Tag: James Lear

What I Read Last Week

Posted September 23, 2013 by Tracy in Features | 8 Comments

Another interesting week in Tracyland. There’s just never a dull moment! Among the many other things that happened: my daughter went on her first date. OMG talk about nerve-racking – she’ll be 16 in a couple of months but…still! The boy (her boyfriend) is very nice though so I wasn’t too worried and it was just dinner and a movie. I dropped them off and the boy’s parents picked them up – she was home by 10. Why do I feel so old? lol Here they are before the date. My girl had her eyes closed but the other one I took while they were in the back seat of the car looks pretty funny – he looked like a deer caught in headlights and she looked like her head was about 5 times too big for her body. lol

I’ve still got a couple of giveaways going at the moment – click on the links to go to post to enter:
A print copy of Steam Bath: Sweaty Gay Erotica edited by Shane Allison
My 5 Star Read (so far) Giveaway
A print copy of The Hardest Thing: A Dan Stagg Mystery by James Lear (US Only)
Congrats to Rowena who won Protector by Joanne Wadsworth!

Anyway, on to what I read:

I started off with the upcoming book Snowbound with the CEO by Shannon Stacey. This is a short story/novella that tells the tale of a man and his assistant that are stuck in a hotel in a blizzard unexpectedly. Each has been attracted to the other for a while but both have kept it on a professional level…until now. The story is about their weekend together and the things that happen once they get back to work and their everyday lives. It was a good one and I really enjoyed it. 4 out of 5

The Hardest Thing: A Dan Stagg Mystery by James Lear was a different kind of read for me. There was very little romance so that’s a big change but also the man character, Dan, was very promiscuous and for some reason it just worked for me – which it normally doesn’t at all. Because of this I really didn’t think that any kind of relationship that happened in the book would work but I still enjoyed it all immensely. You can read my full review here. 4.25/4.5 out of 5

Grabbed by Vicious by Lolita Lopez was a sci-fi romance. Due to an agreement between worlds men of one planet can come enter a Grab. Girls are chosen (I was a little unclear about how – lottery?) and then they are corralled and let loose to run, or not, away from the men. If they are Grabbed then that means that they are now married. Primitive but it works in this story. One girl is Grabbed when she doesn’t want to be but soon succumbs to Vicious’ attentions in bed and they soon fall in love. There are a few other things that happen but it was a decent, entertaining read. 3 out of 5

The Captain’s Promise by Susanne Matthews is the story of a girl of royal blood who is in love with guy when she is just 16. He goes off to be a soldier but he makes a promise to her father to always look after her. When he returns 10 years later and finds her in a big predicament he goes about trying to help her. It was a good story that had it’s issues. 3 out of 5 (read for Book Binge)

I Only Have Eyes For You by Bella Andre was my next read. I was sadly disappointed by this book. I mean, I liked Andre’s writing as in previous books and I liked the premise but when all the sex was taken out there just wasn’t a whole lot of story left over. What was there was good. I’ll post my review for this next week. 3 out of 5

Last for the week was a novella called Single Wolf Female by Jessica Sims. Alice was co-Alpha with her brother Chase but he died. She has to get a new alpha but she’s out of family members. This means she must mate the new alpha. Unfortunately a guy named Roscoe who is mean and nasty wants the position. Alice heads to a shifter dating agency and ends up finding Jackson who is an alpha who runs his pack of two. He takes the position but getting to know a stranger that’s going to be your mate plus dealing with a pissed off Roscoe makes for some strange days. The story was a good one. I really liked all the characters in the book and I very much appreciated that Sims didn’t have the h/h falling in love in a day. When the book ended you could see that it would happen but there were no I Love You’s spouted and that was awesome. 🙂 I definitely need to read more in this series. 4 out of 5

My Book Binge reviews that posted last week:
The Week Before the Wedding by Beth Kendrick

Happy Reading!

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Tagged: Bella Andre, Book Binge, Family, James Lear, Jessica Sims, Lolita Lopez, Shannon Stacey, Susanne Matthews, What I Read Last Week, What I've Been Reading This Week

Review: The Hardest Thing: A Dan Stagg Mystery by James Lear + a Giveaway

Posted September 20, 2013 by Tracy in Reviews | 6 Comments

Once a major in the U.S. Army, Dan Stagg fell afoul of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. In his late 30s, tall, and muscular, Dan is prone to violence, always upholding what he views as justice. He’s offered a great deal of money to protect the young male secretary of a powerful real estate broker. The vain, shallow—but most of all hot—young man’s idea of protection includes sex. Dan quickly realizes something strange is going on: he’s being used as a shield for a much more sinister operation and must chose between easy money and sex or the ideals that he embodied in the Army. Why should he do the right thing—particularly when the army betrayed him?

Dan Stagg is working as a doorman/bouncer at a club when he runs into a bit of trouble and he gets fired. He is then approached by a man who wants him to be a bodyguard for a “secretary” that needs to get gone for a while. Dan is given $10,000 and the promise of $20,000 more when the job is completed. For a man who has nothing and has no prospects this looks like the job from heaven.

Dan meets Stirling MacMahon – the secretary – who is so obviously not a secretary. He’s adorable and Dan can’t keep his hands off the young man. They travel, screwing their way north, but soon run into trouble and Dan, being the smart guy he is, soon figures out that he’s been played. The people who hired him didn’t want him to succeed and when a hit comes down on his and Stirling (who says his real name is Jody) and then Jody is taken he has to use all of his smarts – and his ass – to fix it all.

The Hardest Thing – which is gay erotic fiction – is a pretty great book. I hadn’t read anything by Lear before so I wasn’t sure what to expect but the blurb was intriguing enough to make me want to read it.

I found Dan Stagg to be a pretty complex guy when I sat down and thought of him after finishing this book. On the one hand he was sensitive when it came to relationships. I believed he truly wanted love and a home with the man of his dreams, he fantasized about it enough, but he just hadn’t found that special one yet. Despite all of the arrows pointing AWAY from Jody, because let’s face it he wasn’t really relationship material, Dan finds himself thinking of a future with the man. I gotta give him props for seeing underneath Jody’s surface and seeing a man worth having under all the bleach and self-tanners because frankly I didn’t think Jody was a good match for him AT ALL. Of course then there was Dan’s sex drive which was the size of….the universe. lol He was not afraid to hit anything wearing pants that was willing and ready – despite his feelings about Jody. He was a horny bastard and despite being with Jody umpteen times a day he was still up for some rednecks at a roadside gas station. His promiscuity was his way of dealing with the let downs that life had thrown him (again, as well as being incredibly horny) and it made me ache for something more for him. IDK, there was something about him that I found to be very charismatic and because of this I was completely involved in the story. The way this character was written just captured my attention and his sensitivity mixed with his abrasiveness created a duality that I liked reading about.

The story having to do with Jody, why he was traveling, his boss, his bosses minions and what all the background was interesting. There wasn’t truly a mystery here – at least IMHO – but it was well written enough to keep my attention. I’ll be reading more about Dan Stagg in the future. You all know I’m normally a die-hard romance reader. While this wasn’t a romance there were enough relationship intimations to keep this romance girl happy.

Rating: 4.25/4.5 out of 5

James Lear

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