Ethan is just back from Iraq after spending months rehabbing from serious injuries, and he’s not sure where he stands in the world. One of the first things he wants to do is find his biological father, a man that didn’t even know he existed until Ethan is introduced to him.

In the meantime, Connie crosses paths with Ethan after she picks him up hitchhiking, which he isn’t supposed to do in that area. Instead of warning him and sending him on his way, she senses something about him and gives him a ride into town. They talk and he immediately intrigues her.

Almost immediately, a man tries to pick up Connie’s young daughter from school. The man even knew her name. The suspicion in town falls on Ethan because he’s the newest arrival there, but that quickly gets set aside.

Ethan deals with his father and doesn’t know what to do next. He’s willing to let some time pass till he gets it all figured out. The sheriff, however, knows that Ethan is a good man and that his recent arrival will actually help out with the search for the man that tried to abduct Sophie Halloran. He hires Ethan and sets him up as a “friend” to Connie who’s visiting from out of town.

Connie’s mother and daughter take to Ethan at once, and Connie doesn’t blame them, but she knows that the soldier is just passing through. She doesn’t want anyone to get hurt, but she acknowledges that Ethan is a good man for the role of protector.

Rachel Lee is a solid writer in any kind of fiction. She’s also done several thrillers. Her prose is precise, punchy, and pared-down. She only says what she needs to say, making each scene work, then going on to the next one.

I read this book in two sittings, which makes it a perfect read in my mind. The characters are engaging and the stakes are immediately understandable. Her dialogue is good as well, and the characters are decisive and accepting of their lot in life, making them the kind of people I’d love to meet and hear more about. This is the way romantic suspense should be written. Rachel Lee is skilled enough to make it all look effortless.

The popularity of zombies is on the rise. In fact, the fans of the walking dead may be soon encroaching on the number one spot held by vampires. I don’t know why this is happening, it’s as mysterious as the reasons for the zombies climbing from their graves to start searching for a brain buffet in all the movies (and yeah, yeah, I get that some kind of gas was released in the Living Dead movies and in Raccoon City, but come on. Really?).

Zombies moved back into horror fiction with a much more sure step than they’ve had in a long time. But now they’re launching into teen romance fiction. In a way. Generation Dead by Daniel Waters is a mixed bag, and I’m going to be all over the place while describing my reading experience for you. It just refuses to lie down and die to be reborn into a familiar zombie novel of movie tradition.

The cover of the dead cheerleader with blackened eyes seized me at once. I mean, once you get that image in your head, it’s not going to easily go away. Neither will the romantic triangle between Phoebe, Adam, and Tommy, the “differently biotic” boy Phoebe falls for.

Phoebe was one of the Goth girls at school. She enjoyed being different, and the dressed-in-black thing really worked for her. Looking like the living dead really worked for her. It even earned her the name Scarypants from Pete, the novel’s villain of sorts. Of course, the look really lost its appeal when dead kids started showing up and coming back to school. The author does an excellent job of catching a teen girl’s feelings and confusion throughout the novel. Phoebe comes to life on the pages almost at once.

Adam is the football jock and Phoebe’s next door friend. As it happens, he’s just discovering that the friendship he’s always had with Phoebe runs much deeper. That realization is stymied by his own shyness, the fact that he is a member of the Pain Crew on the football team and he shouldn’t go for Goth girls, and Phoebe’s sudden crush on Tommy Williams.

Tommy is a pioneering wonder among the zombies. He’s articulate and he writes, blogs even. He also goes out for the football team and causes all kinds of tension in the school and the city.

The story revolves around these three characters and how they sort out their lives. However, the author throws in great support characters like Margi, Phoebe’s best friend, and others.

Teens these days seem to be almost shockproof to so many changes in their lives. If the living dead did claw their way from their graves and decide to go to school instead of the brain buffet, I would be very surprised if teens didn’t act exactly as Waters portrays them in this novel. They split almost immediately into groups that supported the zombies and those that stood against. But mostly they were curious.

I could make a lot of comparisons to cultural differences being played out in the pages, of Waters building his zombies up to comment on race, religion, and economics – the usual dividers among populations, but I won’t. I don’t think he wants the book to go that deeply into global problems. I believe he just wants to talk about the teen world, get into their heads, and tell a story they’ll have a ball with wondering “what-if”?

I also have to admit that you’re going to have to push yourself to get through the first fifty pages or so. The book progresses slowly but that’s so the characters and all their complications can be set into place. Once that’s done, Waters engages fully with the story and keeps things moving.

