Captured - Jennifer Chance (Crowns & Gowns #2)

Following up on Courted, I liked it enough to pick up Captured--and despite a few issues with Captured, I liked this one enough to buy the last two books in the quartet (I think it's just a quartet!) so that should give you some indication of how this went.

Captured picks up basically right where Courted left off, but with different main characters, of course.  Lauren is the heroine in this one, and the hero is hunky bodyguard Dimitri--bodyguard and client are one of my favorite pairing tropes, which was one of the reasons I went for this one!  Lauren and her friends are still hanging out in Garronia following Em's engagement to Prince Kristos, and figuring out what they're going to do next.  Lauren slips away from a party to go down into the city and get drunk with the locals, and Dimitri follows to bring her back...at which point she discovers a package hanging out in the palace that she recognizes.  It's from Henry Smithson, who has been sending Lauren packages in that style for years.  Sometimes they contain lavish gifts--clothes, jewels, etc.  Sometimes they contain more sinister things, like spiders, scorpions, or even what she suspects are the ashes of the family dog that went missing.  But Henry is one of her father's best friends and business partners, and haven't believed her in the past when she expressed her feelings that something is very wrong with him, that he's stalking her, etc. and she's convinced the pattern is going to continue now.  But it doesn't, because unlike her parents, Dimitri and the royal family, particularly Queen Catherine, believe her.  And when Henry shows up with Lauren's parents at Kristos and Em's engagement party and tries to coerce Lauren into marrying him, they (well, Dimitri) spirits her off to safety.

Dimitri and Lauren are one of those couples that are attracted to each other, but get on each other's nerves.  Dimitri annoys Lauren because he's a little overbearing, and she frustrates him because she acts like an ice queen when he suspects she's really not.  I really liked this dynamic, and how it slowly began to unwind once Lauren felt safely away from Henry for a while.  The chemistry between the two main characters was definitely there, and for most of the book I think it progressed in a logical manner.  I wasn't rolling my eyes at insta-love the way I was for the entire first half of Courted.  The whole "Lauren has a stalker" thing was a much darker and more menacing plot line than the "oh the media thinks we're together" plot that propelled Courted, and I think it was a nice change.  And this plot also gears up the "search for the missing prince" plot that Courted only hints at.

That said, I did still have a few issues with this.  For the most part, I think the romance progressed in a sensible way, but it did make a big jump to "Oh btw I love you and want to be with you forever" at the end, which seemed very abrupt in the face of how it had been building for the rest of the book.  There's also an attempt to redeem Lauren's parents that I don't think really worked out.  For so much of the book, they were portrayed as not caring, and then suddenly at the end they were like, "Oh, we cared the whole time, we just couldn't do anything about it then," which didn't sit right with me.  I think Lauren's relationship with her parents in light of the whole Henry thing would have suffered a lot more, and the way it was so neatly tied up just didn't seem to fit properly.

That said, this does lay out the plot for the next book nicely, and I'm looking forward to it.  Despite the darker plot of this book, it's still a pretty light series--but I think the plot here tempered it and helped stop it from being too sickly-sweet.  The third book, Claimed, looks like it might be along the same lines, which is good!

3.5 stars out of 5.

Redemption - H. J. Bradley

Okay, so let's establish genre first, so you know what you're getting into before reading the rest of this review: this is modern-based alternate-universe Earth, where every country mentioned (both real and fictional) is ruled by some sort monarchy.  Oh, and it's a romance/erotica.

Valto is part of the royal family of Finland, but he's like eleventh in line for the throne--no chance of taking it any time soon.  The love of his life is Cat, the crown princess of Wales who's set to be crowned in just over a year--as long as she's married first.  But there's a problem.  Valto broke up with Cat years ago because he thought she was cheating on him.  He has since learned she wasn't, but she pretty much hates his guts now, even if she's willing to marry him to secure to the future of her country.  Awkward...  As the title would suggest, the book is about Valto winning his way back into Cat's heart, even though he may have never really left it.

This is a good romance.  It has a strong central conflict, with Cat caring for Valto but not being sure she wants to open herself up to letting him hurt her again.  It has good sex scenes.  It's also got people in various configurations of non-monogamous-hetero relationships, which I know are the focus of some of Bradley's other stories; Prince of Ice has been on my Kindle for ages, but I just haven't gotten to it yet.  Anyway, because of all this, it's easy to see this is a series where the side characters feature prominently in their own books, and that's honestly my favorite kind of series, way above stories that directly follow each other.  Major kudos for that one.  The plot's resolved neatly, though the "climax" (in a plot sense, not a sexual sense--hehehe) is a little short-lived and could have been drawn out a bit more for dramatic tension.  Overall, I really enjoyed this and look forward to reading Bradley's other work...

...but it needs some editing.  Bradley's grasp of comma usage is shaky at best, and comma splices abound in this.  She consistently capitalizes words that don't require capitalization and has numerous instances of jumbled sentences that were clearly intended to make sense, but just slipped through the editing process.  This isn't to slam her writing ability; she's a very, very good author, but she's at her best when she's dealing with short, succinct sentences.  When she tries to get more elaborate, things tend to get a bit dicey.  But that's what good editors are for.  She needs one.  I understand that editing is a costly process, and can be very difficult when you're self-publishing, but it's absolutely vital that a book be well-polished when it goes to press.  She also needs a book designer; the digital formatting of this is awful, which might be due to a number of factors but I would put my money on Amazon's manuscript-to-digital-copy conversion tool, which is notoriously horrible at formatting digital books.  The interior of this is set up in a blog format: paragraphs that aren't indented, but are instead separated up by line breaks.  It makes it a little hard for the eye to follow.  In the grand scheme of things, these aren't huge issues, but they do get in the way of making Redemption look like a polished product, despite the absolutely gorgeous cover and strong grasp of characters and plot.  If these issues had been nonexistent, I could easily see Bradly being published by a major house, or at least see myself thinking she was published by a major house; as it is, though, she's firmly in self-published land.

3.5 stars out of 5.