Delilah Peters

Having read Love in the Stacks (the other Dirty Bits novelette in Peters' New Bedford series) I had high expectations for this book. It was disjointed. I liked a lot of it, like the rep for a single mom with some trauma from a bad birth experience and painful sex following it. The single dad next door has a disabled son and that rep seemed good too. But the romance itself was underdeveloped. I really think Peters would have done better writing longer with a story this complicated. There were a couple of interrupted sex scenes, and they honestly felt shoe-horned in. Like the point of the Dirty Bits line is that they're super steamy, so she had to up the sexual content but the characters weren't really there yet. I liked that the heroine had had a wild past and the whole book was very sex-positive, but she ended up feeling horrible about an incomplete blow job - guilt that her kids were inside watching a movie. Like just leave it out if it's going to make everyone (including the reader) miserable.

Anyway, I liked both of the main characters and their kids, and I wanted everyone to be together and happy, which they were at the end. I just wish it had been longer.




At one point, while the MCs are having sex, they miss phone calls telling them that the girls' dad showed up at the school and tried to take the girls. He had a long history of drug abuse and had had his parental rights terminated years prior. It was traumatic for everyone and led the female MC to break things off with the male MC. This is the kind of stuff that doesn't get resolved properly in a 15,000 word novelette.


Suzanne received a digital copy of this book from the publisher for review.
… (meer)

The Dirty Bits line has been hit or miss for me, but this one was a hit. A quick and steamy novelette featuring library coworkers on Christmas Eve. They're scheduled to close the library together and then there's a heavy snowstorm... The hero is autistic and clearly explains that he needs the heroine to give him clear verbal cues, which is communicated as some excellent dirty talk. The whole thing takes place over the course of one night and I found it just Christmassy enough to be a quick holiday read.… (meer)