Five out of five.
I was smiling or laughing the whole way through, with a few ‘awwwws’ thrown in as well. I could read books like this all day and never get bored.
Read the full review on Mirrigold’s blog. The Captain and the Baker is published on 25th August.
Five stars. A delightful gem balanced between realism, romance, and fairytale.
Read the full review at Padme’s Library. The Dishevelled Duke was published in February.
This is such a great feel-good, delightful, cheerful and endearing read, which is full of real village charm and some very saucy, blush-worthy moments, I was laughing and sighing in equal measure.
See the full review at Chicks, Rogues and Scandals. The Captain and the Baker is on pre-order now, and is published on 25th August.
The first installment in Katherine E Hunt’s Mended Hearts series is out on 25th August. Katherine joined us for a chat to talk about her books and how she writes.
Like most writers, I’ve always written. I only started writing for publication though about three years ago. It’s been a bit of a journey, but I’m finally starting to be where I want to be.
Love is a wonderful thing, especially new love. Butterflies in the stomach, the anticipation of a first kiss. That’s really one of the reasons why I write romance, so I can re-live that excitement over and over again.
Our seventh Captivating Captains novel is published on 25th August by Pride Publishing. Preorder from Amazon and all other ebook retailers. Available in ebook, paperback and KU.
When a hot-tempered TV chef and a mild-mannered baker meet on the rugged Cornish coast, they’ve got the perfect ingredients for a red-hot snack.
Sweary and stressed celebrity chef Jake Brantham is the captain of several floating restaurants. When he’s sent to the idyllic village of Porthavel to turn a pirate ship into the next gastronomic sensation, it’s the last place on earth he wants to be.
Locryn Trevorrow is the bakery king of Cornwall. From the humble pasty to a wedding cake fit for a mermaid queen, there’s nothing he doesn’t know about the art of baking. He lives in a cosy world of gingham and ganache, but at night he goes home to his smugglers’ cottage alone.
When he’s adopted by a lost kitten, Jake soon discovers that there’s more to Portavel than cream teas, lobster pots, and the annoyingly fastidious Locryn. As the village prepares for the wedding of its favourite young couple, Jake and Locryn find themselves as unlikely matchmakers for two locals who’d given up on love.
Torn between the call of Hollywood and the kisses of Locryn, will Jake choose a mansion in Beverly Hills or a cottage on the Cornish coast?
Jake, immaculate in his chef whites but his hair just ruffled enough to look careless, tried to smile into the television camera.
There wasn’t much to smile about because, although the set of Saturday Breakfast was more than familiar to him, he hadn’t had to share it with Locryn Trevorrow before.
Locryn, as sugary sweet as the cakes and delicacies he baked, was as far as it was possible to be from Jake, a chef who’d made a name for himself swearing on the telly while cooking. As he had watched Locryn across the studio that morning, all smiles and sunshine and please and thank you and how marvelous, he couldn’t imagine the man had ever sworn in his life. He’d probably draw the line at fiddlesticks.
Join us as we talk about our romantic thrillers The Colour of Mermaids and The Man in Room 423. We’ll talk, plotting, pacing and the inspiration behind our genre-hopping. And as ever, there’s something emerging from the inkwell, and a lot of fizz in our gin.
You can listen to us on Anchor.fm, iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, Castbox, Overcast, Breaker, RadioPublic and Pocket Casts. Other platforms are available!
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Today, Beth D Carter is visiting the blog to tell us about her latest release, Come with Me, the first part in her new series.
I’ve been writing my whole life, I think. I started reading my mother’s Harlequin Presents when I was about 10 or 11, and wrote my first romance at 14…long hand in a spiral notebook. Never thought I’d actually be a published author. When ebook publishing exploded, I was able to hope and dream. I sent my first book, Black Leather Pants, to four publishers and one accepted. That was 2009 and eleven years later I have almost eighty published works.
I love that there’s always a happy ever after. That you can come home from a hard, stressful day and relax with a good story that takes your mind off the buttholes you had to face.
