Saturday, July 13, 2013

My Ever-Growing TBR Pile 7/13/2013


Been a while since I did this. For a while there, I posted every Sunday (or Saturday?) about books I've found, how I found them, and why they'd made it on my TBR. I just quit posting due to the lack of comments, but it did have page views, so I figure ya'll must be interested. Hopefully there's something for you on here.

So here we go again. Random Reading, I called it, as I find books often in the most random ways. Regardless, these are the books that came to my attention this week and why I decided to read them: (Lots of strong women books this week!!!)

Desperate SituationsDesperate Situations by Abby Holden was free on kindle. I decided to give this a go because it features a woman helicopter pilot.

An ex-Ranger, Jake McGrew, leaves the military to join a mercenary group in Afghanistan. Here he meets up with Megan Cartwright, the best helicopter pilot he’s ever met and his new boss. She has a problem with Special Forces men and has sworn off romance only to find herself attracted to this ex-soldier. As she leads them through many desperate operations, each one more harrowing than the next, she ends up revealing to McGrew her deepest secrets. Will they survive to ‘live happily ever after'?


Taming GI Jane by Debra Webb was free on Kindle and I just love women in the military stories. It also sounds funny.

Taming GI Jane

After six years of active duty, army drill sergeant Jane Passarella is ready for a new challenge. Running a fat farm for the general’s wife and her friends is not what she had in mind. Jane is caught completely off guard when her own willpower goes AWOL while teamed with sexy camp director Tom Caldwell.

With a camp rife with contraband ice cream and crawling with rebellious dieters, romance is the last thing on Tom’s mind…until he sees petite and pretty GI Jane. The two have just fourteen days to transform a dozen couch potatoes into svelte, disciplined beauties. But how will they ever be able to keep their minds on the task when they can’t keep their hands off each other?

SmokescreenSpotted on netgalley, Smokescreen by Nancy Hartry. I like this publisher. I've read a few of their titles so I have faith this will be good. It's about two girls facing sexism and a forest fire.

Nothing in Kerry’s life prepares her for her first summer job. Stationed as far north from Toronto as Florida is south, unqualified and inexperienced, she perceives hazards around every tree. What does she know about fieldwork? Or black bears? Or men? Absolutely nothing—all she’s done with her life so far is competitive dance. If her mother only knew what this job required!

Kerry’s new partner, Yvette, is unlike anyone she’s ever met and something about her doesn’t add up. Her boss is a chauvinist pig and out to get them. When forest fires break out, Kerry and Yvette are drafted for fire duty and sent deeper into the bush—even closer to the fire. As all of northwestern Ontario goes up in flames, Kerry vows to find out what is really going on and uncovers a crime of international scope and scale that will threaten her life.

Smokescreen is an adrenalin pumping adventure, pitting two resourceful young women against nature and man at their most greedy. Truth and lies. Fire and darkness. Who will triumph when nothing is what it seems?


Come Looking for Me: A NovelCome Looking for Me by Cheryl Cooper is on my wishlist after spotting its sequel on Edelweiss. A woman aboard a ship...forming a friendship and working alongside the men. A love story, but it doesn't appear to be one of those cheesy bodice rippers.

In Come Looking for Me, a mysterious young English woman named Emily risks a crossing of the Atlantic during the War of 1812 for the promise of a new adventure in Canada. But she never arrives.

Captured by Captain Trevelyan, a man as cold-blooded as his frigate is menacing, Emily is held prisoner aboard the USS Serendipity. Seeking to save herself, she makes a desperate escape overboard in the midst of a raging sea battle and is rescued by the British crew of HMS Isabelle. Yet Emily has only exchanged one form of captivity for another, and remains in peril as England escalates its fight against the United States on the Atlantic.

On board the Isabelle, Emily encounters a crew of fascinating seamen and strikes up unexpected friendships, but life on a man-of-war is full of deprivations and dangers to which she is unaccustomed. Amidst heartache and tragedy at sea, she struggles to find her place among the men until a turn of events reveals her true identity. And when Trevelyan's ship once again looms on the horizon, Emily fears losing the only man she has ever loved and falling into the hands of the only man she has ever loathed.


House of BathoryHouse of Bathory by Linda Lafferty is on my wishlist after I read and enjoyed another book by her this week, The Drowning Guard. I've read..hm...three Bathory books now, so I have a fascination with this woman. 

