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Chasing Fire. Fear of heights not a good thing when reading this book. Los ebooks en Espanol? ¡Hombre, claro que si! Harlequin los tine! (Ebooks in Spanish? Like, DUH. Harlequin’s got them!) Have a look – they’re 25% off. ¡Qué guay!

Time to gaze at covers and pick the best one – and struggle with it every time like I do, right? Yeah. It’s Cover Cafe voting time!. The voting runs until May 31st. The picking of the bestests and worstest covers MIGHT TAKE ME THAT LONG. Thanks to Karen for the heads up. Seriously. The worst cover selection this year was a choice between Bad Photoshop, Bad Stock Images, Bad Art Design and Just Plain Skeevy.

And finally, this week at Kirkus, I’m talking about Nora Roberts, specifically how much I enjoyed Chasing Fire and how much all that parachuting scared the crap out of me. Good thing the head-hopping helped with the fear of heights.

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The Link-O-Lator

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  1. Jen G. says:

    Just looked through the Worst Covers selection.  OH DEAR GOD.

  2. chrocs says:

    Harlequin sigue demostrando que es la editorial más preocupada por su mercado hispano. Los primeros en ofrecer sus libros por internet, y los envían a todo el mundo. Los primeros en publicar e-books en español.

  3. Katherine says:

    I just went to vote on covers. The GOOD ones were mostly OK, but it was relatively easy for me to pick a favorite in each category as some were quite nice. The BAD ones however, were so terrible I had a hard time picking the worst. OMG. “Hope in Hell” finally “won” for me as that naked guy in the weirdly contorted stance just really creeped me out. “Barefoot Bride for Three” was a pretty close second though as it has all kinds of nasty and ridiculous going on.

    Everyone go at least look; worth a few good laughs 🙂

  4. Lori says:

    You really liked Chasing Fire, hih? I wasn’t crazy about it. The fire stuff was good, but the rest of it didn’t work for me.

    On topic, some of those covers are truly frightening. I just don’t understand how covers that bad actually get published.

  5. Linsalot says:

    I also chose “Hope in Hell” just because it made me laugh and laugh at its ridiculous.  I think I may actually buy it and use it strategically to freak out/amuse my friends and people sitting next to me on the bus.

  6. Jane says:

    I agree with you, Katherine.  The best of the good stood out for me pretty easily in each category.  But each of those worst is a champion in its own way.  I ended up with “Hope in Hell” too.  As my comment for it said – Naked man bum should not make you hope he doesn’t turn around.

  7. Spider says:

    I have almost written a HaBO about Chasing Fire so many times this week!

    I picked it up from the library and dug in, as one does, and I swear—I have read this story before!  Three times I have checked the copyright to make sure it wasn’t an early NR I had already read!

    I’m enjoying it, but I swear, there is another book about forest fire fighters and a murder plot that’s out there! 

    Is it a Hoag?  A (that author who writes thriller-romances whose name starts with an I but won’t come to me right no because my students have rendered my brain to mush)?

  8. DreadPirateRachel says:

    Oh. My. Godz. The covers in the “Worst” category truly deserve to be there. O_o

    At least I got a good chuckle, but I’m going to have to think seriously before I can choose which one offends me most. Each one deserves a special place in book cover hell.

    Some of the book covers were really lovely, though. I loved the cover for Under the Marshall’s Protection, or whatever it is called. It’s the one with the house in the swamp.

  9. Nifty says:

    I enjoyed Chasing Fire a lot…and so did my dad.  He and my mom have been living with me since Thanksgiving, and I think he’s gone through my entire collection of Nora Roberts.  Her “suspense-y” titles, at least.  (Even as I type this, he’s sitting at the other end of my couch reading High Noon.)

    The “worst” covers are awful!

  10. Becca says:

    I enjoyed Chasing Fire, found it hard to put down… but after reading it, the plot seemed a bit thin compared to the amount of time Nora spent impressing me (and I was impressed) with her research. But then, I keep comparing her other romantic suspense books to Blue Smoke, and they almost always come up wanting in comparison. Wonderful characters as always, though.  I’m not sure I bought the murderer’s rationale, though.

  11. Linkmeister says:

    Spider, are you a Nevada Barr fan? The fourth Anna Pigeon novel Firestorm may be what you’re thinking of.

    Captcha: season79. The Pirates beat the Orioles 4 games to 3. The players’ wives did a helluva boogie behind the dugout to the strains of Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” during one of the games in PIttsburgh.

  12. Jill says:

    OMG, my eyes! MY EYES! “Worst” doesn’t begin to describe those covers. Someone please pass the brain bleach.

    Spider, are you thinking of Iris Johansen? Your “I’m sure I’ve read this before” book doesn’t sound like Tami Hoag, though admittedly I haven’t read all her backlist. But I am decidedly NOT an IJ fan, so if it is one of hers, I wouldn’t know.

    Captcha: shown25. I’ve shown myself those worst covers 25 times and still cannot decide which is indeed worst!

  13. Kris says:

    Chasing Fire was the first NR book since Angels Fall that I disliked.  Only a little, mind you, but it made me glad that I won’t pony up for HC books.  I got it from the library, and my librarian is such a queen of frikkingawesome that whenever there is a new NR or JDRobb out, she holds it for me!  I thought the main character was a bit much, and I usually think that I wouldn’t mind having a few drinks with most of her leads, but this one went right up there with Reese in AF, only for different reasons.  This book did NOT, however, remove Nora from my auto-read list!

  14. Vicki says:

    I almost snorted on the keyboard over the worst covers. Finally chose Shackled by the Cowboy as he was so anatomically improbably. A human gumby.

  15. Spider says:

    @ Linkmeister:
    No, I haven’t read that yet, but I’ll put it in my TBR.  🙂

    @ Jill:
    Iris Johansen was who I was thinking of!  And while I don’t think I’ve read her Firestorm, I’m pretty sure that’s not it.

    It’s crazy, but I almost feel like it was another Nora Roberts that I read with this story.  The plot had such a familiar feel to it!  Anyhow, I finished it last night and it was definitely enjoyable as a one-off.

    My captcha is hope86, as in I hope it doesn’t take 86 years to figure this out!

  16. LG says:

    My vote for “worst” is the mess that is Floggers’ Holiday Sale, although it was a close call – Barefoot Bride for Three almost got my vote for combining pieces of at least six images and not even trying to make it look like any of them belonged together.

  17. AgTigress says:

    There are some truly astonishing images in the ‘Worst Covers’ category, of course.  My problem is that I am unable to find a single cover I regard as even acceptable (let alone ‘good’) in the other three categories I looked at.  Hate ‘em all. 
    😀

  18. Nadia says:

    There was a Jill Shalvis that was about firefighters, might that be it?

    I haven’t bought “Chasing Fire” yet, which is unusual for me, as NR is one of the handful of authors I will buy in hardcover as soon as they are released.  But I found “The Search” to be a bit of a slog and it took me forever to finish it, and so I’m not as eager to jump on this one.  But the husband needs some stuff from Amazon, so I’ll probably go ahead and buy it so I can at least get free shipping, LOL.

    The “Worst Covers” definitely live up to their rep, but I have to say was not as impressed by what was chosen as the best.  Kept thinking “surely, these are not as good as it got last year?”

  19. Sharon says:

    I chose “Hope In Hell”, too. There’s just something so repulsive about the whole thing—the nudity, the long white hair, the odd stride…yikes!  The “bests”, however were pretty bland, IMO. I liked the double cover category the best—good choices there. So many of the other categories contained too many romance-cover-by-Thomas-Kinkade-Painter-of-Light entries. Yuck.

  20. Linkmeister says:

    Spider, a caution: The Anna Pigeon books are suspense/thrillers with occasional graphic violence. There’s little-to-no romance.

  21. James Lynch says:

    Wow, the worst covers certainly lived up to their name!  My vote would have to be the washing machine on COMING CLEAN (looked like a scene out of a horror movie: “We found the victim stuffed in the washing machine, legs up by his head”) but the one with the whips and floggers looked like a bunch of tangled-up Christmas tree lights!

  22. StarOpal says:

    Always look forward to the Cover Cafe contest. I’m with everyone else that the Best offerings were a little vanilla this, BUT I still looked into some based on covers and even added to my TBR list because of it.

    As for the Worst. Yeesh. It’s reeeally hard to decide this year. They are so eye gougingly awful, all of them.

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