriously, a straight married guy in his 30s picked up a Harlequin book, read it, and liked it. Seems like that should violate the laws of the universe or something, right? And yet...
It boils down to this: it's just a fun read, with a bunch of characters to like, hate, or laugh at. There's a fog-enshrouded old mansion, a killer on the loose, a small-town sheriff who's more chicken than hawk, a mysterious FBI agent (Donovan Black) with a connection to said mansion, and a young woman (Isabella Ross) who's just inherited it from a wealthy ex-boyfriend who drove his Corvette off a cliff. Oh yeah, and while poking around her new patch of real estate, Isabella's sister Katie disappears which guarantees our heroine is going to stay right where she is until she digs up the truth even if it kills her.
Like I said, modern-day gothic. Beautiful woman, old house, legends of hauntings and ghosts, dark and brooding (and potentially dangerous?) love interest, and peril lurking around every corner. Seriously, why did this sort of thing ever fade into obscurity? It's delicious.
Especially with the cast of secondary characters with all their hilarious quirks and flaws that I now know Ms. Ryan is famous for creating after excursions through several of her other books. That's what I fell in love with: the group of people who, by the end of the book, feel like extended family. I know these guys and gals. I "vacationed" in Mystic Harbor for a few days, and wouldn't mind going back again. Sometimes, that's all you can ask for in a novel that's just a hair over 200 pages long. Sometimes, that's all you need.
It was all this fan needed, at any rate. And it just goes to show that one should never judge a book by its genre. Though in Darkwood Manor's case, you can feel free to judge it by its cover. Yeah, check out that spooky old mansion on the windswept, storm-pounded coast. Try to tell me you don't want to poke around in there for a few hours. Go on. I dare ya.
November 11, 2020
Darkwood Manor is my fourth Harlequin Intrigue "Shivers" novel, after The Secret of Cypriere Bayou, Stranger in a Small Town, and Mystery Lover. I found it overstuffed, chaotic, and irritatingly atonal, but it did help clarify what I don't like in romantic suspense.
After her ex-boyfriend dies in a car crash, hotelier Isabella Ross visits the long-neglected Maine mansion he left her in his will. She's evaluating the property for its potential as a boutique hotel when her cousin/co-worker disappears without a trace and she's confronted by a mysterious man, F.B.I. sharpshooter Donovan Black. Once her appeals for help in finding her cousin fall on deaf ears at the local sheriff's, she teams up with Donovan to investigate her relative's whereabouts and the incessant threats she receives regarding the historic home.
Darkwood Manor started off wonderfully, with a lot of energy, but I soon realized that its frenetic pace masked the inconsistent tone, wooden dialogue and poor attention span. In this novel, no one talks like a real person. Everything that the characters think or verbalize sounds like an oddly flattened knockoff of 1940s noir films (My favorite line: "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, cousin, but your pretty bird's ditched her perch."). I suspect that all the slang and cringe-inducing one-liners were supposed to read as hyper-modern, sarcastic, or quirky, but it came off as over-wrought and preposterous.
Isabella and Donovan move around a lot in Darkwood Manor, but after the initial excitement of her cousin's mysterious disappearance and their first electric meeting, the plot becomes a circle. They journey out to the sketchy house on the cliffs, where they inevitably get verbally threatened, physically attacked, meet some accident, or some combination therein, and then they flee to safety. Once they're ensconced back in town and take care of their injuries, they go back out to the house, etc., etc., etc. With this relentless episodic quality, the narrative of danger became increasingly muddled. Although the villain has several POV sections, it didn't feel as if the threat was escalating or the antagonist had a clear purpose. It was frenzied, but pointless.
Since Darkwood Manor is the second disappointing novel in the series, I'm beginning to suspect these books needed a stronger editor. I've done a little online digging and it looks like "Shivers" (2010-2011) took over for Harlequin Intrigue's earlier gothic-themed collection, "Eclipse" (2004-2006). As someone who loves gothic fiction, I see a lot of potential in mixing up gothic elements and romantic suspense plots so I'm still curious to read more. And, as I slowly make my way through these books, it has helped me understand what sub-genre elements I'd prefer to avoid. Darkwood Manor has been especially clarifying:
1. Guns and shoot-outs
Guns in novels are like zombies in television shows. They're terrifying, since they represent an existential threat to life, but they're also dead boring. The zombies inevitably win. The person with the gun inevitably wins. When one character is shooting another on page, I fail to feel any dramatic tension and it's a snoozefest to chart where bullets are going, especially in comparison to the pathos of human emotion surrounding most crimes.