In the early 1600s, Elizabeth Báthory, the infamous Blood Countess, ruled Čachtice Castle in the hinterlands of Slovakia. During bizarre nightly rites, she tortured and killed the young women she had taken on as servants. A devil, a demon, the terror of Royal Hungary—she bathed in their blood to preserve her own youth.

400 years later, echoes of the Countess’s legendary brutality reach Aspen, Colorado. Betsy Path, a psychoanalyst of uncommon intuition, has a breakthrough with sullen teenager Daisy Hart. Together, they are haunted by the past, as they struggle to understand its imprint upon the present. Betsy and her troubled but perceptive patient learn the truth: the curse of the House of Bathory lives still and has the power to do evil even now.

The story, brimming with palace intrigue, memorable characters intimately realized, and a wealth of evocative detail, travels back and forth between the familiar, modern world and a seventeenth-century Eastern Europe brought startlingly to life.

A Hunka Hunka Nursing Love (Women's Fiction)Spotted on New Age Mama--some blog/blurb tour--Hunka Hunka Nursing Love by Kathryn Maeglin hit the wishlist too. It caught my eye because it's a unique twist and men are the ones being objectified for a change!

Imagine a visiting-nurse service with hot young guys as caregivers. What golden girl wouldn’t dig that?

Valerie Palka is a savvy businesswoman who is obsessed with keeping her elderly mom, Helen, safe from all the lethal disasters that can befall widows living alone. Helen thinks the workaholic Valerie should focus on having as much luck in the bedroom as she does in the boardroom. But when Helen takes a spill and is rushed to the ER, a handsome male nurse, Keith Nuber, strikes her fancy, and she tells her daughter, “If you could get a handsome devil like that to take care of me, I’d be willing to consider it.” So Valerie creates a care agency, Home Health Hunks, staffed by attractive younger men.


Touched by FireSpotted on Negalley, another Tundra book, Touched By Fire by Irene N. Watts has caught my interest and is on my Kindle. Interests me for so many reasons...It's about immigrants, discrimination, a historical fire.

Touched by Fire, Irene N. Watt's exquisite new novel, explores one family's journey as they flee from the pogroms of Russia in 1905, where the Cossacks burn villages to the ground, to Berlin, Germany, where Jews have a hard time living and working in peace, to the streets of the Lower East Side in New York. Teenage Miriam gives a first-hand account of the excitement everyone feels about going to America, the "Golden Land," the journey in steerage, the arrival at Ellis Island, and the discrimination the immigrants feel while seeking employment. When Miriam finally lands a job at the Triangle Shirt Waist Company as a cuff setter, she believes her future in the New World is finally secure. But on March 25, 1911, the fire that starts from overflowing bins of material scraps rages into what becomes known as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and Miriam's life is forever changed.

MontanaMontana by Gwen Florio. Another Netgalley book. This one caught my attention because it not only takes place in Montana, my favorite state, but it's about a woman seeking the truth. She's also a reporter who was in Kabul. You gotta be a tough woman to face that. It doesn't hurt that her name is Lola....I hope to read this one soon.

Foreign correspondent Lola Wicks is pissed. Downsized from her Kabul posting, her editor reassigns her to a stateside suburban beat formerly the province of interns. Arriving in Montana for some R&R at a friend's cabin, her friend is nowhere in sight.

Anger turns to terror when Lola discovers her friend shot dead. She can't get out of Montana fast enough, but finds that she can't as she's held as a potential witness, thwarting her plan to return to Afghanistan on her own and have her editors change their minds. Her best hope lies in solving the case herself. But this surefooted journalist who deftly negotiated Afghanistan's deadly terrain finds herself frighteningly off-balance in this forgotten corner of her own country, plagued by tensions between the locals and citizens of the nearby Blackfeet Nation.

Lola's lone-wolf style doesn't work in a place where the harsh landscape and extreme isolation compel people to rely upon each other in ways she finds unsettling. In her awkward attempts at connection, she forms a reluctant alliance with a local reporter, succumbs to the romantic attentions of a wealthy rancher, and fences warily with the state's first Indian candidate for governor, the subject of her friend's final stories.

Ultimately she comes to truly care about the people she meets in Montana, only to miss the warning signals that her own life is in danger.

The Goddess LettersOn my wishlist: The Goddess Letters by Vicki Matthews. I actually found this via an ad on an ebook site freebie site. Why I want to read this? I have a fascination with the old Pagan ways and beliefs...when women ruled the world. The idea of a woman prophet...well, hell, yea.