Today debut author Josie Bonham has called for tea, scones and a natter about her first novel, A Good Match for the Major.
Hi ladies. Thank you for inviting me.
I’ve always dabbled in writing. I have several part-written novels tucked away in notebooks and computer files. My sister persuaded me to do a Futurelearn creative writing course with her which set me wondering if I could write seriously. When my eldest niece sat down and wrote a fantasy novel, it spurred me on to give this itch to write some serious attention. I happened to come across the Romantic Novelist’s Association, was lucky enough to grab a place on the New Writers’ Scheme and haven’t looked back.
My main genre is Regency romance but I also enjoy crime. I’m writing a contemporary cosy crime with my sister at the moment. Or at least I’ve left her writing a section whilst I work on my Regency series. It’s no surprise that a certain amount of romantic suspense always seems to creep into my stories,
It’s publication day for Vanessa Robertson’s second novel, and the first in her Kate Carpenter series – Don’t Blink. Vanessa popped by the blog to tell us more.
I’ve written since I was a child – I had a blue Silverette portable typewriter which I loved. Took it seriously too – I might have been ten but I made carbons of my work in case I wanted to submit to publishers! As I got older, I realised that being a writer wasn’t a thing that people actually did – or so I thought – and I stopped writing. When I was in my twenties and early thirties I didn’t know what to write.
After years in the book trade, we sold our bookshop and I finally had time to write and – crucially – knew enough about the business to feel confident that there was a market for what I wanted to write. The rise of indie writers and faster-paced digital-first publishers also meant that I felt less constricted by genre.
I entered Bloody Scotland’s Pitch Perfect event—not a singing event, fortunately—and pitched the idea for what was to become my first book, Death Will Find Me, a crime novel set in 1920s Edinburgh with a heroine who was a former spy and the only suspect when her estranged husband was murdered. I was one of the winners, picked by a panel of agents and publishers, and that gave me the confidence to keep writing.
In early 2019, Death Will Find Me was published, and although that’s a world I want to get back to very soon, I was also having fun writing a series that had been brewing for years and so Don’t Blink, the first of the Kate Carpenter thrillers will be out in May. I’ve also released a short novella, Vanishing Point, to introduce Kate to readers and that’s available free via my website as well as to purchase. The second full-length book, Trace Evidence, will be out in a few months and I’m currently writing the third.
Say hello to author Angela Addams who’s visiting the blog today. Her latest novel, Wicked Disclosure, is out now.
Oh, I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I have “novels” that I wrote when I was six or seven, complete with pictures. They weren’t very good. But for some reason I was committed to writing stories and I’ve been lucky enough to have quite a few of them published. I started writing for publication when I was on maternity leave with my daughter about thirteen years ago. I spent at least eight months writing an urban fantasy, paranormal romance mashup that ended up getting me my first agent. It never got published but it was the start of my publishing journey. I ended up selling my first few books to a small micro press which was my gateway to other publishers. It’s taken a whole lot of perseverance and thick skin over the years. There’s so much rejection to tackle when you’re trying to get published for the first time and it doesn’t stop after that. You have to be okay with the let downs that happen and not let those things keep you down. I’m passionate about telling stories and I wouldn’t be able to stop writing even if I wanted to, trust me, I’ve tried over the years.
I write in a few different genres. Paranormal/Urban Fantasy Romance, Contemporary Erotic Romance and YA Thrillers and Fantasy/Magic Realism. I try to be versatile because that gives me more opportunity to explore my strengths as a writer. It helps me learn new things with each project and it keeps me from getting bored. I enjoy writing, period. Creating new worlds, developing interesting characters, getting the voice just right in a project, it’s all stuff I enjoy doing. I do not enjoy outlining, at all, but I do it because it helps hugely to know what my plot beats are before I start. I’ve learned over the years that if I don’t outline, I’ll get stuck midway through Act 2 and that’s never a good thing.