2. Sexual attraction as romantic connection
I don't know who needs to learn this in the 21st century, but it is possible for two people to have sex based entirely on their shared physical attraction. Sex does not equal love. Without having a single conversation about their instantaneous chemistry, Isabella and Donovan begin kissing within the first 35 pages of Darkwood Manor. They're incredibly sexually compatible, which is great, but the text suggests that this magnetism is based in emotional connection, which there's no sign of. Like The Secret of Cypriere Bayou, Darkwood Manor's central romance can only be read as a love story if love and sex are interchangeable...and they aren't.
3. Mental illness as the default explanation for criminality
Just as love and sex aren't always the same, mental illness and criminality aren't synonymous. When romantic suspense protagonists casually explain the actions of a villain as "crazy" or "mad", they're doing real damage. As a society, we like to see criminals as intrinsically unlike ourselves. It frightens us to think that, given a slightly different set of circumstances, we might commit crime too. We also want to punish criminals harshly in this country and that would be harder to justify if people saw criminals as essentially similar to themselves.
However, when mental illness and criminality are consistently conflated, people who suffer from mental illness are stigmatized as potential or latent criminals, especially if they're already marginalized as LGBT+, homeless, Black or brown, etc. We also risk our ability to prevent crimes and rehabilitate the people who commit them when we write-off criminals as deranged, sub-human, or low-functioning due to mental illness. Oversimplified platitudes about mentally ill criminals don't substantively help us understand why crimes have taken place, how to keep them from happening in the future, or the methods that might reintegrate a low-risk offender back into society.
4. Hereditary criminality
Ugh, the idea of hereditary criminality sits comfortably at the center of white supremacy, antisemitism, and the American eugenics movement. It's a nasty, thoroughly debunked theory that has been responsible for a lot of real pain so it's really disappointing to see Darkwood Manor and The Secret of Cypriere Bayou flirt with it. Murder doesn't run in families.
5. Uncomfortable race stuff
In The Secret of Cypriere Bayou, the wealthy rural household in 1861 Louisiana refers to their labor force as "servants" and the most prominent practitioner of voodoo is a rich white woman. In Mystery Lover, the heroine's "pale" or "porcelain" skin is described as proof of her beauty. In Darkwood Manor, Donovan's ancestry is an ongoing fetish, but Isabella is particularly obsessed with the idea that he might be descended from the Romani (the book uses the slur). Since this detail isn't pertinent in any way, the heroine's fixation only serves to eroticize the Romani as Other. Worse yet, Isabella's fixation is entirely her own invention: Donovan's ancestors were Romanian; Isabella is the one who insists they're Romani.
6. Death with no emotional impact
When Darkwood Manor begins, Isabella is inspecting the home she has inherited from her ex-boyfriend, who has just died at an incredibly young age, after accidentally driving his car off a cliff. Even if she had been lukewarm about their relationship and relieved that they had broken up, I imagine she would still feel his loss acutely, but her feelings about him are eerily nonexistent. In Mystery Lover, the villain executes two of his henchmen at close range and when the hero detonates a bomb, one of his friends accidentally dies in the blast, yet none of these deaths are given any emotional weight. I don't understand this at all. Death isn't meaningless, even for people whose experiences of empathy are limited/compromised, so I'm confused by fictional characters who don't seem impacted by it.
7. Fridged women
DON'T. FRIDGE. WOMEN. Or girls!!! The hero's half-sister in The Secret of Cypriere Bayou. The hero's daughter in Mystery Lover. The heroine's cousin in Darkwood Manor. Disappointingly, these female characters get traumatized, abused, and held up as short-hand motivation for the protagonists' journeys. At the end of the day, they're reduced to objectified props of suffering. Gah, I don't get this! To me, it's completely conceivable that two people might want to desperately solve a mystery together, despite the danger or potential threats, totally apart from the imperiled status of a woman or girl. But then again, maybe I'm one of these mentally ill pre-criminals.