This is a book for the teens. Some parents of teens or those who want a trip back through the teenage years will enjoy it as well, but the junior high and high school readers should eat this one up. There’s no real explanation for why the zombies came back to life, or why only American teens were affected, and I was disappointed slightly in that. But the characters are real, facing situations with genuine emotion, and I believe that the target audience is going to feel that and enjoy the read.

 Jordan Dane hits a solid homerun with her debut novel, No One Heard Her Scream. The book is marked as romantic suspense, but the accent is on suspense, with clearly defined characters, a taut plot, and forensic and police terminology that will satisfy the armchair crime scene investigators looking for a new buzz.

The novel’s pacing is frantic, the prose pared down and swift, the love scenes torrid, and the bad guys as creepy and evil as anyone would ever want. I had a good time blazing through this book. It offers a lot of excitement and twists, as well as the San Antonio background that I’d recently visited. The scenes along the historic riverwalk really jumped out at me.

I liked Detective Rebecca “Becca” Montgomery right out of the blocks. She’s cut from the same larger-than-life cloth that a lot of action/suspense heroes are cut from, but she wears it well. I liked the fact that she was tough, independent, and good in a fight, though that isn’t what most romance heroines are noted for. However, more and more young women in our world are getting that way – including familiarity with the martial arts – and I think Becca presents a good role model in several respects.

Dane grabs our attention immediately in the beginning with the short action piece, then segues smoothly into Becca’s story. Still reeling with the guilt and pain from her younger sister’s disappearance months ago, Becca is pulled off Dani’s investigation and placed on a cold case assignment. Along the way she’s hauled into an investigation involving the body of a young woman that was bricked up in a recently burned-down movie theater.

While at the theater crime scene, Becca crosses paths with Diego Galvan, who quickly proves he’s more than he seems. Diego is a strong lead that easily holds his own with Becca, and he’s a man hiding a lot of secrets.

Real life has to be squashed almost into sound bytes in a novel to keep the pacing up, and Dane masters that art easily. Her strength lies in the plotting, which has enough twists and turns to keep most readers guessing or second-guessing which path she’s going to take.

With the meteoric pacing of Becca’s investigation, the budding relationship with Diego sometimes gets overshadowed, but I found myself accepting the fact that the author would handle it. My main attention focused on Becca’s pursuit of the bad guys and who everyone really was. The headlong storyline made it almost impossible to let the relationship breathe, but I think it’ll be satisfying to romance fans.

However, the suspense, action, and detailed police knowledge should have fans of Tami Hoag and Lisa Jackson picking up Dane’s books as well.

Dane scored a great deal with her publisher. Over the next three months, three of her novels will be released. No One Left To Tell comes out next, followed by No One Lives Forever. Although they sound like a series, all of them feature different heroines and heroes.

Pick up Jordan Dane’s novels even if you don’t have time to read them now. They’re perfect beach books, though you may be more tense lying in the sun and lawn chair than you’d planned on being!

No Control is author Shannon K. Butcher’s second novel. She writes boiling hot romance intertwined with huge dollops of intrigue and a generous backstory. Romance readers don’t always get those, so someone who provides a good mix of terrific hero and heroine, as well as the above elements, is going to get noticed. Butcher has. And if you think her last name is familiar, you may be thinking of her husband, Jim Butcher, the author of the Harry Dresden fantasy series.

I enjoyed Butcher’s take on her characters. You could almost have picked them out of stock players (take one emotionally damaged heroine who no longer trusts herself, and take one Special Forces guy with a Savior complex that gets totally ensnared in the damaged female’s life). Yet Butcher makes both of these characters jump from the pages larger than life but as people readers will learn to love.

Eighteen months ago, Lana Hancock was the lone survivor of a terrorist attack. A group that called themselves the Swarm took a group of young American’s hostage, tortured them, and killed them. Lana was believed dead as well. Even though she survived, she had to undergo several surgeries and torturous months of rehab to reclaim even a shadow of her life. She’s since started a foundation based in art that’s aimed at helping kids.

The last thing she needed was for special forces soldier Caleb Stone to come striding back into her life. But he did. As it turns out, there’s some question about the Swarm and whether that organization was razed to the ground in the bitter firefight that followed the capture of the hostages. Caleb gets assigned to protect Lana, but he’s also been ordered to find out everything she knows. Caleb’s superiors don’t think Lana told them everything she knows.

