Podcast Transcript 80. An Interview with Elyse from Smart Bitches

Here is a text transcript of 80. An Interview with Elyse from Smart Bitches. You can listen to the mp3 here, or you can read on! 

This podcast transcript was crafted with precision by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.

 Here are the books we discuss:

Book pamela clare striking distance Book Mirror Image Sandra Brown Book Long Time Coming - Sandra Brown Book Vivian Arend - Banff Search & Rescue - High Seduction
Book Fear for me - Cynthia Eden Book Kathleen Woodiwiss - a rose in winter Book lori austin - The Lone Warrior Book susan wigs - the hostage
Book the mistress - susan wiggs Book The firebrand - susan wiggs Book The fall of Shane McCade - Nora Roberts Book Jennifer McQuiston - Moonlight on my Mind
Book candy girl diablo cody Book Stephanie Plum One for the Money Janet Evanovich Book Anita Blake - Book 1 Guilty Pleasures Laurell K Hamilton Book Kushiel's Dart - Jacqueline carey


[music]

Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to another DBSA podcast!  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me is Elyse who reviews for me at Smart Bitches.  You may remember her from such incidents as 10 Things She Hates about Romance Novel Sex Scenes or reviews of romantic suspense, which I am not terribly much a fan of.  Elyse sat down with me to talk about the books that she loves, what she’s reading, what she’s really enjoyed, why Sandra Brown books are so addictive, and what’s coming next for her, as well as major questions like, where do you draw the line in the Stephanie Plum saga?  And when did Anita Blake stop wearing a fanny pack?  These are all key questions, and we cover them all.

This podcast is brought to you by Berkley, publisher of the #1 New York Times bestselling author Maya Banks’s all new Surrender trilogy, starting with the explosive Letting Go.

I’ll have more information about that book at the end of the podcast, as well as information about the music that you’re listening to, ‘cause it’s awesome, and you know where it came from – that’s correct, this is from Sassy Outwater, and I’ll have information about the artist and the track and all the awesome things that go with it.

And now, on with the podcast.

[music]

Elyse:  I’m so excited to talk about books.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  I even have, like, a stack of books sitting here.

Sarah:  Ooh, tell me about them; what do you have?

Elyse:  I just finished Striking Distance, so –

Sarah:  Pamela Clare book?

Elyse:  Yeah, and it’s so good.  It is so good.

Sarah:  Oh, that’s so excellent!

Elyse:  It is.  It’s probably one of the best romantic suspense books I’ve read in a really, really long time.  Like, I’m still kind of blown away by it.

Sarah:  What do you like about it?

Elyse:  It was – I don’t – She’s just such a good writer.  Like, her characters felt so real, and I think one of the hard things about romantic suspense is having heroes who are kind of like tough alpha heroes, but they’re not jerks at the same time.  You know, they don’t kind of fall into that, that alpha-hole category, and he, her hero, Javier, is just really – He walks the line between being really sweet and compassionate because she, her heroine has been through so much trouble, and, you know, still being kind of a tough, bad-ass dude, and I love it.

Sarah:  That’s awesome!

Elyse:  So.  Yeah, I wasn’t, I wasn’t crazy about the ending, though.  It kind of, this could have been an A+ book, and then the ending happened, and it knocked it down to an A for me.

Sarah:  What was wrong with the ending, or can you not describe it without spoiling it?

Elyse:  If I describe it, I will ruin the whole book.

Sarah:  Oh, then yeah, don’t do that.

Elyse:  Yeah.

Sarah:  I did that once on a podcast, and I felt really horrible.

Elyse:  Yeah, so.  It wasn’t horrible; it just wasn’t what I was expecting.

Sarah:  Bummer, dude.  What are some of your favorite romantic suspense novels?  One of the things I wanted to talk to you about was romantic suspense, because it is a genre that I don’t really enjoy, so I don’t talk about it very much.  But you like it, so what are some of your favorites?

Elyse:  I think probably the first romantic suspense books I started reading were Gothics, and so, you know, I always loved Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney and, you know, the older Gothic romances, and then when I first started reading romantic suspense, I didn’t really know it was romantic suspense at the time.  It was when Sandra Brown had totally, like, broken away from romance novels and was doing the romantic suspense things, but it was marketed as thrillers.

Sarah:  Yeah.

Elyse:  So I read a lot of her, a lot of Linda Howard, like, a lot of the big name authors that then, they went from romance over to thrillers and suspense, and that’s kind of how I got started.  And I’ll always have a place in my heart for Sandra Brown because of her absolute crazysauce books, ‘cause they’re nuts.  Not all of them, but she’s got some that are just so strange, and I love it.

Sarah:  I loved old Sandra Brown, but the thing about Sandra Brown was that it, it didn’t often involve children in peril –

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  – and that’s the thing that I can’t deal with in romantic suspense.  It, it seems like every time I try one, in order to increase the emotional connection of the reader, they throw some children in peril, aaand I’m done.

Elyse:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Children in peril, children dead, yeah, I’m done now.  And with Sandra Brown, I mean, there was one where this woman was next to another woman on a plane –

Elyse:  Yes!

Sarah:  – and then the plane crashed, and the woman –

Elyse:  Mirror Image!

Sarah:  Yes!  And then the woman who died was switched seats with the woman who wasn’t rich, but the woman who wasn’t rich got the rich woman’s face, because, you know, nobody checks your dental records or your ID or, you know, your teeth.  Like, nothing.  So this woman gets this other woman’s face, which is coincidentally not that far from hers, and she’s all about to be like, yo!  I’m not that person, when someone comes to her hotel room and is like, you better keep quiet, or I’m going to kill you, so she decides the best thing to do is to investigate with her fake face.

Elyse:  Yeah, I read that book –

Sarah:  I love that book!

Elyse:  I, in full disclosure, I was too young to be reading that book when I read that book –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – and there was this scene in it where they, she describes the heroine as milking the hero –

Sarah:  Oh, God!

Elyse:  – and being, like, the good upper Midwestern girl that I am, I was visualizing –

Sarah:  [Milking sounds and laughter]

Elyse:  – like, how you milk a cow, and I was trying to understand how that would feel good, and like, I’m still traumatized by that to this day.

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Elyse:  She had another book called The Switch, and the hero was a Native American astronaut, and –

Sarah:  Like you do!