8. Where are my normies?
So far, my favorite "Shivers" novel has been Kerry Connor's Stranger in a Small Town because both the hero and heroine were normal, run-of-the-mill people who were personally tied to the crime they wanted to solve. That's an incredibly relatable set-up for a romantic suspense novel and I wish it had been used more often in this series. When one person in a partnership is a law enforcement professional, it feels imbalanced. I like it so much better when both parties don't really know what they're doing, but they're doing the best they can! No one needs to be "the expert" for it to be sexy.
And on I go, the next "Shivers" I have is Alana Matthews' Waterford Point...
After her ex-boyfriend dies in a car crash, hotelier Isabella Ross visits the long-neglected Maine mansion he left her in his will. She's evaluating the property for its potential as a boutique hotel when her cousin/co-worker disappears without a trace and she's confronted by a mysterious man, F.B.I. sharpshooter Donovan Black. Once her appeals for help in finding her cousin fall on deaf ears at the local sheriff's, she teams up with Donovan to investigate her relative's whereabouts and the incessant threats she receives regarding the historic home.
Darkwood Manor started off wonderfully, with a lot of energy, but I soon realized that its frenetic pace masked the inconsistent tone, wooden dialogue and poor attention span. In this novel, no one talks like a real person. Everything that the characters think or verbalize sounds like an oddly flattened knockoff of 1940s noir films (My favorite line: "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, cousin, but your pretty bird's ditched her perch."). I suspect that all the slang and cringe-inducing one-liners were supposed to read as hyper-modern, sarcastic, or quirky, but it came off as over-wrought and preposterous.
Isabella and Donovan move around a lot in Darkwood Manor, but after the initial excitement of her cousin's mysterious disappearance and their first electric meeting, the plot becomes a circle. They journey out to the sketchy house on the cliffs, where they inevitably get verbally threatened, physically attacked, meet some accident, or some combination therein, and then they flee to safety. Once they're ensconced back in town and take care of their injuries, they go back out to the house, etc., etc., etc. With this relentless episodic quality, the narrative of danger became increasingly muddled. Although the villain has several POV sections, it didn't feel as if the threat was escalating or the antagonist had a clear purpose. It was frenzied, but pointless.
Since Darkwood Manor is the second disappointing novel in the series, I'm beginning to suspect these books needed a stronger editor. I've done a little online digging and it looks like "Shivers" (2010-2011) took over for Harlequin Intrigue's earlier gothic-themed collection, "Eclipse" (2004-2006). As someone who loves gothic fiction, I see a lot of potential in mixing up gothic elements and romantic suspense plots so I'm still curious to read more. And, as I slowly make my way through these books, it has helped me understand what sub-genre elements I'd prefer to avoid. Darkwood Manor has been especially clarifying:
1. Guns and shoot-outs
Guns in novels are like zombies in television shows. They're terrifying, since they represent an existential threat to life, but they're also dead boring. The zombies inevitably win. The person with the gun inevitably wins. When one character is shooting another on page, I fail to feel any dramatic tension and it's a snoozefest to chart where bullets are going, especially in comparison to the pathos of human emotion surrounding most crimes.
2. Sexual attraction as romantic connection
I don't know who needs to learn this in the 21st century, but it is possible for two people to have sex based entirely on their shared physical attraction. Sex does not equal love. Without having a single conversation about their instantaneous chemistry, Isabella and Donovan begin kissing within the first 35 pages of Darkwood Manor. They're incredibly sexually compatible, which is great, but the text suggests that this magnetism is based in emotional connection, which there's no sign of. Like The Secret of Cypriere Bayou, Darkwood Manor's central romance can only be read as a love story if love and sex are interchangeable...and they aren't.
3. Mental illness as the default explanation for criminality
Just as love and sex aren't always the same, mental illness and criminality aren't synonymous. When romantic suspense protagonists casually explain the actions of a villain as "crazy" or "mad", they're doing real damage. As a society, we like to see criminals as intrinsically unlike ourselves. It frightens us to think that, given a slightly different set of circumstances, we might commit crime too. We also want to punish criminals harshly in this country and that would be harder to justify if people saw criminals as essentially similar to themselves.
