SEASONS READINGS Santa's On His Way anthology

Santa's On His Way anthology

By Lisa Jackson, Maisey Yates, Stacy Finz, Nicole Helm

What the Cowboy Wants for Christmas: Maisey YatesMeg, Charlie, and Noah all met as teens living in the same foster home. Meg fell instantly in love with Charlie for the last thirteen years she's waited for him, waited to be old enough, waited for him to get a good job, waited for him to come home from New York but this year she decided to stop waiting especially after finding him in bed with another woman. Noah has been a constant in Meg's life and has been in love with her for just as long and finally this year is the year he has his chance to finally show Meg how he feels.

Overall, it was a really nice and steamy read with lots of emotion. Meg looks back on her life and sees things differently than she use too and once she gets all that figured out everything falls into place.

Snowed In: Stacy Finz
My favorite of the book! I absolutely love Glory Junction. As soon as I read in the last Glory Junction book the animosity between Rachel and Boden I knew this was going to be great. Rachel Johnson left her big city corporate lawyer job to pursue her dream of being a baker. Now she owns a fantastic bakery and is looking to expand and she knows just the place. Boden Farmer turned the tired old bar into a gastro pub and he has plans to expand himself but in the meantime he's working the bar for parties which brings him in close proximity to Rachel. They are both prepping for the Christmas Day wedding when they get snowed in. With no distractions standing in their way they finally drop their walls low enough to let each other in but their is still the matter that they both want the same location for their business.

Overall, I loved this one. It's a quick and easy read with funny situations and loveable characters. Rachel has been burned once before so she's hesitant to let anyone else in it takes a grand gesture from Boden to show her he's worth the risk.

A Cowboy Wedding for Christmas: Nicole Helm
Lindsay Tyler dreamed of leaving her hometown behind and she did she left after high school and vowed never to come back. Cal Barton thought he was enough for Lindsay, that she would stay for him and when she left town she broke his heart. After six years of living life on her own Lindsay is homesick she's had her time to grow up and discover who she really is and that person belongs with her family. When her brother gets engaged and she comes home for the wedding she's staying home for good. Now she just has to make it through the wedding at Cal's Christmas Tree Ranch without falling back in love with him.

Overall, this was a nice emotional read about how sometimes to need to be apart and discover who you are away from the comforts of home to really appreciate the place where you belong.

A Baby For Christmas: Lisa Jackson
1995 Annie McFarlane is newly divorced when her husband's girlfriend ends up pregnant. After discovering she may never be able to conceive and then her husband leaving Annie was having a horrible year. 1996 Liam O'Shaughnessy needs to find the real killer of his boss before he gets convicted of murder his only lead is the woman who claimed she saw him there but she's disappeared but he's found her sister. Annie found solace in a small house in the middle of nowhere looking after an older couple ranch. Her plan was to stay a few more days before going to visit her brother and his family but late one night she discovers a baby on her front step with a note "For you Annie". The next night Liam shows up at her door claiming the baby is his and demands to know where her sister, the baby's mother, is but Annie has no idea and with a blizzard blowing in they are stuck together to work it out.

Overall, this one fell short. I love Lisa Jackson's older stuff and this feels like it's only half a book. It feels like there is so much missing from this story. I love the idea of it and the plot and if there is a full version of this story out there I want to read it but this as is is lacking.   

ARC REVIEW You Will Pay by Lisa Jackson

You Will Pay is a stand alone (as far as I know) book by Lisa Jackson. I'm big on Lisa Jackson, I have read a bunch of her older stuff. You Will Pay reminds me of a couple of things the video game, Until Dawn, and the movie, I Know What You Did Last Summer. (it's way better then the movie but the video game is so good it's hard to compete with it.) The main difference between these two and this book is that revenge is a dish best served cold, very cold, twenty years cold. It is very complicated story that has you guessing and a decent twist at the end, it also kind of dark, I like that. Unfortunately the pacing and character introduction was not to my liking, it was interesting how she did it, it not unusual for LJ to do the flip flopping between past and present, alternating to different POVs in the past to get the different sides of the story, it was nice but there are seven to nine different POVs to keep track of and I just had a hard time getting into the story especially since most of the characters are really annoying.

It starts off with a young woman standing on the edge of a cliff ready to commit suicide, she's a very religious and young with no idea what to do she has her epiphany and chooses not to go through with it, just then someone comes out of the woods and pushes her over. Her body is never found. A day later two more people disappear, many lay the blame of the disappearances at the hands of the convict that escaped and went missing. This all happened on the grounds of a religious summer camp and the three people who went missing were all camp counselors. Twenty years later remains are found on the beach.

Lucas was there that summer, he was a counselor and is the son of the preacher who ran the camp. He dated the first girl who went missing, it was a very bad summer for him and he prefers not to remember it, but he's a sheriff's deputy and with the skeletal remains showing up on the beach he knows it's all going to come up again. Bernadette was also a camp counselor back then and she fell in love with Lucas but after what happened she wanted to put it all behind her and never contacted him again, but now not only is the Sheriff's department asking her to come in for questioning about what happened back then but an independent journalist, who also happened to be one of the kids at the camp that year is also hounding her for questions. Jo-Beth was the self appointed leader of the counselors back then she devised the story everyone would tell, a story she devised to cover her own ass in the prank she played on one of the other counselors, because after all Monica deserved it but then Monica herself went missing. The secrets are all coming out whether people want them to or not and old romances are being revised.