Unfortunately, Caleb is probably the last guy that should have been sent. He was undercover at the time of Lana’s abduction. He was onhand and some of the worst torture she went through – and he did nothing. She didn’t ever want to see him again.

I loved the instant antagonism that Butcher placed between her characters. It’s always best to believe in the forces that try to keep two lovers apart. Stupidity and selfishness are big reasons to keep the characters apart in romance novels that I read, yet some writers continue to use them. I totally bought into Butcher’s scenario, and she builds up the reasons for Caleb’s presence there – because of that history – instead of letting it just sit there.

The romance elements of the story are incredibly hot. Butcher takes her time to build those up as well. Nothing happens too quickly in the novel, and readers aren’t kept waiting too long.

In addition, Butcher is a fine action writer as well. In the action scenes, she proves herself time and time again. The choreography is great, and her military thinking and jargon is dead-on. There isn’t much in the way of action for a long time, but when she gets to it, the result is deadly earnest.

Even more, Butcher’s backstory with the villains and Caleb’s special forces friends is marvelous. The creepy intensity of the woman who’s out for Lana’s blood is awesome, as well as the head of the Swarm. And there are enough other things going on that a small puzzle of who’s doing what to whom builds up as well. I loved Caleb’s friend Grant, and I hope he ends up getting featured in her third book.

Butcher is an excellent romance writer. If you haven’t picked her up, you should. Her first book, No Regrets, is still on the shelves as well.

The Road to Hell is newbie author Jackie Kessler’s second foray into the paranormal romance field that’s just burgeoning with vampires, werewolves, witches, and other supernatural things. Kessler has played a trump card that’s going to be hard to beat. Her heroine, known in the mortal world – translation, our world, as Jesse Harris was actually a demon named Jezebel. From Hell. Yep, Hell – with a capital H. For four thousand years.The story of how she became human – well, mostly – is told in the first novel, Hell’s Belles. This one just came out and people should know it’s out there. I’ve read both books. Couldn’t help myself. The devil – or, at least, Jesse – made me do it.

In the mortal world, Jesse’s main squeeze is vice detective Paul Hamilton, who has no clue about Jesse’s otherworldly origins. To him, she’s the most wonderful woman he’s ever known. Except for that little faux pas she has of being a stripper at a gentlemen’s club. And trust me, the gentlemen at that club don’t exactly act gentlemanly, as the opening pages of the novel reveal.

And Jesse hasn’t forgotten she was once a succubus of seduction. She enjoys sex in all forms. Stripping just kind of takes the edge off of no longer being a practicing demon. Or maybe it builds her appetite for when Paul comes home. After reading the books, I think it’s probably a mixture of both.

What I can tell you with all certainty is that Kessler has created a spunky, foul-mouthed, straight-shooting, character that still maintains an endearing innocence even after four thousand years of sin. Jesse/Jezebel is a hoot. I should be ashamed for enjoying her ribald adventures so thoroughly. Probably I am. But Jesse (and Kessler) is a supreme provocateur and seductress. I claim being bespelled as my defense.

Kessler’s prose and pacing are engrossing. Readers aren’t going to be able to pick her books up and read casually. They’re going to be hooked by the cleverness, whipped into a frenzy by the blatant eroticism and honesty, and left in a lather when the last page of a book is turned.

She reads like an old hand. She admits on her website to enjoying comic books and writing fan fiction. Still, you can sharpen your craft there, but Kessler writes like she’s been through the finishing school for fiction writers.

Perhaps some of the characters don’t come across on the page as strongly as they might, but there’s no need. With Kessler holding the reins and the novel bolting like a thoroughbred with its tail on fire, you’re simply not going to have time to give them that kind of consideration. They work. They have problems, goals, dreams, and desires (most of them sinful or sexual, of course).

And Jesse/Jezebel is a honest and appealing (in oh-so-many ways), that anyone who is even modestly intrigued by this kind of fiction is going to be swept away and dropkicked into a functionally realized world that makes its own macabre sense. The mythology, the way she redeemed demons – mostly, was intriguing. The background isn’t why someone probably picks paranormal romance up, but those writers that pay attention to it really stand out in the field. Kessler is fast becoming one of those.

Though she hasn’t given up all her demonic thoughts, Jesse strives to live life as a mortal woman because she loves Paul. The problem is that she escaped Hell (her job classification had been changed from Seductress to Betrayer and that didn’t suit her nature at all). And now Hell has come looking for her.

