Review: Broke Down: My Over the Top Possessive Alpha Harem by Sharan Daire

Broke Down: My Over the Top Possessive Alpha Harem by Sharan Daire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sweet and Sexy RH

This was actually written by Joely Sue Burkhart, of Queen Takes Knights fame. This book is written under a pen name and I can see why. This book is NOTHING like the dark RH works this author is known for. This book is a very sweet RH, with very little conflict, filled with sweet insta-love and a little steam thrown in for good measure.

Shelby is a single mother. She’s broke, alone and desperate. She only has one family member left, her grandmother, who she hasn’t seen since she was a child. She finally caves in, packs up her belongings in her very broken down car, scoops up her children and heads off for pastures new, where hopefully she at least won’t have to worry about rent.

With a grand total of $20 in her purse, her faithful old car gives up the ghost. They are on a deserted road, with no food, no heat and no money to call for a tow truck. Shelby doesn’t know what to do until flashing lights pull up behind her and the sheriff comes up and rescues her. Whisking her up the road, where he, his twin brother and two best friends run a fancy hotel/lodge/retreat.

Shelby can’t believe her luck and is waiting for the other shoe to drop, but the sheriff and his friends can’t believe their luck too. They’ve been looking for a woman to share, to have a family with and they all want Shelby and her adorable kids.

The characters are really fun. Shelby is very real, down to Earth and a little bit beaten up by life. Her kids are well behaved and sweet, without being over the top and cutesy stereotypes. The guys are big characters. Derek, the sheriff, is a big burly protector type, his brother Kaleb is a big teddy bear of a mechanic, Everett is the charismatic hard-working poor boy, done good and Chris is the broken billionaire ex-marine with PTSD. They even have a dog.

You can probably guess where the plot goes. It’s sweet and lovely, filled with grand gestures, dreams come true and passion. It’s a sweet and loving romp of a book and is pure escapism as you imagine yourself taking Shelby’s place instead of in your normal grind of a day.

It’s a fun book, without any great challenges, but it’s well written and you feel good when you read it. Sometimes all you want in a book is something to make you smile and this book hits the nail on the head.

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Review: Alien Conquest (Alien Invasion Series Book 1) by Honey Phillips

Alien Conquest by Honey Phillips
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Alpha Male Alien Alert

I normally quite like alien romances but I think I’ve hit my quota for the alien alpha version of these types of books. The first thing I’ll say that there needs to be a trigger warning for this book because there is sexual assault in the book.

The book also opens with the MFC, Emily (or M’Lee as the alien MMC, T’Lan, calls her) waking up with an awful hangover and no recollection of the night before, but with her body showing evidence of having had sex with her alien ‘friend’.

The start of this book was really hard for me and I imagine it will be for a lot of women. What follows is Emily running to her grandmother’s after the place she works with aliens is blown up and her ‘friend’ dies. She hides in her old home town, until a few weeks later she discovers she is pregnant with a half alien baby.

T’Lan shows up to investigate the explosion because she should have been there at the time but wasn’t because she was hungover and her ‘friend’ made an excuse to her boss and let her sleep in. Obviously T’Lan falls for her immediately and claims her for himself and takes over Emily’s life.

The story is all about his wooing of Emily and her falling for the handsome, giant alien with horns. All of her doubts are washed over and she doesn’t complain much at all the restrictions placed on her by this alien who is part of a race of beings who have invaded Earth, all be it under the cover of rescuing Earth from the humans.

This alien race is so sketchy, it’s so hard to envisage a situation where a human woman would be ok with their behaviour, but Emily just keeps forgiving them, as does her grandmother. It’s all acceptable because she is ‘enlightening’ this advanced race that what they are doing is pretty much sexual exploitation at best and sex trafficking at worst.

It must be the combination of pregnancy hormones and lust that keeps her in his thrall, because we don’t see much past the first couple of months after giving birth. Once she’s no longer too tired to think, I hope she wakes up!

Apart from my problems with the content, the book is well written and if you like this type of thing you will probably enjoy it as it’s full of lust-filled activities and romantic claims. There is plenty of building of tension and peril, it’s just not for me.

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Review: Driver: Grit : The Badass Geek (Badass Security Council Series Book 12) by L Ann Marie

Driver: Grit : The Badass Geek (Badass Security Council by L. Ann Marie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Little Confusing at the Start

I’d probably give this book 3.75 ⭐️ if I could.

This is the first book in the new chapter of the BSC MC books. This one covers Alpha Club where Jordan is the Pres and Brinks is the VP. Both men are meant for Stella, Sheila and Jax’s daughter from Enforcer. Stella is a genius and deaf. She hasn’t got any extra psychic gifts but she took part in all the training the other kids had. She’s pretty deadly as well as very very clever.