Elyse:  Like you do – and there, again, there were twins, and it was a twin switch-up, and I remember one of the twins was, like, part of a publicity firm or something that took celebrities around town, and all I remember about this other twin was that she had just gotten artificially inseminated –

Sarah:  Of course.

Elyse:  – and they decided to do the, like, Parent Trap thing, where they were going to switch roles for a day so that the newly pregnant twin could go hang out with the handsome astronaut, and then there was maybe a murder, and we weren’t sure which twin lived and which twin was really sleeping with the astronaut.  Was it the pregnant one, was it the not-pregnant one?  We don’t know.  And then some Native Americans were mad at the Native American astronaut because he wasn’t supporting their cause.  It was full-on crazysauce.

Sarah:  Which twin is sleeping with the Native American astronaut?

Elyse:  Is it the pregnant twin or the not-pregnant twin?

Sarah:  You’d think these would be simple questions to answer, like, go to CVS and get a test!  These are not tricky questions!  [Laughs]  Wow.

Elyse:  Yeah, her books are great.  They’re getting –

Sarah:  But I loved them!  They weren’t, like, super violent.  They were suspenseful, but there wasn’t, like, entrails, and nobody’s intestines –

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  – came flying out in a Sandra Brown novel.  There was shoulder pads and big hair and some suspense and maybe some plastic surgery to give you someone else’s face or something.  Like, there was no, like, violent, you know, exsanguinations and lots of body parts everywhere.

Elyse:  I felt like she watched a lot of Dynasty.

Sarah:  Yes!  It was very Dynasty romantic suspense, those books.  I love them!  And they’re crack!  Like, you pick one up –

Elyse:  They are.

Sarah:  – you cannot put them down.

Elyse:  Although I – and I’m sad about this – I just DNFed one of her books.

Sarah:  [Gasps] Oh, no!

Elyse:  And I, I kind of want to go back and finish it, but I, I’m really struggling with this one.  So it’s a fairly new release of hers, Lethal –

Sarah:  Oh, that is new!

Elyse:  And – Yeah.  So the premise is that the hero is some sort of undercover agent, and he’s framed for several murders, and he’s on the lam, and the heroine and her young daughter find him in her backyard bleeding out.  And he basically holds them hostage in her house –

Sarah:  Of course.

Elyse:  – with a gun, right, while he gets patched up and is ready to go and stuff, and so the reader knows that he’s, he’s not a murderer, that he didn’t do this, but the heroine doesn’t know.

Sarah:  Right.

Elyse:  And there are parts in the book where he’s, I mean, it’s like a 24-hour period that he’s in the house with her that she’s convinced that he’s going to kill her and her daughter.  And –

Sarah:  That’s so romantic.

Elyse:  Right.  And there’s even one part where he decides he has to sleep, and so he handcuffs her to him in the bed so that he’ll know if she gets up to try to call the police or whatever, and she’s convinced he’s going to rape her, and in her mind, she’s thinking, please don’t let my daughter wake up, and I just – Like, I can’t believe that later on everything’s going to be okay and they’re going to fall in love.  That she was that traumatized by this, and she’s going to come back from that.  Like, as the reader I know it, but as the main character, she doesn’t, and it was just, yeah, it’s too much.  I put it down.

Sarah:  What, what else makes you DNF a romantic suspense?

Elyse:  The hard thing with romantic suspense is that it’s kind of inherently implausible, so you really have to suspend a lot of your disbelief, but if stuff gets super, super crazy, then I have to put it down.  Unless it’s, like, F+ insane fun crazy.

Sarah:  Oh, crazysauce is, crazysauce is always good.

Elyse:  Yeah.  But if it – you know, it, it’s hard to find, it’s why it’s so hard to find a good romantic suspense book, ‘cause it’s so hard to balance something that you’re willing to believe might be happening with two people falling in love while they’re being shot at.

Sarah:  Of course!

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  There is nothing more romantic than having sex in a stairwell while, while guys with guns are chasing you.

Elyse:  Exactly!

Sarah:  Like, that, that always ends with the best sort of orgasm.

Elyse:  Right, and nobody ever gets really nervous and throws up.

Sarah:  No!

Elyse:  Right, ‘cause it’s, that’s what I would do.  I would be in the fetal position, sobbing and vomiting.

Sarah:  And there’s no problem actually reaching orgasm, despite the many people with guns who are trying to kill you.  You can just put that out of your mind for a moment and have a nice, four-page orgasm.

Elyse:  Right.  Well, because the bad guys take orgasm breaks.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  They do.  They have to; that’s in their contract.

Sarah:  [Laughs] It’s in their union contract!

Elyse:  They go outside and they have cigarettes.

Sarah:  [Laughs] It is orgasm time?  All right, let’s go outside.

Elyse:  You know who does it really well is Vivian, or, I’m sorry, for the – Vivian Arend does write really good romantic suspense, but in the Intrigue line – ‘cause those are almost – I, I can’t get into the Intrigue romantic suspense Harlequin ones.  They’re too short for me to buy what’s going on, but HelenKay Dimon does it, and I believe it.  So –

Sarah:  Oh, HelenKay Dimon and Vivian Arend write great suspense.

Elyse:  Yeah, both of – and Vivian Arend just started this series about a search and rescue team in Banff, Canada –

Sarah:  Yes!

Elyse:  – and it’s more like adventure, less suspense.  There’s not –

Sarah:  Right.

Elyse:  – murdering and stuff going on, but it’s really, really good.

Sarah:  It’s really hard to describe the difference, too, between romantic suspense and romantic adventure.  They’re, they’re related, there’s often a suspense element, but the, the romantic adventure is a very different thing than romantic suspense.

Elyse:  Yeah, I think nobody’s being shot at is kind of –

Sarah:  Yes, there’s no firearms –

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  – ‘cause it’s Canada.

Elyse:  Exactly.

Sarah:  [Laughs] And they’re all too nice to shoot at you.

Elyse:  Or if they do, they apologize.

Sarah:  Oh, I’m sorry!  Are you okay?  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Don’tcha know.

Sarah:  Oh, dear.  So what other books have you really enjoyed lately?

Elyse:  Yeah, I’m kind of in a slump, which bums me out a little bit.

Sarah:  That just sucks!

Elyse:  You know, as far as romantic suspense goes, though, I really, really liked that Bagram Ops series by Kalea Cross?