Chicago economics professor Rob Harris has it damn good: dream job, devoted wife, adorable daughter. Selena Richards has it even better - she's a wildly popular Hollywood actress with awards and men galore. Yet each has a dark secret that only the other knows.

Since college, Selena has had alarming dreams where she's asked to encourage women to create a radically different future for our world. Rob, her old college boyfriend, is the only person Selena's told about these dreams. The devoted family man, Rob never mentions to his wife that he was secretly engaged to Selena when they met. Or that he and Selena still correspond.

Rob and Selena's secrets collide when her dreams take a frightening turn. The powerful Jacobi appears, violently warns her to stop meddling with the world, then vanishes. Terrified, Selena reaches out to Rob, who wonders if she's a prophet, or merely mad.

Unable to abandon her, Rob is slowly drawn into Selena's haunting world of forgotten knowledge, ancient ritual, and demigods quite interested in controlling mankind. The line surrounding reality continues to blur and Rob finds himself in Selena's dreams, face-to-face with Jacobi, who is happy to kill to hide the truth that will change the world. As Rob fights to keep himself and Selena alive, his concepts of reality crumble, as do his once-rigid views on nature, divinity, and even love. To his amazement, he finally accepts that the greatest hope for our world may actually rest with Hollywood.


The Tattooed WitchSpotted on LibraryThing, The Tattooed Witch by Susan J. McGregor. You got the Spanish Inquisition and a magical tattoo. That is just too cool. I don't think I need to say more.

When Miriam Medina and her father are accused by the Inquisition of murdering a high priest, Miriam knows justice is impossible. Their accuser, the Grand Inquisitor, is in fact, the real murderer. Miriam's only hope is to resort to her long dead mother's magical legacy: the resurrection of the dead through a magical tattoo.

Even Nectar is PoisonEven Nectar is Poison by Mercer Addison. On my wishlist and found while doing an Amazon search for suffragettes.

After Donald McShane is forced to flee Ireland on a ruse created by his nefarious brother, he joins a surge of immigrants landing in the squalor on Manhattan’s East side. He sends for his wife and two young children who are sailing to him on the Titanic. When the ship sinks, it opens up a steamer trunk full of mysteries. Donald goes to Halifax, Nova Scotia where the dead from the Titanic are taken. There he’s shown a strangled woman matching his wife description and who has his wife’s identification on her. She’s not his wife. Donald, unable to believe his wife and children have perished in the freezing Atlantic goes on a mission to find them. Who is the silent little girl rescued from the Titanic by suffragette, Olivia Marsh? What has happened to Donald’s son? This is a drama of family betrayal, murder, class warfare, suffragettes fighting for equality in the workforce, but most of all love.

Marblestone Mansion, Book 1 (Scandalous Duchess, #1)Kindle Freebie, Marblestone Manor by Marti Talbott caught my eye because it sounds like the castle Glen Eyrie, which I've been to, in Colorado Springs. But what really ended up convincing me to download it was when I looked up book two in this series and discovered there was a woman with multiple husbands involved. What a nice change!!!! LOL

A Duke by inheritance, Hannish MacGreagor soon learned the title came with very little wealth, so he bought a silver mine in Idaho, left his wife of two weeks in Scotland, and sailed to America. Two years later, he sold the mine and became one of the wealthiest men in Colorado. Yet, all was not well with his marriage. Never could he have imagined the disaster that was headed his way.


Flight Risk (Antiques in Flight, #1)On my wishlist: Flight Risk by Nicole Helm. The blurb doesn't sound like much to me, just another boy and girl fall in love story that just happens to be set at an airport. It's actually the "warning" at the end that convinced me to read this. I LOVE women in aviation. 'Nuff said.

After losing his mother to cancer, Trevor Steele has taken a leave of absence from the FBI to get his little sister through her last months of high school. But once she’s settled in college next fall, he’s leaving Pilot’s Point and heading back to Seattle.

Now if only he could keep his mind off childhood friend Callie Baker. Especially since she’s asked him for a big chunk of his spare time to help save her family business.

Once the town bad girl, Callie has had to get her act together to keep Antiques in Flight airport from falling apart. Swallowing her pride to ask for Trevor’s help is the hardest thing she’s ever done—next to trying to forget the sizzling kiss they shared two years ago.

