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Showing posts from March, 2012

Desperate Lives and Deep, Dark Secrets

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The real problem with getting into trouble, as almost every five-year-old knows, is getting back out of it... and the bigger that trouble is, the worse one’s chances of doing so are. Not that understanding the odds seems to matter much; most of us still manage to get into varying degrees of trouble more often than we ought. It’s the particular sub-groups our troubles generally tend to fall under, though, which can determine the courses our lives will take... from the usually-fixable “sticky situations” and “misunderstandings”, to the unfortunate (and somewhat-more-awkward) instances of “wrong place, wrong time”, all the way to major violations of the law (clearly the worst of the bunch, and definitely best avoided).  Hot on the heels of last year’s brilliant debut The Poison Tree (see my review for it, here  ), author Erin Kelly takes a look at all sorts of trouble--and the multitude of repercussions--in her fabulous follow-up, The Dark Rose . Louisa Trevelyan is a quiet, unassuming w

Luck and Loss: Knowing When to Kiss or Run

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Oh, to be one of those lucky ducks who gets all the “perks”... the to-die-for designer wardrobe (complete with smokin’ hot shoes and the coolest “it” bags)... the spacious high-rise apartment (with a stellar view)... 24/7 access to a stable of the hottest sports cars around... a choice of the finest cuisines and wines to be found... even rubbing elbows with the rich-and-famous on a regular basis. Pretty awesome, right?  Nothing comes without a price, though... something which no one is perhaps more aware of that than professional casino “fixer” Lucky O’Toole, back for equal parts fantastic fabulosity and treacherous troubles in author Deborah Coonts‘ latest, So Damn Lucky . (By the way, if you haven’t read the first two books in the series yet, you can find my reviews for them here  and then here .)                            ~  ♠  ♣  ♥  ♦  ~ Lucky’s typical day can best be summed up as “expect the unexpected”, because just when she thinks she’s seen (and dealt with) it all before in