Sarah:  Yeah.

Elyse:  I think Jane mentioned that she liked that too.  And it’s set in Afghanistan; it’s more of a military romantic suspense, but it’s really well done.

Sarah:  Really!

Elyse:  I read one of them.  They’re very, very, very emotional, though.  Like, it’s one of those books that’s going to take all your guts out and stomp on them and then stuff them back inside of you, but they’re really good.  I reviewed one a while back, and I can’t remember the name of it, ‘cause I’m bad like that.

Sarah:  Right.

Elyse:  But there was a helicopter on the back and, like, faces looking menacingly into the distance, so…

Sarah:  Of course.

Elyse:  Who else have I – Oh, I’m reading, I’m actually listening to it on audio, Fear for Me by Cynthia Eden.

Sarah:  Ooh.

Elyse:  And that one is, it’s a romantic suspense, but it’s very, very – You would not like it.  Lots of gore, evisceration, and blood.  It’s very scary.  It’s –

Sarah:  Entrails.

Elyse:  Entrails.  It’s about a serial killer who breaks out of prison and instead of going for Mexico, which would be a smart thing to do, he wants to get revenge on the DA who put him there –

Sarah:  Of course.

Elyse:  – and so – Of course! – who’s of course, I think she’s like 28 in the book, and she’s a district attorney, which I thought was interesting.

Sarah:  Of course!

Elyse:  And so the U.S. Marshal who helped catch the guy comes to protect the DA, and they had an affair before, but then he walked out on her, and so she’s still ass-hurt about it, and he’s, I’m not sure what his deal is yet.  Meanwhile, the serial killer’s hanging around, lurking in the shadows, breaking into her house.

Sarah:  I always like when a, when a good suspense novel is going on or, or there’s some sort of mystery and, like, obvious shit happens.  Like, wow, I don’t remember leaving that fork over there, and it never occurs to anyone that someone was in the house.

Elyse:  In the house, yes.

Sarah:  Like, come on!

Elyse:  Yeah.  This one, she was, what was she doing?  She was carrying groceries in the house, and he murdered her best friend in her house.

Sarah:  Huh?

Elyse:  And I don’t know if he thought it was her or he just, her best friend was there, and so he killed her –

Sarah:  So she’s, so she still lives in the house where her best friend got killed?

Elyse:  Well, I think this happened like a day ago.  The story is still – It’s, it’s not a long timeframe; it’s pretty compressed.  

Sarah:  Oh, okay.  I would so be at the Motel 6, but anyway.

Elyse:  Yes, yes, for sure.

Sarah:  I mean, it’s a crime scene.  You wouldn’t be able to use the kitchen!  And it’s not like crime scene cleanup –

Elyse:  No, I, I don’t think he ever leaves the house.

Sarah:  Yeah, like, okay, so anyway.  Sorry.  I apologize; reality was intruding on this conversation, and that’s just not okay.  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Oh, I think I messaged you on Twitter about the book that made me really, really mad with the incredibly sexist hero?

Sarah:  Oh, yeah!

Elyse:  Yeah, like –

Sarah:  Those were horrible messages!  I was getting upset on your behalf!

Elyse:  Yeah, so I actually, I’m, like, pulling this up and reading parts to you, because this is how – I got maybe 10% of the way into the book, and then I was like, no more.  So the book was Blue Forever by Nina Bruhns, and the hero is a Marine, he’s on a secret mission in China, and he’s just, like, his thoughts are so offensive.  So he realizes he’s going to have to sync up with this woman who works for the State department, and he says, Kip would – and his name is Kip, too, which is the manliest of names – 

Kip would much rather deal with a man.  You could talk to a man, reason logically with a man, no muss, no fuss.  Women were just so damn emotional and unreasonable.

And then later on, he –

Sarah:  Wait, really?  Ewww.

Elyse:  Yeah, that’s really what he…thinks.

Sarah:  Great!

Elyse:  And then he thinks to himself,

Oh, she doesn’t look that tough.  A wink and a smile, and she’d be putty in his hands.  Women love to be needed.

Sarah:  Oh, yeah.

Elyse:  Yeah.  And there’s a scene, too, where she’s shooting out of the back of a Jeep at the bad guys, and he actually thinks that she’s just so adorable because she’s missing shooting them.  Because she had never shot a gun before, but she’s, he thinks it’s cute.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Ewwwyuck.

Elyse:  So that’s the problem with romantic suspense is a lot of heroes slide into that category, where the author wants them to be these really tough, hard-core, you know, bad-ass guys, but then they just turn into douches, and you don’t want to read about it.  And, you know, it’s, it’s finding, I think, that balance between having a sympathetic hero and one that you believe can still, you know, get danger-boner while shooting at bad guys.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Danger-boner!  [Laughs some more.]  So, one of the other things that you really like to review on the site is historical.  What are some of your favorite historical authors?

Elyse:  My first historical author was Kathleen Woodiwiss, and I’ll always love her, but then I went back and re-read some of her books as an adult –

Sarah:  Ohhh.

Elyse:  – and they were so messed up.

Sarah:  That’ll scar you for life.

Elyse:  Ohhh.  I think the first romance I read was A Rose in Winter, and that was the one where the hero pretended to be this scarred-up old guy, and so she never slept with her husband, and she just, you know, he just kind of lurked around, but meanwhile he was secretly – I don’t know what he was doing, fighting crime or something – and so she met him without his –

Sarah:  He was a spy.

Elyse:  – mask on, and sort of started falling in love with him.  It was so weird.  It was a very strange book.

Sarah:  He was a spy, probably the Chief of Police –

Elyse:  But when you’re –

Sarah:  – you know.  Like you do.

Elyse:  Right.  But when you’re 14, you’re, oh, that makes total sense.

Sarah:  Oh, of course!  I – I accepted some completely bonkers shit.  I remember one historical that I read; it was something about when the ravens return to this estate, then the family gets the land back.  It was all, it was all hinging on some birds, which already is just doofy, but the, the hero was a complete asshole.  Like, he was an unmitigated jerk.  But he was really good at the playing the piano.