Working side by side leads to a complicated dance of almost-moments, until their repressed urges finally break free. But just as Trevor begins to think staying for good might be the right path, Callie closes herself off, afraid to believe in promises…even Trevor’s.

Product Warnings
A woman who’d rather face an airplane engine than falling for her best friend, a man who’d rather face a gun to his head than going home, and a love that will test what they both want.


A Stolen LifeKindle Freebie I look forward to reading: A Stolen Life by Stacey Coverstone. Woman pirate. ARGGH! She decides she's tired of pirating and takes over another woman's life...and fiance.

Eighteen-year-old Kit Malone has lived a pirate’s life for ten years, though not of her own choosing. When ruthless Captain Tory orders young women kidnapped from a seaside village and Kit is instructed to watch them until ransoms are paid, she makes a startling discovery. One of them is her mirror image.

Bonding over their likeness, Tamsin Mallory tells Kit about her privileged life, as well as her fiancé, Christopher. Longing for family and to be a proper lady, the seeds of a plan form in Kit’s mind. When Tamsin dies, Kit sets her plan of assuming Tamsin’s identity into motion. After narrowly surviving a storm at sea, she is rescued by Matthew, a trapper who lives in isolation after a devastating heartbreak.

When Kit finally arrives at Mallory Manor, she becomes Tamsin in body and soul. But how long will it be before someone discovers the truth? And how will her attraction to loner Matthew affect her upcoming marriage to charming Christopher?

Grace and the Secrets of the Beech 18
Found via a random Amazon search for women pilots. (I do this weekly as women in aviation books are just my "thing") I found Grace and the Secrets of the Beech 18 by Judi Stephensen. Woman pilot. Tomboy. WWII. WASPS (discovered that tidbit in the reviews.) On my wishlist for sure. I suspect it's a time slip.

Grace was practically raised at the historic airfield, where her father works long hours as a mechanic. Set at the base of the Rocky Mountains, she and her older brothers have spent many summers exploring the surrounding hills and prairie lands, stirring up adventure with their imaginations while their father toiled away. This summer, Grace must find ways to pass the time alone. She is spiritless until she discovers the abandoned twin-engine airplane parked on the ramp and her curiosity about the timeworn beauty begins to grow. Suddenly Grace realizes that she is embarking on the greatest journey of her life as she unravels the secrets of the old Beech 18...


A Hazard of HeartsA Hazard of Hearts by Frances Burke, a freebie today, promises to be full of strong women! It's also a historical about nurses in Australia.

From the bustling energy of Sydney Town to the brawling goldfields of Victoria comes a compelling saga of three passionate women who pit themselves against society’s restrictions to carve their place in history.

Elly Ballard, spirited and intelligent daughter of an eminent surgeon, rallies from violent betrayal to take on an outdated, vermin-infested hospital and its officious and self-serving board of directors.

She is aided by the diminutive and fiery Pearl, who has escaped slavery and the horrors of war-torn Nanking, and by Jo-Beth Loring, a spoiled beauty who has lost everything, including the man she loves, in a shipwreck off the Australian coast.

Denying her own need for love and her strong attraction to Paul Gascoigne, a man haunted by his past and ambitious for the future, Elly fights to establish nursing as an honourable profession, and a woman’s right to be considered an intelligent force in society.


The King's DaughterThough the reviews are not very good, I've decided to give this one a go as well: The King's Daughter by Penny Ingham. Why? It's about a king's daughter who fights to save her kingdom and leads an army, though it sounds like the romance overpowers this story line.

King Alfred The Great of Wessex lies dying, and his beautiful headstrong daughter, Elflaede, swears to continue her father's quest to drive the Vikings out of England. But, alongside bloodshed and battle, Elflaede must endure the jealousy of her brother Edward, the cruelty and callousness of her husband Ethelred, King of Mercia, and the surprising and forbidden love for her greatest enemy.

In an age of superstition and fear, when bloody battles laid the foundations of the English nation, The King’s Daughter is a powerful story of love and war, jealousy and betrayal - and the bitter choices of divided loyalties. (This book was previously published as Lady of the Mercians)


That sums up my random finds and ever-growing TBR pile this week. Be watching for reviews for some of these soon. I hope there's something for you on here! Some of these titles are still free. Go look for em on Amazon.

3 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. I know. I may need to change the blog to book JUNKIE. LOL

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    2. Lol. My tbr list on goodreads is huge, im never gonna get to read them all!

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