My biases are that a lot of times I think she has a surfeit of plot and occasionally is a little grimmer than I want (though, as I think I mentioned, I love _Agnes_, so it's more a tone thing than a body count thing). Also I haven't read most of these for 5+ years.
Originally published as category romances:
_Manhunting_: despite the title and being her first novel, I have a real soft spot for it; it has a nice "gradually becoming friends, oh wait I want to jump your bones" thing going.
_Charlie All Night_: the one where the couple sleeps together right away, then become platonic friends, then fall in love. Set in a radio station, has some weirdness with a drug subplot that I'm pretty sure doesn't work any more.
_Anyone But You_: the one where she's 40 and he's 30 (she cares about the age difference, he doesn't).
_The Cinderella Deal_: the one where they pretend to be a couple, and then they go back to their lives, except then they miss each other.
Originally published as non-category romances:
_Fast Women_: the one about marriage and divorce, set partly in a detective agency; a little on-the-nose thematically and not entirely optimally paced, but on the whole better balanced than most of her non-categories.
. . . actually, that's it. (You're already read _Bet Me_. I haven't read _Maybe This Time_ yet but I'm told it uses slut-shaming as rape apologism.)
Well, okay, I should probably give _Welcome to Temptation_ (small-town politics and murder) and _Faking It_ (art fraud, forgery, murder) another try--they are slightly linked by characters--but I kind of felt the murders weren't well-integrated and the latter had about 25% too many characters. On the other hand I still remember stuff from them, which is more than I can say about some of the other books not on this list.
no subject
My biases are that a lot of times I think she has a surfeit of plot and occasionally is a little grimmer than I want (though, as I think I mentioned, I love _Agnes_, so it's more a tone thing than a body count thing). Also I haven't read most of these for 5+ years.
Originally published as category romances:
_Manhunting_: despite the title and being her first novel, I have a real soft spot for it; it has a nice "gradually becoming friends, oh wait I want to jump your bones" thing going.
_Charlie All Night_: the one where the couple sleeps together right away, then become platonic friends, then fall in love. Set in a radio station, has some weirdness with a drug subplot that I'm pretty sure doesn't work any more.
_Anyone But You_: the one where she's 40 and he's 30 (she cares about the age difference, he doesn't).
_The Cinderella Deal_: the one where they pretend to be a couple, and then they go back to their lives, except then they miss each other.
Originally published as non-category romances:
_Fast Women_: the one about marriage and divorce, set partly in a detective agency; a little on-the-nose thematically and not entirely optimally paced, but on the whole better balanced than most of her non-categories.
. . . actually, that's it. (You're already read _Bet Me_. I haven't read _Maybe This Time_ yet but I'm told it uses slut-shaming as rape apologism.)
Well, okay, I should probably give _Welcome to Temptation_ (small-town politics and murder) and _Faking It_ (art fraud, forgery, murder) another try--they are slightly linked by characters--but I kind of felt the murders weren't well-integrated and the latter had about 25% too many characters. On the other hand I still remember stuff from them, which is more than I can say about some of the other books not on this list.