Elyse:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And so whenever he would play the piano with his tortured, tortured soul, the heroine would be like, oh, but his music!  And birds, and piano.  That was what this guy had going for him:  birds and playing the piano.  And I still remember this book, like, wow!  That was amazing!  Because it was, like, so over the top, and they were very intense, and I was 14, and I was all kinds of familiar with intense, I thought it was amazing!  And then I went back and read it and was like, what’s wrong with me?  Why did I like that?

Elyse:  Yeah, I remember reading Jane Eyre the first time and being like, of course you lock your crazy wife in the attic.  Like, what else are you going to do?

Sarah:  Well, of course you put her – yeah!

Elyse:  Yes!  Why, why is that an issue?  Why is everyone getting all bent out of shape about this?

Sarah:  Look, if she’s crazy and you don’t want her to be around, then of course you should lock her in a closet.  That makes perfect sense!

Elyse:  Yeah!  Totally!  But historicals – Regencies are my comfort reads, but I’m trying to break out of that, ‘cause there’s so many good books that take place in different time periods.  So I just reviewed a Western for you, and she, the author’s Lori Austin –

Sarah:  Yes.

Elyse:  – and she has a whole trilogy set in the Wild West, and so I bought the first two books, and I’m looking forward to those, ‘cause she did a really, I thought, good job.  I think she handled it really well.  Her hero was not Native American but lived with them for a long time.  He was actually initially a slave to the Cheyenne and then kind of assimilated into their culture.  So I’m reading those, and then there’s a series of books that I really enjoyed that take place during the Great Chicago Fire, which –

Sarah:  Whoa!

Elyse:  Yeah!  Like, the fire happens in the first chapter, and then everything, it’s the events that happen after that, and that’s by Susan Wiggs, and I want to say the first book is The Hostage.  It’s, I think, The Hostage, The Mistress, and The Firebrand, and the other thing I liked about The Hostage was it also took place in northern Michigan.  The, the book opens up with this, she’s sort of like a debutante; her father is, I don’t know what you would call, like, a captain of industry or something, and the fire breaks out, and as the Chicago fire is going on, this man is coming to get revenge on her father because his unsafe business practices mining basically killed one of his friends, and he sees the daughter and takes the opportunity to kidnap her, and they wind up on this island in Michigan, and it sounds crazy, but it makes – [laughs] – it makes more sense when you’re reading it.

Sarah:  Sure, yeah!  O-o-okay.  Whoa.

Elyse:  These are, I think they were published in the ‘90s originally.

Sarah:  Oh, yeah.  I’m sure.  I also think that there’s something – one of these things is not like the other.  The Hostage, The Mistress, and The Firebrand?

Elyse:  Yeah.  Well, one of –

Sarah:  One of those things doesn’t fit real well.

Elyse:  I think she was a, I think the firebrand was, like, a suffragette.

Sarah:  So what was the first romance you ever read?

Elyse:  Ohhh.  I think it was –

Sarah:  The first that you remember.

Elyse:  The, A Rose in Winter.

Sarah:  It was A Rose in Winter?

Elyse:  I’m pretty sure that was it, yeah.  I found it in the basement, and it was in a box of books that belonged to my mom.  She had all the Kathleen Woodiwiss books, and I went through and read all of them in, like, a week.  And I was very young –

Sarah:  That’s dangerous.

Elyse:  Yeah.

Sarah:  I don’t know if that’s a recommended activity, all of them in a week.

Elyse:  No, it was summer, I was a kid, I was bored.

Sarah:  Yeah!

Elyse:  Yeah, I learned a lot about alpha-hole heroes.

Sarah:  But wait, aren’t you, aren’t you, aren’t you, like, from the Midwest?

Elyse:  I’m from the upper Midwest.

Sarah:  Yeah, the socialist republics of the upper Midwest?

Elyse:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Yeah.  Don’t you have things to do in the summer, like state fairs?

Elyse:  The state fair here is glorious, and you need to come and eat some of the cheese pu – er, cheese puffs – cheese curds and cream puffs.  Those are the two.  It is –

Sarah:  I have been.  I went to the Minnesota State Fair with a friend of mine who is from, I think, it’s Roseland?

Elyse:  Okay.

Sarah:  Is that a place?  Right?  It’s a place outside of Minneapolis somewhere?  Anyway.  She’s gone to the Minnesota State Fair every year, so we did the tour, and I saw every goddamn inch of the Minnesota State Fair.  I saw the dairy barn –

Elyse:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – I saw, like, all these stands where you could, like, shoot things.  And then we got –

Elyse:  Yes!

Sarah:  – like a bucket of chocolate chip cookies and then crossed the whole damn fair to go to the truck with the milk because you’ve got to get the free cup of milk from the giant tanker truck, it’s like a giant industrial udder full of milk –

Elyse:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – with your bucket of cookies, and it’s clear on the other side of the fair!  They don’t move these things near each other.  I saw Elvis Presley seed art, I saw seed art of pop stars at the time that I went, I think there was some Spice Girls seed art.  Seed art was amazing.  I saw the butter heads.

Elyse:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  The butter heads were amazing.

Elyse:  Did you – Sarah, my brother-in-law used to date Alice in Dairyland, okay?

Sarah:  Get.  Out!

Elyse:  For real.

Sarah:  For reals?!

Elyse:  For reals.

Sarah:  Oh, my God.

Elyse:  Yeah, he and Alice in Dairyland, they were a thing.

Sarah:  No!

Elyse:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Oh, my God!

Elyse:  When you, when you grow up in Wisconsin in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, a nice man from the Dairy Council comes and teaches, like, your fifth grade class a six-week seminar, basically, on all the different types of cows and milk and cheese production.  I still know more about cows today than is reasonable for any adult to know.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Has this been useful for you in your profession at all?

Elyse:  It has not been.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  It’s pitiful; not whatsoever.  So…

Sarah:  That’s terrible!

Elyse:  Yes.

Sarah:  That’s very sad.

Elyse:  I, I have not read any good dairy farmer romances, either.  They’re always cattle ranchers but never dairy farmers.

Sarah:  Why are there no dairy farmer romances?  This is a very good question!

Elyse:  I, I, I don’t know.

Sarah:  I’m going to ask on Twitter.

Elyse:  [Laughs] Why are there no dairy farmer romances?

Sarah:  Do you know of any dairy farmer romances?  Let me ask.  Because, I mean, that seems like a legitimately manly profession, right?

Elyse:  You’ve got to get up early and milk those cows.

Sarah:  Milk a cow –

Elyse:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – take care of them.

Elyse:  He’s taking care of a lot of ladies every day.

Sarah:  I just don’t understand, how are there not more dairy – Oh, people are retweeting this.

Elyse:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  We don’t know the answer, but we’re going to lift this question into the, into the greatest heights of Twitter.  We must share whether or not there are dairy farmer romances.  You know, there are a bunch of professions that you’d think would be in romance – another retweet – that, there are a lot of hero professions that are missing.  Like, there’s no dairy farmer romance heroes.  There are all these ranchers and rodeo guys, but you never have, like, the, the veterinarian who specializes in, like, reptiles.  And birds.

Elyse:  Jennifer McQuiston has a book coming out that you sent me, Moonlight on my Mind, and it’s a regency, but the hero is a veterinarian, and I thought that was so cool.

Sarah:  Really?

Elyse:  Really!

Sarah:  Oh, that’s awesome!

Elyse:  Yeah!

Sarah:  Her first two books are on sale.  That’s probably why the, that’s probably why they’re on sale.  When is the new one coming out?

Elyse:  I want to say it’s March 25th.

Sarah:  Ooh, that’s cool.

Elyse:  Yeah.  So the hero’s a vet, and I thought that was really neat.  And his family’s very disapproving that he’s a vet, ‘cause they want him to be, I don’t know, aristocratic and not do anything.

Sarah:  So, that’s a really interesting thing, ‘cause you read the first book and really didn’t like it but then went back for book two and now book three.  Are you still, are you glad that you stuck with her?

Elyse:  Oh, absolutely.  It takes a lot for me to not read an author anymore.  I have to be actually offended –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – but what I’m reading for me to never read an author again.  Unless, yes, I’ve run into self-published works that just, it was obvious it had never seen an editor, stuff like that.  I won’t, I won’t go back to that.  I don’t want to be your copy editor.

Sarah:  Oh, I hate that too.

Elyse:  I read a self-published book a while, and I just deleted it immediately.  It was on sale for 99 cents, which is why I bought it, and there’s this part where the hero is asking her, he’s, he goes, so, you know, what did you do this morning?  And she’s like, oh, I took a nap and then I made breakfast.  And he goes, I wish I had been there to see that.  And she’s like, to see me making breakfast?  And he goes, no, taking a nap.  And I’m like, who watches someone take a nap?

Sarah:  That’s really boring.

Elyse:  That’s really weird!  Unless you have a concussion or something and they have to wake you up a bunch of times, why would you – I blame Twilight.

Sarah:  Watching people sleep?

Elyse:  For the watching people sleep.  Yeah.

Sarah:  Yes.

Elyse:  I wouldn’t, like…

Sarah:  I think you’re right.

Elyse:  To put it in perspective, I think I hated Twilight more than I have hated almost any other book, and I still read all four.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  I, I’ll just keep going.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Why did you read all four?

Elyse:  I don’t know, it was, it was one of those where, it was like an F+ book for me, and so I could not – I was reading it and texting my friends at night, you won’t believe what I just read –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – and texting them passages and stuff.

Sarah:  I barely finished the first one.  I did not like being in her head.  I was so bored.  I had the same problem with 50 Shades of Gray, which is, like, totally not a surprise.

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  When you’re that deep in the point of view of a character and she’s frickin’ boring, it is so difficult to maintain interest and to think it’s at all interesting.

Elyse:  What really upset me was, just, the whole, like, oh, my family believes I just mysteriously fell out of a window and was really badly injured and no one questions the fact that perhaps my strange new boyfriend and his weird cult-like family might be abusing me.  Like, everyone just took everything at face value.  Right?

Sarah:  Of course!

Elyse:  Oh, that’s weird, the kids never come out when it’s sunny.  Oh, well.

Sarah:  Yeah, it –

Elyse:  Nope, don’t question that.

Sarah:  You know, they, they’re very special.

Elyse:  They go hiking.  Their dad’s a doctor; it’s legit.

Sarah:  Yeah, it’s fine.

Elyse:  And they’re, they’re step-siblings or whatever, foster siblings, but they’re dating.  It’s not weird; we’re not going to question that.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Right.  And when that happens in any other book, I’m like, okay, no.  No, no, no.

Elyse:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Nonononononono.  Nope.

Elyse:  Yeah, anyone who’s had step-siblings can tell you that’s so, so icky.  So icky.

Sarah:  I have three dairy farmer romances for you.

Elyse:  You – I’m – so excited!

Sarah:  But one of, only two of them are actual books.  Donna, Donna  reminds me that the hero in The Fall of Shane MacKade by Nora Roberts was a dairy farmer, she thinks, and I think she’s right about that.  That was the MacKade series, which is one of Nora’s early Silhouette category romances, but they all take place in Antietam, Maryland.  And then Allison says, “Well, my uncle Walt and my aunt Dot have been married for many decades up on the dairy farm.”  [Laughs] I just, I don’t know if there is a more Midwestern name set than Walt and Dot.

Elyse:  No, I don’t think so.

Sarah:  Like, I think they’re the king and queen of the Midwest.  And Jennifer Saul says that Dairy Queen is a great YA book with dairy farming as a backdrop, and it has a really nice romantic element.  So there you go, dairy romances.

Elyse:  I’m happy.  Like, I feel complete.  Did, have you – I don’t know if you get the ads where you are for FarmersOnly, the farmers’ dating website?

Sarah:  No!  Somebody brought that up on the, in, in reply, and I was like, that’s not real, is it?

Elyse:  It is totally real, and now, I’m putting this out there to any authors who are listening, I want a dairy farmer romance where they meet on a FarmersOnly dating website.  I need that to happen.

Sarah:  FarmersOnly?

Elyse:  And they’re tagline is, because city folks just don’t understand.

Sarah:  What?!

Elyse:  Yup.

Sarah:  That’s like bad small town romance tagline.

Elyse:  Yes!  Yes!  And it – the commercial –

Sarah:  Single in the country.  Oh, my God.

Elyse:  The commercials are on here all the time, and they look like somebody went out with their old VHS giant camcorder and recorded them.

Sarah:  Oh, my lord, and there’s sister sites, including American Dating, Traditional Dating, Rural Dating, Christian Dating, and Senior Dating.  What’s traditional dating?

Elyse:  Boring dating?

Sarah:  FarmersOnly Traditional Dating.  Traditional dating and cowboy dating are both given a state-of-the-art twist.  The only thing that differs in the way that people have shared traditional values meet our members moderate the site – I don’t even understand what they’re saying.  All right, success stories.  Oh, yeah.  There are success stories!  And every single – nope!  Nope, nope, one dude is not wearing a ball cap.

Elyse:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  But all of – No!  There’s two dudes wearing, not wearing a ball cap, and there’s many dudes that are wearing a ball cap, all of which seem to indicate a form of tractor machinery.  Wow.

Elyse:  For sure!

Sarah:  You’re right!  FarmersOnly.com, “City folks just don’t get it.”  This is amazing!

Elyse:  Welcome to my world, Sarah!

Sarah:  Oh, my goodness!  Oh, wow, this is incredible!  I feel like I could get lost in this site!

Elyse:  [Laughs] Are you going to create a profile just so you can look around?

Sarah:  No, I’m, I, I just want to read all the success stories and hope they’re all really happy!

Elyse:  And they all have names like Walt and Dot.

Sarah:  Yeah!  And, and they’re all being photographed in some sort of FarmersOnly booth, and all of the signs are in Comic Sans.

Elyse:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Find a date or make new friends, in Comic Sans!  You can’t run a dating site with Comic Sans!

[music]

Elyse:  You want to hear my impression of a, of a Minnesota stripper?

Sarah:  Yes, yes, please, I really do!  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Hi, you guys, my name is Cherish, and I just want you all to know I ain’t never lost at Amateur Night.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Nice!

Elyse:  That is actually from, there’s a wonderful book, if you have a sense of humor about sex, called Candy Girl that Diablo Cody wrote.  She stripped for a year in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Sarah:  No!  I did not know this!

Elyse:  The book is hilarious.  It is probably one of the funniest books I ever read, and I listened to it in the car on my way to and from work, and I would laugh so hard that I would have to, I would think about pulling over because it was just –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  It is so, so funny.  This was before she was, you know, writing and, but – it, it’s the funniest book ever.

Sarah:  I want to read this book right now!

Elyse:  It’s a quick read, but it’s really funny.

Sarah:  So, if you were talking to somebody who didn’t read a lot of romance and really liked the books you like, liked suspense, liked historicals, liked Regencies, what books would you give them to try to convince them that romance is completely awesome?  What’s in your, sort of, conversion kit?  Aside from, you know, cheese.

Elyse: I always – Right.  I’m sending you cheese now.  And cream puffs.

Sarah:  Yum!

Elyse:  I always – [laughs] – I always keep Edith Layton for my Regencies and Eloisa James because they’re both just so good.  But if I’m kind of converting people from the mysteries, then I – Lisa Jackson is very good.  A lot of the authors that kind of, the covers look more thriller-y than romance-y, I think, is the way to go.  Linda Howard.  Sandra Brown, you have to really tread with caution; it depends on how much, I think, they want to read about crazy twin-astronaut shenanigans.

Sarah:  Who doesn’t want to read about crazy twin-astronaut shenanigans?

Elyse:  I know I do.  In fact, I’m a little indignant that there’s not more of that.

Sarah:  I can understand that.

Elyse:  Let’s see, who else would be on that list?  Sometimes Janet Evanovich, too.  Even though she’s not really a romance writer, she’s kind of a, a good segue, I think, into the romance genre, because she does have that, that romantic arc between Stephanie and the two main characters that go through the whole series.

Sarah:  I had to give up and just assign an ending to the Stephanie Plum series.

Elyse:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Like, I just, okay, I can’t, I can’t do this anymore.  I have to just, I just have to declare that this is the character that she ends up with, and that’s who she ends the books with, and I’m done now.

Elyse:  I quite at, I think, nineteen.  Who did you, who did you decide she ended up with?

Sarah:  I stopped reading before she turned Morelli into a douche, and so I picked Morelli because I didn’t read any of the douche-y parts, and I thought that Ranger was really creepy.

Elyse:  I picked Morelli too.

Sarah:  Good!

Elyse:  He’s got a house and a golden retriever!

Sarah:  I know she turns him into something of a dick who’s really, like, sexist and asshole-ic, but I liked him way better than Ranger.  I thought Ranger was just creepy.

Elyse:  Yeah, I, I don’t know if I thought he was creepy.  I didn’t think there was a lot going on there.  I thought he was kind of one dimensional.

Sarah:  Yeah.

Elyse:  He was like the hot dude that showed up and gave her a car and then disappeared again.

Sarah:  Right, he might as well be a guy on a calendar on her wall.  Like, that’s his dimension.

Elyse:  Pretty much, yeah.

Sarah:  So I totally picked Morelli and was like, okay, I’m done.  But if I read the first one, the scene where Grandma Mazur shoots the chicken in the gumpy will make me laugh every time.

Elyse:  Yes.

Sarah:  You just have to say “gumpy,” and I’ll start laughing.

Elyse:  I like the one where the dump truck falls on her car.

Sarah:  Yes, that’s, it’s always good.

Elyse:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Early, early Stephanie Plum car destruction is excellent car destruction.

Elyse:  It is.  It is!

Sarah:  It’s very good.  Towards the end, it’s like, okay, what’d you do to the car this time?  In the beginning, it was like, Whoa!

Elyse:  And she just started –

Sarah:  And then she gives the hamster a blueberry, and then shit falls on her car, and it’s like, this is great!

Elyse:  Yeah!  She started a new series, too, and I can’t remember who the other author is.  I think the book was, like Pros and Cons or something?  It’s a heist-type novel.

Sarah:  I am – Dorien Kelly.  I think she’s writing with Dorien Kelly.

Elyse:  Okay.  I haven’t read it.  I don’t know, I’m kind of Evanoviched out.

Sarah:  Yes.  I am Evanoviched out too.  I am Evanoviched-ed-ed.

Elyse:  I can’t, I used to read Laurel Hamilton religiously, and then Stephanie Plum – er, Stephanie Plum, what was her name? – Anita Blake.

Sarah:  Oh, God!

Elyse:  And that just got horrible!

Sarah:  Oh, God.  Many, many, many readers on the site have talked about how Anita Blake became a gleaming orifice, or glistening orifice.  Either way, she just became a giant orifice.

Elyse:  Pretty much!

Sarah:  It was horrible!  And, and she was so great!  I mean, like, early, early Anita Blake, when she would match her socks to her polo shirt and put on a fanny pack.

Elyse:  Yes!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And go raise the dead.  And it would be like, I’ve got purple socks and black jeans and a purple polo shirt and a fanny pack, and I’d be like, you go, girl!  You go raise the dead looking like that.

Elyse:  And she collected stuffed penguins.

Sarah:  Yes!  And she was like a dork!  I mean, she was running around matching her socks to her polo shirt!  There’s –

Elyse:  And the thing I liked about her early on was there was really this struggle with humanity where she saw horrible things and was really conflicted about belonging to the paranormal community, and then it just, it just shifted, and she became the magic hoohoo or whatever of all the were-leopard-panther –

Sarah:  Right, everybody got to have, everybody’s got to put themselves in her body in some way.

Elyse:  Yeah.  And it was, yeah, I didn’t understand why that – And she spent all this time justifying it, too.  Like, if you want to write erotica, just write erotica.  Don’t do all the navel gazing associated with that.

Oh, I had a recommendation for someone that called in on your last podcast, the one that liked –

Sarah:  Please do!

Elyse:  Yeah, she liked The Last Hour of Gann?

Sarah:  Every podcast we’re talking about this lizard book.  I’m going to have to –

Elyse:  Because it’s lizard people!  You have to talk about it.

Sarah:  Did you read it?

Elyse:  I have not read it.  I bought it.  I haven’t read it yet.  But there is a sort of fantasy series that’s got a little bit of romance in it that’s really big on worldbuilding, and I really loved it.  The first book is called Kushiel’s Dart, and it’s by Jacqueline Carey.

Sarah:  Oh, yes!  The Carey series!

Elyse:  Have you read the books?

Sarah:  No, but I know exactly what you’re talking about.  You’re totally right.

Elyse:  They are so good, and it’s sort of this, I would say, like, Renaissance Europe, but it’s very free love, open Renaissance Europe, and the –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Elyse:  – main character’s a, a courtesan, ‘cause that’s totally a legit job, and you have to go to school for it, and the whole nine yards, and she is a spy, too, and she’s – The Kushiel’s Dart refers to a red dot in her eye, and people who are born with this, she’s called an anguissette, and basically, she derives pleasure from pain and humiliation during sex, so she’s basically a sub or a masochist, and I read an interview with Carey where she said that she wrote her character that way because she was sick of reading fantasy novels where the heroine was always kind of threatened with the sexual violence, and so she sort of brought out this heroine that subverts that and is kind of like, yeah, whatevs.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  There’s three books in the original Kushiel series, and then she writes several more in that world, too, and those I really enjoyed, and I’m usually not a fantasy reader.

Sarah:  That’s awesome!  Thank you.  I’ll add that to the list of books that will accompany the podcast.  Awesome!

Elyse:  Now I kind of want to go read Mirror Image again.

Sarah:  You should.  You should totally read Mirror Image, and you should review it as yourself in the future going, ohhh, wow.

Elyse:  I’ll, I’ll never get over the milking scene, though.  I’ll always be upset about that.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Well, when you’re from Wisconsin, it just has a completely different meaning.

Elyse:  It does!  It does.  I’ve, I’ve milked things in my life, cows and goats and such.

Sarah:  If, if something is being milked, you pres-, you just presume that it is an udder.

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  Or an udder-like attachment.

Elyse:  I just, I think I assumed –

Sarah:  Not a, not a–

Elyse:  – it was the same gesture, and, like, I couldn’t figure out how that would not be weird.  You know?

Sarah:  Oingy, oingy, oingy, oingy, oingy, oingy, oingy…

Elyse:  Exactly!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Yeah, that’s just not going to work.

[music]

Sarah:  And that’s all for this week’s podcast.  I hope you enjoyed this episode.  Next week, Jane and I are going to sit down with Kati D. from Dear Author, who reviews over there, and that is also a really fun interview.  I hope you enjoy this peek at some of the people who work with us while we review books.  We’re going to try to interview as many reviewers as will hold still and sit down long enough for us to do so.

This podcast is brought to you by Berkley, publisher of #1 New York Times bestselling author Maya Banks’ all new Surrender trilogy, starting with the explosive Letting Go.  Josslyn found perfection once, and she knows she’ll never find it again.  Now widowed, she seeks the one thing her beloved husband couldn’t give her:  dominance.  Dash has lived in an untenable position for years:  in love with his best friend’s wife but unwilling to act on that attraction.  Yet when he finds her in a club devoted to the darker edges of desire, he’s furious because he thinks she has no idea what she’s getting herself into.  You can’t find out more about Letting Go in the entry that goes with this podcast.  This book is on sale now wherever books are sold.

The music that you’re listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater.  All the best music comes from Sassy, I swear.  You can follow her on Twitter @SassyOutwater.  This is a Scottish fiddler named Duncan Chisholm.  Duncan just released a live album, but this is from his latest studio album.  You can find him on iTunes and on his website, and I’ll have links in the entry that goes with the podcast that will tell you where to go if you want to buy this, ‘cause it’s awesome, and gosh, all the music she sends is so fun!  I really like it; I hope you like it too.

And did you know that this our 80th podcast?  Isn’t that awesome?  And if you’ve been listening for all 80 then you know what to do if you have an idea or suggestion or some feedback, or you want to tell us that we’re wrong, or you want to tell Jane that she’s wrong, ‘cause even if she’s not on the podcast, you can still tell her that.  You can email us at sbjpodcast@gmail.com; we love email.  You can call us at our Google voice number, 1-201-371-DBSA.  Don’t forget to give us your name and where you’re calling from so we can include your message in an upcoming podcast.  If you want to find me on Twitter, I’m @SmartBitches, and Jane is @DearAuthor, and Elyse is @ElyseIndeed.

We’ll be back next week with more romance novels, interviews, mayhem, and assorted silliness, and until then, Jane and Elyse and I all wish you the very best of reading.  Thank you for listening.

[pretty music]

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  1. Hannah says:

    Great podcast! I would love more suggestions for titles that fall into the sub (sub-sub? ) category of romantic adventure, for those of us who like action and suspense but are on the squeamish side.

  2. MeliMac says:

    This is the first podcast transcript I’ve read and I lmao.  Yay for smart bitches!

  3. Janhavi says:

    @Hannah- have you tried Heart of Steel by Meljean Brook? I thought of it immediately when you said ‘romantic adventure.’ Its a steampunk romance, great fun, heroine is a skyship mercenary captain and hero is a adventurer/salvager/treasure hunter. They pretty much spend the whole book fighting zombies. Here is a A- Dear Author review by Jane… http://dearauthor.com/book-reviews/overall-a-reviews/a-minus-reviews/review-heart-of-steel-by-meljean-brook/

  4. CarrieS says:

    You guys are so funny!  LOVED IT!  BTW, Seanan McGuire’s upcoming book, Half Off Ragnorak , has a reptile vet hero.  sort of.  I mean, he studies reptiles – I don’t mean that he is a vet who is also a reptile.  So there you go – one dairy farmer hero, and one reptile vet.

  5. Cordy says:

    Garlic Knitter, I so appreciate your transcripts!

    I’m curious about military suspense/romance – have people found books that have a badass hero and a not-particularly-badass heroine, but that don’t treat the heroine like the love interest in an 80s martial arts movie? My secret desire would be a military suspense/romance where the hero is super intense and the lady is a normal person. Does this exist? Everything I flip through involves super-butch people out-butching each other, which winds up making me feel bad about myself and like I need to go join a Crossfit gym STAT. What I really want is a heroine who feels the way many ordinary ladies would feel about some of these guys, which is more like “…can’t talk. must sit down. need cold drink.” Does this exist? Does anyone write this?

    I found First to Burn by Anna Richland in the comments here, and liked it quite a bit – the hero is a special forces guy, and the heroine is also military, but she’s a physician, so she’s reasonably tough, but she’s not grabbing the radio and shouting “GET ME AIR SUPPORT RIGHT NOW” all the time, and she’s definitely pretty impressed by the hero at various points. I’d like to read more stuff in that vein.

  6. kkw says:

    Oh, crossfit. Because the fear of sports failure is worse than the fear of death. It totally belongs in a romantic suspense. Suzanne Brockmann and Jennifer Crusie have both written romantic suspense with normal heroines. Nora Roberts. Susan Andersen. I don’t read a ton of suspense, though, so I feel like I only know the obvious names. I do have a definite soft spot for Sandra Brown – Linda Howard – Karen Robards kind of crauzysauce, though.
    I don’t know if they count as romantic adventure books, but I loved the Shalvis series where the brothers are wilderness guides.

  7. Lina says:

    Love the pod cast. Thanks for the transcripts… As ever you the mix of snark and truth is hilarious ! Sandra Brown I does have some crazy sauce plots but they are addicting..

  8. jane says:

    @cordy Kaylea Cross’s Bagram series and her other recent one—forgetting the name right now—are really good. Her older releases are not quite as good, though. The newer series just ended with five books—it’s some kind of special forces group working with the NSA on terrorist cells. It’s really good, but the last book to end the series was kind of a bummer.

    Laura Griffin sometimes has good romantic suspense but some of her books are way off, too. She’s very hit and miss.

    LOVE Cindy Gerard books—her BOI series, not the Bodyguard one. They’re more military but I would call them romantic suspense.

    Karen Robards went to crazytown with the latest ghost romance she’s doing but I’m hoping she can pull it off. I love Linda Howard but she hasn’t released a book in a while. Veil of Night was horrible and can be skipped.

    Karen Rose books are pretty good. Some are hit and miss and they can be kind of gory – a little too creepy sometimes.

  9. Kris Bock says:

    I like the idea of “romantic adventure” as a genre, because I love romantic suspense when it has plenty of action, but not the gore and violence. Unfortunately, since it’s not an established category, it’s hard to market or find books that way. On Amazon, you’d have to choose “romantic suspense,” and people won’t know where it is on the violence scale or “contemporary romance,” where people probably won’t expect so much of an action plot. There’s an “action-adventure” category, I think, but it’s not a sub-genre of romance. I figured that would attract more male readers who are looking for Clive Cussler or James Bond-type books.

    It would be nice if more sites let you sort by violence level, the way some do with heat level. The Fussy Librarian e-mail list lets you choose both violence and sex levels for books you want to learn about.

  10. Rachel says:

    1. MN State Fair – the city might have been Roseville.  It’s just north of the state fairgrounds – because there are dedicated fairgrounds, with streets and permanent structures and everything.
    2. The Sweet Martha cookies are amazing, and one of the two reasons I go.
    3. The other reason being the Creative Arts Building, where my mother and I go to see all the quilted, crocheted, and knitted items submitted for judging.
    4. It’s the second largest state fair in the country (only Texas is bigger, of course).
    5. If you are crowned Princess Kay of Milky Way (daughters of MN dairy farmers) you get your head sculpted in butter during the Fair.
    6. The State Fair is one of the reasons that the school year (K-12 and college) doesn’t start before Labor Day in Minnesota for most school districts.

    And none of that has to do with romance, dontcha know.

  11. The Fairy Godmother says:

    About “Mirror Image”: actually the dental record was checked, and the ME assistant had alerted his boss, but because there already was a positive ID, it was ignored. The dead woman (a bitch-on-wheels Rich Lady) was sitting in the Journalist’s chair, and she had in her hands J’s mother’s locket. The daughter wanted to take a look at it, J gave it to her, but RL snatched it because she had made being horrible to her daughter a full time job, and that’s when the crash happened.

    J on the other hand had taken the daughter out of the airplane while having two broken arms, extensive burns and a broken jaw, so it was assumed it was the mother. Because of her injuries she couldn’t warn anyone that the reconstruction surgery planned was going to give her RL’s face and because the bad guy had come to her room gloating about his evil plans before she was lucid and knowing who she was, she was also afraid that she might be taken out as well.

    You can tell that book made an impact, I also read it younger than I should have had, and basically set a high standard that other romances my gran’s stash had couldn’t even touch. My Barbara Cartland PTSD is another story

  12. octoberwoman says:

    I can’t believe that I have never bothered to read one of these podcast transcripts before now! I’m gonna have to go back and start reading them all, this was very enjoyable!

    I love Sandra Brown, she’s one of my all time favorites. I also loved Lethal, it’s now one of my favorites of her books, after Witness.

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