However, when mental illness and criminality are consistently conflated, people who suffer from mental illness are stigmatized as potential or latent criminals, especially if they're already marginalized as LGBT+, homeless, Black or brown, etc. We also risk our ability to prevent crimes and rehabilitate the people who commit them when we write-off criminals as deranged, sub-human, or low-functioning due to mental illness. Oversimplified platitudes about mentally ill criminals don't substantively help us understand why crimes have taken place, how to keep them from happening in the future, or the methods that might reintegrate a low-risk offender back into society.
4. Hereditary criminality
Ugh, the idea of hereditary criminality sits comfortably at the center of white supremacy, antisemitism, and the American eugenics movement. It's a nasty, thoroughly debunked theory that has been responsible for a lot of real pain so it's really disappointing to see Darkwood Manor and The Secret of Cypriere Bayou flirt with it. Murder doesn't run in families.
5. Uncomfortable race stuff
In The Secret of Cypriere Bayou, the wealthy rural household in 1861 Louisiana refers to their labor force as "servants" and the most prominent practitioner of voodoo is a rich white woman. In Mystery Lover, the heroine's "pale" or "porcelain" skin is described as proof of her beauty. In Darkwood Manor, Donovan's ancestry is an ongoing fetish, but Isabella is particularly obsessed with the idea that he might be descended from the Romani (the book uses the slur). Since this detail isn't pertinent in any way, the heroine's fixation only serves to eroticize the Romani as Other. Worse yet, Isabella's fixation is entirely her own invention: Donovan's ancestors were Romanian; Isabella is the one who insists they're Romani.
6. Death with no emotional impact
When Darkwood Manor begins, Isabella is inspecting the home she has inherited from her ex-boyfriend, who has just died at an incredibly young age, after accidentally driving his car off a cliff. Even if she had been lukewarm about their relationship and relieved that they had broken up, I imagine she would still feel his loss acutely, but her feelings about him are eerily nonexistent. In Mystery Lover, the villain executes two of his henchmen at close range and when the hero detonates a bomb, one of his friends accidentally dies in the blast, yet none of these deaths are given any emotional weight. I don't understand this at all. Death isn't meaningless, even for people whose experiences of empathy are limited/compromised, so I'm confused by fictional characters who don't seem impacted by it.
7. Fridged women
DON'T. FRIDGE. WOMEN. Or girls!!! The hero's half-sister in The Secret of Cypriere Bayou. The hero's daughter in Mystery Lover. The heroine's cousin in Darkwood Manor. Disappointingly, these female characters get traumatized, abused, and held up as short-hand motivation for the protagonists' journeys. At the end of the day, they're reduced to objectified props of suffering. Gah, I don't get this! To me, it's completely conceivable that two people might want to desperately solve a mystery together, despite the danger or potential threats, totally apart from the imperiled status of a woman or girl. But then again, maybe I'm one of these mentally ill pre-criminals.
8. Where are my normies?
So far, my favorite "Shivers" novel has been Kerry Connor's Stranger in a Small Town because both the hero and heroine were normal, run-of-the-mill people who were personally tied to the crime they wanted to solve. That's an incredibly relatable set-up for a romantic suspense novel and I wish it had been used more often in this series. When one person in a partnership is a law enforcement professional, it feels imbalanced. I like it so much better when both parties don't really know what they're doing, but they're doing the best they can! No one needs to be "the expert" for it to be sexy.
And on I go, the next "Shivers" I have is Alana Matthews' Waterford Point...
February 8, 2011
And Jenna Ryan does it again. Wonderful in chilling, quasi-gothic imagery of a dilapidated, fog-enshrouded manor on top of a Maine cliff, multiple mysteries involving ghosts, disappearances, and murder, a dark and brooding hero, a headstrong heroine in distress, great pacing, wonderful chemistry, palpable attraction...
It all meshed perfectly into this great HI story. No wonder Ms. Ryan is one of my favorite authors. She (almost) never misses.
It all meshed perfectly into this great HI story. No wonder Ms. Ryan is one of my favorite authors. She (almost) never misses.
April 14, 2011
Quick, easy read with plenty of interesting characters and plots. Reminded me a tiny bit of those old gothics, but never quite achieved it.
The snarky, smart-alecky dialogue at the beginning of the book was getting on my nerves. Either I got used to it or the author didn't use it as much. Finally, a HUGE coincidence at the end of the book was hard to swallow, but oh well.