Jesse’s best friends try to bait her into returning to Hell. First through guilt (after all, her one-time best friend Meg – one of the Greek Erinyes, also called the Furies) has gone missing. And anything strong enough to make a Fury disappear has got to be considerable. These attempts are hilarious. I found myself laughing out loud several times. Don’t do this in public, because trying to explain the erotically-laden plot, quips, puns, and jokes isn’t meant for the public transport or water cooler crowd. Unless you’re in an especially permissive public transport or water cooler crowd.

Then Dauuan, her one-time casual lover for thousands of years who knew best what she really wanted and craved, tries to seduce her into losing her newly-won soul. That, at times, had me in tears as I laughed at both of them dancing around their changed relationship.

Jesse decides that things in Hell must have truly gone to Hell with all of these things going wrong. But she avoids guilt, sympathy, and clever traps with aplomb.

Then, when nothing else has worked, Meg’s sister Fury seduces Paul and strips his soul from him. She takes it to Hell. And Jesse now has no choice but to go there to rescue him.

The book, as long as it is, will be one of the quickest reads you’ve ever had. The events basically take place in one day, but it’s a day that progresses at breakneck speed and with twists and turns and loops that a prize-winning rollercoaster would envy.

Read one of Kessler’s books and she’ll seduce you into her private fandom.

Driven, the third book of Dorchester’s new Shomi line – which has an anime look and promises fast action and hot romance, delivers a fast read guaranteed to take the reader out of this world. The novel is a concoction of action/adventure and romance whose roots are definitely in the pulp arena.

This is Eve Kenin’s first book, but new fans need not worry. She’s also writing novels under her real name, Eve Silver.Driven begins with a bang in a futuristic frozen world where truckers and runners are the lifeblood of far-flung outposts of humanity. A large portion of the world’s population has been depleted and the environment has turned toward the Ice Age. It’s not quite there, but arable lands are few and far between, and there are communities stuck in the harshest circumstances while providing materials other than food to communities. Trucking remains the least expensive and surest means of transportation for cargo.

I loved the world. Images filled my head, triggered by the beautiful cover, and enhanced by Kenin’s terrific prose. The thing that really pulled me in was the action, though. I’m a guy. I read romances. I enjoy writers that know how to mix action, suspense, mystery, and love stories. There are a lot of good writers out there. Eve Kenin (Eve Silver) is going to be one of those, and she’s going to be read a lot.

The main character is Raina Bowen, daughter of a military father who taught her everything he knew about surviving in the harsh world they’ve inherited. She’s a trucker, roving across the Northern Waste as an independent hauler, working when and where she can.

When the book opens, she’s signed up for a race against the Janson Company, a group of truckers that are essentially pirates that will kill drivers and hijack their cargoes. In the opening chapter, Raina gets into a fight with a trucker and beats him down with her martial arts prowess. She’s exactly the kind of rough-and-tumble woman that I love to root for. She’s capable and deadly, plenty able to hold her own ground in physical battles, and clever enough to overpower opponents that outnumber her.

She’s paired up with Wizard, a cipher of a man at first that demonstrates strange abilities and way of thinking that gets explained. Then I liked him even more.

In the beginning, it’s hard to say who saved whom more. Raina seems to pull Wizard’s butt out of the fire when he goes up against the Janson truckers, but when they talk later, he tells her everything was going according to his plan. And he makes perfect sense.

A sizeable chunk of the novel’s opening is devoted to a road trip. Raina and Wizard fight their mutual foes and their attraction to each other. Then Raina figures out that Wizard is actually an assassin, one of the most cold-blooded killers in the frozen world they inhabit. Not only that, but it looks like he was going to kill her when he found out she was running guns, not grain like she thought. Her innocence is apparent to him, though, but he reveals the fact that the book’s villain, Duncan Bane, set her up and is using the race as a means to his own ends.

The sexual tension matches the action, though. And when Kenin brings her characters together, the pages heat up and the sizzle is a tangible thing.

I really enjoyed the book. The idea of a bleak future, survivalists that live in fully-equipped trucks that roll across a deadly, icy landscape, sharply-drawn characters, and plenty of action kept me turning pages till I reached the end. The author’s grasp of dialogue and character development is great, and she doesn’t keep you hanging in limbo while she works out her plot. Things happen in this novel, then they keep happening.

This is the first of the Shomi titles I’ve read, and the first Eve Silver/Kenin book as well, but it definitely won’t be the last.

Judging from all accounts, the vampire romance novel is here to stay for a good long time. As with any other venue, there will be some good practitioners and some who also ran.

After reading Fanged & Fabulous, Michelle Rowen’s second novel about new vampire Sarah Dearly, I’m inclined to believe that the author and heroine are both going to be around for a bit. Or a bite.

Rowen drinks deeply in the same vein (and I’ve got to stop that soon) that MaryJanice Davidson (Undead and Unemployed) does. In Rowen’s world, as in Davidson’s, vampires are a many-splendored thing, but not necessarily to always be taken seriously.

Sarah Dearly is a riot and a mess, a combination which always seems to strike gold in the romance market. In the previous novel, Bitten & Smitten, Sarah was turned into a vampire by a blind date and very nearly killed by vampire hunters. She also became the lover of an ancient vampire named Thierry de Bennicoeur, who apparently wants to keep Sarah at arm’s distance. During the events of that novel, she ended up becoming known as the Slayer of Slayers, a reputation that guarantees her eternal enmity with the vampire slayers stalking her kind – but it also kind of serves to keep them at arm’s distances as well.

The new novel brings Sarah a lot of problems. Her relationship with Thierry isn’t going well. To make matters even worse, she seems to be getting along better with her lover’s wife than her lover (there’s a definite problem with getting a divorce when you’re a vampire, as Sarah discovers). And there’s only so much sympathy Sarah can take from the wife before she’s ready to snap.

To complicate things further, Sarah is also invited into the inner circle of vampires, called the Ring, by another ancient vampire, Nicolai. It doesn’t help that Nicolai seems to be at odds with Thierry for reasons known only to them.

Then someone blows up Sarah’s apartment. She loses her “shard,” a mystical object that is the only way she has of seeing her reflection (she can’t even check her look without it and has to depend on the honesty of her friends!), a pair of secondhand Pradas that were to die for, and all her other belongings.

With her vulnerability brought into sharp focus, and wanting to do a little butt-kicking in revenge, Sarah starts taking self-defense lessons from the two bodyguards Thierry assigns to keep watch over her. But even as she starts learning to take care of herself, things take another turn for the worse when Gideon Chase – the master hunter of the vampire slayers – locks onto her trail and determines to stake her himself.

Rowen keeps the book moving along quickly. Her wry humor is a lot like Davidsons, and readers of both series may enjoy the resonance between the books or be disturbed by it, but she’s definitely one to read as the vampire romance novels start getting a bit long in the tooth. (Sorry. Compulsive.)

The plot circles a little bit before striking out into new territory, but the scenery is pleasant and the company is good. Fanged & Fabulous is only Rowen’s third novel, so she’s entitled to spend some time sharpening her craft. However, she’s off to an outstanding start and I’m eagerly awaiting her next books.

Although Jane Graves is a local author and one whose name I’ve seen on several books, I had not yet read one of her novels. When I saw the cover of Hot Wheels and High Heels I was immediately intrigued. The back cover copy offered humor and a look at the life of a repo man. I figured if the romance didn’t hook me, I still had the adventures of stealing cars from people who didn’t want him stolen. These days the action in a romance novel can be top-rate.

I’m a big Stephanie Plum fan. I had the good fortune of discovering Janet Evanovitch’s books when the first one came out. So I was there at the beginning. I’m also a fan of some of the paranormal series that are out there. As a guy, I really don’t think that’s all that uncommon these days. Men read a lot of women writers. I still treasure my Robert B. Parker stuff, but I love the laughs and insights provided by the ladies. And some of them provide chills and thrills as well.

Back to Jane Graves. When I flipped open the book and began reading, I was immediately attracted to the ease with which the author puts words on the page. I was actually several pages into the story before I realized how much I’d read. The prose is effortless, and the characters are instantly unique and identifiable. Darcy McDaniel, the heroine, has got a real problem. While she was down in Mexico on vacation with a friend, her husband sold her house, emptied the bank accounts, and ran up the charge cards – then vanished. For the last fifteen years Darcy has been a trophy wife. She traded her good looks to a man old enough to her father for a lifestyle of malls, manicures, and personal trainers. Later in the novel you’ll find out more of her motivations for doing that.

I have to admit in the beginning I wasn’t very sympathetic toward Darcy. It wasn’t that I figured she got what she had coming to her, but I know other people who have much worse problems. Still, this is a huge problem for her.

Before she knows it, she’s back living with her parents in the same small, dingy trailer park that she’d grown up in. It was suddenly like the last fifteen years never existed. All she has left is her dog Pepe and her Mercedes, which had been at the airport awaiting her return.