Overall, it was a good read, not my favorite of her but it was a good read. I didn't predict the ending but it wasn't all that surprising.        

ARC REVIEW After She's Gone by Lisa Jackson

My mother-in-law got me into Lisa Jackson books and one of my all time favorites fall back reread books is one of hers, unfortunately this is not going to be one of those books. I enjoyed the mystery it's what keep me reading the book instead of just DNFing it. The first half of it is whiny and a mishmash of other Lisa Jackson books updated. Cassie is annoying, her heart is in the right place but the poor me attitude got old real quick. It did get better when Trent showed up and took control of Cassie. The detective wasn't any better, it alluded to a hard past but she was just to annoying for me to care about her past. Allie evidently suffers from affluenza, she thinks everyone owes her something and nothing his her fault; she's a narcissistic bitch who got off lightly in the end. Trent is the only main character I liked.

After She's Gone is the third book in Lisa Jackson's Northwest series, it is a direct sequel to her 2005 release Deep Freeze which centers on actress Jenna Hughes and Sheriff Shane Carter. Cassie and Allie survived the events of the previous book only for it to screw up their lives. Cassie tries to escape by moving to L.A. to become an actress only to suck at it. Allie fought for her mother's attention and was jealous of all the attention Cassie got after the attack and growing up the daughter of Jenna Hughes she felt she was in constant competition with both her mother and sister. But after she moved to L.A. at Cassie's insistence Allie became famous. Cassie jealous of her sister's easy ability to act, gave it up and found screenwriting was more her thing. Because of Allie's easy start to stardom Cassie felt jealous and became even more self conscience with anything pertaining to Allie, especially when it came to Cassie's own husband.

There is an accident on set, the actress who was shot was originally supposed to be Allie. But now Allie is missing and Cassie had a nervous breakdown and admitted herself into a psychiatric hospital. But the longer Allie is gone the more worried Cassie gets and an ominous visit from an old timie nurse gives Cassie the kick in the butt she needs to find out what's going on. The longer Allie is gone the more police think Cassie did it especially after she is seen with an actress the night before she was murdered. Two dead, one almost paralyzed and one still MIA and Cassie is at the top of the suspect list. Thankfully she has her mother, stepfather, and Trent to lend a hand and support her in her need to find Allie. But what they discover is even more shocking than anything they had to deal with before.

Overall, I kept reading because the mystery was good, I was only half right in my initial guess. The characters, except for Trent, Jenna and Shawn, were all so shallow you just didn't care what happened to them.            

ARC REVIEW Never Die Alone by Lisa Jackson

Lisa Jackson's ongoing series following Rick Bentz and Reuben Montoya two New Orleans Homicide detectives continues to have more then their fair share of the worst of the worst. This is book eight and as far as the series goes this can be read as a stand-alone. It does talk about a past case as it references to a secondary story line Lisa Jackson is building up to for another book. It does get redundant as it is mentioned more then a few times, I think unnecessary but then I have read that book so it just maybe that way for me. Other than that the book is classic Jackson suspense light on the romance but nail-biting suspense I couldn't put it down I didn't want to put it down, I'm glad my kids can find food on their own. The whodunit was a surprise if not a little cheesy.  

(***SPOILER***... unless you have read the previous book, Devious... a notorious killer from a previous book is back. It's awesome and because it it just a secondary story in this book and its such a tease!)

Brianna Hayward is a twin-less twin; she lost her sister in high school and it changed her life forever. Brianna is now a psychiatrist who runs a help group for other like herself. She is also trying to prove her cousin is innocent of crimes he didn't commit. Her cousin was convicted of murdering his twin sisters on their twenty-first birthday, he was labeled the 21 Killer. Brianna is alone in her belief until one of her friends from the Twin-less Twin group discovers her twin daughters missing.

It should have been the best night of their lives, Zoe and Chloe were turning twenty-one but the night went wrong and now they are both hog tied naked in a basement room with a scary looking naked guy singing Happy Birthday, badly. Zoe always the strongest of the two tries to escape and now she is lost in the swamp separated from her twin. Chloe needs to be the strong one, after their attempted escape Chloe was recaptured; now she needs to get herself out of this before he catches Zoe again.

Bentz has no reason to believe Brianna Hayward, but something about it reminds him of Olivia and how they first meet. So he goes out on a limb and starts to follow up on the missing twins. Also thrown into the mix is crime reporter Jase Bridges. Jase went to school with Brianna and her sister and has a secret he has kept from Brianna for years but the attraction is there and he tries to stay away but the story of the 21 Killer and the missing twins is too good to pass up.

Overall, with all the emotional turmoil from both past and present experiences, and the suspense of being chased by a mad man it ties you up inside. If you haven't read any of the other books this would be a good one to start at.