I was pretty confused for the first 20-30% of the book. There was stuff going on with Jordan but it was only insinuated rather than explained and it left me frustrated that I couldn’t quite work out what was going on. I think this is because there was so much set up for the new club as well as writing about the relationship between the three people. This is an MFM story, but even though the relationship between the two men isn’t physical they are very much a partnership in loving Stella and their relationship with each other is as important as each of theirs with Stella.

It was interesting learning more about Jordan. We already knew quite a lot about Brinks because he grew up with Cort and Jinx is his twin brother, both of whom are long-established characters in the series. Jordan was always more of a peripheral character and as such, we didn’t know much about his background. This book explores his past and how he became involved in the club. We also get to know more about his abilities and his tech/business skills.

Now I know more about the set up of this new club, I’m looking forward to reading more about it, especially with all the information dumped on me in this book. The relationship aspect was again not the most important part of this book, it was a central part of the story progressing, but wasn’t the main focus. A lot of the problems in the relationship and the obstacles stopping it were sorted out in previous books. There wasn’t much of a hint about who will be covered in the next book as there were no real hints, for once. I’m sure all will be revealed in due course.

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Review: Chaos (The Library of The Profane Series Book 1) by JB Trepagnier

Chaos by J.B. Trepagnier
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Funny and Intelligent RH

Ripley is a witch, a pretty powerful one. She’s also the librarian at The Library of The Profane, the place where all the books about the supernatural are kept. She had to fight for her life to get the job, and she loves it. She’s not a typical librarian with her leather clothes and healthy sex-positive attitude, but when they have a werewolf erotica section in your library then you have to expect your librarian to be a bit open-minded.

Ripley is minding her own business, hanging with her familiar Felix when a hedge witch requests some help with some necromancy. She helps raise the corpse only to find it’s actually the physical embodiment of the god of Chaos, who is not only gorgeous but expects Ripley to become his wife. Someone wants Chaos returned to Earth for nefarious purposes and neither he nor Ripley are inclined to help them. The Library itself also seems to be helping out by drawing together a team of gorgeous supernaturals who happen to be excellent at problem-solving, to give them a hand.

There is some pretty juvenile humour in this book, but it’s also pretty funny. I love the banter between the main characters and there is also some real tenderness there too, with genuine affection. There are lots of references to sex, but not masses of actual sex scenes. The plot is more important, as is building the relationships and the tension between the characters.

The world-building is really interesting and I love how the magic systems were slowly revealed throughout the book. There is still a lot we don’t know about the world in which the Library is situated, but are getting to slowly know the characters within its walls.

I really enjoyed this book and it has lots of potential to form the basis of a good solid anchor book to start this series. I can’t wait to see how the author builds on what she has written here.

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Review: Black Sheep (Flight of The Javelin Series Book 1) by Rachel Aukes

Black Sheep by Rachel Aukes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fast Paced Space Opera

I do love a good space opera, and this is a great example of a good space opera. I listened to the audio version, narrated by Emily Woo Zeller, and enjoyed her storytelling skills as much with this book as I have with others.

Throttle is a captain of a cargo ship that has been converted into a colony vessel. She and a handful of crew, including the man she loves, an ex-pirate, take it in turns to sleep on the 15 years of the journey so far. The colonists are all in cryogenic sleep and they are all looking for a fresh start away from their star system that has been riddled with wars.

The ship is starting to fall apart as it was not designed for deep space long term journeys and eventually there is a system-wide failure. The crew decide to take the ex-pirate ship they have in the hold to try and find help, not really expecting to find any, except they find a ship, lying dead in space with no one aboard.

When they take the ship back to the colony ship to rescue all the colonists they find a hole in space and evidence of pirates having stolen the vessel. Throttle has made a promise to get those colonists to a safe new home and she is determined to keep that promise.

I loved Throttle so much. She is a paraplegic who wears leg braces to ambulate most of the time, but a wheelchair when the braces are not possible. It’s not often you have disabled characters in Sci-fi because usually, they have miraculous cures or cybernetic limbs that are better than the originals. To have a disabled main character, who also has a successful and loving relationship is fantastic for someone who is also disabled. I particularly loved how much she enjoyed floating in zero gravity because I can imagine how freeing it would be.

Apart from being disabled, Throttle is a gifted leader. She is strong, fearless and will do anything to get the job done. She’s called Throttle because of her incredible skills as a pilot. She’s also a crack shot and great at hand to hand combat, even in leg braces. The other characters were as well rounded as Throttle, but she is the main focus of the story, though there are other points of view.

The story rockets along at a cracking pace and I really enjoyed the notion of two different branches of humanity’s colonisation efforts meeting centuries after the fact and finding a divergence in law, technology and social structure, but who still have a common language.

There were a few plot twists along the way, especially toward the end, that knocked me askew. They made me very likely to read the next book in the series but didn’t leave me gnawing my nails to the quick in frustration about the way it ended.

I really enjoyed this book, especially the audio version, I will definitely be reading/listening to the next in the series.

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