Enter John Stark, ex-cop turned repossession agent. And this repo man has papers to reclaim Darcy’s beloved Mercedes. He’s strictly a no-nonsense kind of guy who gets the job done right the first time. Unfortunately, he’s never dealt with anyone like Darcy. She makes a fool of him and keeps the Mercedes. For a time. Then John returns with a truck and grabs the luxury vehicle with no problem.

As the fates conspire against them, as they are sometimes do in romance novels, Darcy gets under John’s skin and he inadvertently offers her the receptionist job at his agency. Darcy refuses to take it at first, but quickly finds that no one else will give her a job. John’s partner Tony holds John to his promise. Darcy starts to work, living hand-to-mouth.

Since this is a romance novel, the rest of the story about boy-gets-girl is predictable in many ways. However, Jane Graves keeps the story lighthearted, fun, and fast-paced. Despite the fact that I was certain I knew how the story would end up, I stayed glued to the pages – to the character development, to the dialogue, and to the rapid scenes.

That’s one of the best tricks the author pulled off in this book: there was honest character development. Darcy grew as a character. For me, she went from being grossly unlikable to sympathetic and admirable. The changes she made in the way she looked at the world, herself, her family, and in what she thought she wanted were all real. I’ve seen people make those same changes for a lot of the same reasons.

Maybe the plot is the same romance novel that has been told for years, but Jane Graves makes her characters come to life in ways that many romance novelists don’t. She makes the predictable a unique experience and worthwhile. Not only that, but her prose zings right along and readers will be at the end of the book before they know it.

As I said, this is my first Jane Graves book. But it won’t be my last. She set the bar high in this one. I want to look at earlier books and get the sequel to this one coming out next year when she finds the right woman for skirt-chasing Tony. Pick this one up, folks. For the beach or just for fun. It’s a good one.

Holly Lisle started out her writing career with fantasy novels. However, lately she’s turned her hand to paranormal suspense novels and become quite successful and quite well-known at them. She also manages her personal web site (www.hollylisle.com) regarding her career, a personal dialogue with fans and interested parties, and offers tip sheets and essays on the craft of writing. Fans wanting to know more about her and her work are encouraged to visit the site, as are budding writers.

Her first novel paranormal romance, Midnight Rain and her last, I’ll See You, had more violence inherent in the plot than the current book does, but her fourth book, Night Echoes, is more a southern gothic and ghost story. In all of her books, Lisle manages to present interesting characters in the interesting situations, all with an economy of language that keeps readers turning pages. Lisle has such an easy touch with prose that it’s hard not to just keep reading way past bedtime. The pages seem almost to turn themselves.

In Night Echoes, commercial artist Emma Beck buys an old Civil War-era house in South Carolina that she has ties to she has no explanation why. When she sees the house, she realizes that she’s dreamed about it and painted it several times in her artwork. The author works this story with a slow burn, layering in character and building tension at a steady pace. 

Emma was adopted by her parents. Before he died, her father gave her the name of her birth mother. Her father had hired a private detective to track the information down in case Emma ever needed to know. It was that search for the background on her mother and why she was given up for adoption that led Emma house that she buys almost on impulse. 

The story picks up after Emma has been living in the house for a few days and is still moving in. She’s also met Mike Ruhl, the contractor who did minor repairs on her house before she moved in. There are immediate sparks between Emma and Mike that leave no doubts about who the romance will concentrate on. 

Lisle presents her character and a very human fashion and gives her a detailed background that allows the reader to get to know her very well. But it isn’t long before Emma becomes embroiled in trying to find out more about her birth mother. The story she gets almost breaks her heart. Her mother was sixteen when she gave birth to Emma. The father betrayed her and left her alone and pregnant and at the mercy of her cruel father. 

However this isn’t the only story that Emma is told. The prevailing story is that the baby died, which means that she can’t be that baby. But everything she finds leads her to believe that she is, and she feels that she is. 

The book doesn’t really offer anything new to the experienced gothic/ghost story reader. Those who have read in the genre before will easily keep pace with Lisle’s twists and turns. Still, this is a well-crafted novel and the characters are pleasure to explore and journey with. The first three books Lisle wrote offered action and surprises. Night Echoes jogs along at a comfortable pace and delivers a satisfying ending that doesn’t really come as a shock or surprise. While the novel may not build on the momentum of the previous three, it offers a diversion into a different style of writing and an old style ghost story that most of today’s readers haven’t seen in some time. 

Readers who want something to take to the beach and vege out with will enjoy this novel a lot. And Holly Lisle’s growing fan base will enjoy yet another winner.