This would have gotten a higher rating but for these few issues. Still, an interesting read.
The snarky, smart-alecky dialogue at the beginning of the book was getting on my nerves. Either I got used to it or the author didn't use it as much. Finally, a HUGE coincidence at the end of the book was hard to swallow, but oh well.
This would have gotten a higher rating but for these few issues. Still, an interesting read.
April 11, 2016
Just love this writer.. My second book of hers. Darkwood.. read this when you are not distacted ! There are a lot of characters to keep track of. Lots of action and spookiness. Would have liked a bit more romance but you can't get everything. A good book to read alone with some hot coco.. Have fun reading this ( audiobook wonderful.. just love this reader Liz Bieler you have a great voice and are a great listen ! )
April 1, 2022
I struggled not to nap through this. I realize a good number of people liked this story and production. I did not. So boring and repetitive and trite I skimmed and hurried from Chapter 9 to the last two chapters. Even six hours and 21 minutes was too long to listen to narrator Liz Bieler squeak through poor attempts at male voices and the chipper yet snide voice of the female protagonist. Sorry, Ms. Ryan, this one was not for me. I am glad you had good reviews, though.
June 26, 2025
I read this a while ago and gave it a three stars in my head but the more I think back on it, the more weird stuff came up. Why did the main girl had a weird attachment to the fact the love interest was Romani? Why does everyone talk like they’re in a bad porno saying one liners? Is this book suppose to be supernatural? Why is the plot moving so fast but nothing is happening?
October 13, 2020
4 Stars / 2 Steam Fans
Video review available in Week 40: Sep 27 – Oct 3 weekly book reviews and Kindle Clear Out Readathon Vlog.
For other video book reviews, check out my YouTube Channel: Steph's Romance Book Talk.
Video review available in Week 40: Sep 27 – Oct 3 weekly book reviews and Kindle Clear Out Readathon Vlog.
For other video book reviews, check out my YouTube Channel: Steph's Romance Book Talk.
July 16, 2018
Great story! The plot was really well written and kept you guessing as to whom was actually the culprit. Engrossing and easy to listen to. Made me think of an adult Nancy Drew novel.
October 9, 2019
Part of the Shivers series. Good story and fast to read.
March 27, 2021
Awful; eye rolling dialogue and “romance”. Cheesy. I should have listened to the reviews!
May 18, 2011
If I had to make Darkwood Manor into a movie it would fall into the film noir category. The mood is dark, forbidding, and mysterious; the criminal is greedy and malevolent; there is a blonde dame and a strong, tall, dark hero. I don't think there was ever a mention of sunlight and the humour didn't lighten things up much.
I had to back up once or twice to get the supporting characters straight and I had to re-read the description of the manor once or twice especially when Katie goes missing and Isabella first meets Donovan. (What the heck was he doing down there?) This was early on in the book and the ballroom, the rat traps, the cat, the hidden rooms, the tree randomly falling on the car like it's an Allstate commercial, and the family tree were a bit much piled into one 224-page story.
The surprise twists at the end of most chapters were a great element and kept you hooked to the end. The romance felt more like lust than love but since Isabella and Donovan didn't mind, I guess there's nothing more you can say...
I had to back up once or twice to get the supporting characters straight and I had to re-read the description of the manor once or twice especially when Katie goes missing and Isabella first meets Donovan. (What the heck was he doing down there?) This was early on in the book and the ballroom, the rat traps, the cat, the hidden rooms, the tree randomly falling on the car like it's an Allstate commercial, and the family tree were a bit much piled into one 224-page story.
The surprise twists at the end of most chapters were a great element and kept you hooked to the end. The romance felt more like lust than love but since Isabella and Donovan didn't mind, I guess there's nothing more you can say...
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December 24, 2014Miniseries: Shivers
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December 24, 2014Miniseries: Shivers
April 5, 2011
My first Harlequin Shiver novel, and man was it creepy! It had me captured from the beginning to end! Highly recommended!
December 11, 2012
This was a very enjoyable, old-fashioned kind of gothic mystery. The story was complex and the characters were fun. I'd definitely read it again!
February 15, 2015
Good book. Suspense was good. The killer was totally unexpected. Romance was also sweet. Loved Donovan and Isabella.
July 9, 2015
I read this quite some time ago and it was really good!
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews