Billi Tiner

This book is sweet and heart-warming. Cat is a woman who grew up in foster care. Her childhood was anything but typical. Ethan is a child who currently stuck "in the system." His father is a complete moron who likes nothing better than to beat him up and make him feel worthless. Mitch is a man who believes in justice and pursues it as far as he's allowed to go. Solving cases and bringing people to justice means a great deal to him in terms of his career, but Cat means more to him.

This book covers abuse, foster care, adoption, the struggles to "connect" with others due to trust issues, and the emotional roller coaster that we call love. The feelings/emotions shown in this book are very realistic and the characters are well-portrayed. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Warning: About 90% in (toward the end of Chapter 22, I think!), you will run into sex. Personally, I didn't think it was necessary. The feelings between Cat and Mitch were fairly obvious.… (meer)

My third book by this author and third in this series. 13th chick lit book.

Well, the book opened and I was immediately annoyed. Shocked and annoyed. Is something that happens immediately a spoiler? Well, if so, I can’t talk about the rest of the book then. There we go – my review. I was shocked and annoyed by the opening. End of review. Heh.

Book involves someone named ‘Elizabeth Fischer’ who worked as a highly paid public relations person until being unexpectedly fired from her job. She worked in the big city. Has trouble finding work in the city, though there is this ‘low paid’ job out in the boonies that’s hers if she wants it. So, she reverse commutes. You know how people would live in a small town and commute twenty miles to ‘the big city’? Well, with her new job, she lives in the big city and commutes twenty miles to Spring Valley. To be the president of the local animal shelter.

As is common in a Tiner book, based on reading three books, there are three men lined up for the woman to potentially date. One is a board member (and not in the running, despite his persistence, because he’s so gosh darn creepy), one is a vet that works at the animal shelter (and is so gosh darn incredibly handsome), and the last is some bum who comes by to volunteer at the shelter to walk the dogs (well, he looks like a bum, sounds like a bum, and, when asked, intentionally implies that he is a bum – when asked if he works, or desires to work, or whatever the question was, to which he replied something like ‘I don’t see the need to work.’)

All three are either hot-heads, grabby, or really creepy. The vet and the bum have anger issues. All three have grabby hands. Quite frankly I didn’t like any of the three ‘potentials.’

The ‘bum’ is a side character from one of the previous books. I’m being intentionally vague because of how this book begins. He had his heart broken at the start of, or maybe just prior to the start of this book. So his emotions are all over the place.

Quite frankly, I’ve been kind of pissed off by the whole situation. Since the beginning. I’ve mostly pushed it out of mind, but . ... in between books one of the characters died.

Oh, and, as an undercurrent running throughout this book – there’s this serial rapist out there. Elizabeth spends most of the book vaguely terrified that certain individuals might be the rapist. Oh, and either the rapist has targeted her, or she has a stalker. So, that occurred.

Man I kind of hated the main male character. He spent the majority of the book alternating between feelings of self-pity and rage. Then acting these bits of rage to wander around doing stupid things like beat people up. Yay, what a hero. Mmphs. By the time he physically attacked people at a dentist office (mostly referring to the innocent bystanders being manhandled and flung around); I was kind of hoping he’d end up in jail. While ‘knowing’ he’s going to have a ‘happily ever after’ instead. Because. This is a Romance book. And that’s how they work. People who are complete and utter dicks, filled by rage, and operating with no self control, get to end up in ‘happily ever after’ land instead of ‘jail’ if they happen to be one of the two people in the main coupling. Also, many of the things vibrating off him, actually made him seem to come across as the likely serial rapist (his appearance changes randomly, he doesn’t have to work, so he has lots of free time, he has rage issues, he seems incapable of controlling himself, etc.; though I’d actually have been shocked if he had ended being the rapist).

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked sounding hurt.
“You never asked.”

Bullshit. She asked. He intentionally answered in a way to make it seem as if he was a bum. Because he wanted to make sure she was disgusted with him. WTF? There was a whole bloody big point made about that. Surrounding that. To have him reveal his actual nature and say ‘you never asked’? What the fuck? What a fucking asshole. Fucker has rage issues, can’t control himself, grabs people and holds them with his steel arms (what, that’s what it said in the book), beats people, and lies. Then lies when he is called on it. I did not like him in that first book he appeared in, and I certainly haven’t grown to love him now.

To a large extent, any positivity I feel for the book is based solely on Elizabeth and her story. And I feel sorry for her. Sexually harassed, fearing rapists and the ‘best man’ for her is this guy. Even so, and despite how much I dislike the lead male character, I actually did like the book.

By the way? I know why they had to kill a character in between books. Because the main male character, Paul, had a completely different set of emotions and personality between the first book he appeared in and the second. And that is the only real way to get away with turning the cool collected guy who he was in the first book he appeared in into a raging furious jealous dude that he was in the second book he appeared in.

‘Her heart swelled with the knowledge that his aggravation was a result of his desire to protect her.’ – hmm. *shrugs* She’s one of those, eh? Gets off on her man being all aggressive and stuff? Bah.… (meer)

My second book by this author and 12th Chick Lit book.

I knew the first book in this series, Dogs Aren't Men, was a part of a series, but I had the odd impression that the books were less connected than they actually turned out to be. I mean, the main characters from the first book, Rebecca and Derek, turn up in this one - slightly larger role than cameos. Derek is much more of a slightly larger role than a cameo, while Rebecca is just shy of a side character. Mitch, a side character in the first book, takes over lead in this one. Along with Cat, who wasn't involved at all in the previous book.

The book is mostly about how Cat, who was physically abused while growing up, and eventually kicked out at 15, has made a life for herself since then and feels the need to act as a support for someone in a similar situation to the one she was in when she was a kid. So she goes through the process of becoming a foster mom, and gets a foster kid. Named Ethan. Who is 13. The mother left shortly after Ethan was born, and the father was very abusive.

Mitch, being the other co-lead, is a committed bachelor and ladies man. He's also a police detective and so a good part of his story involves mysteries and crimes.

There's something of a cliché that popped up in this book that came close to just barely causing me to give this a lower rating. A damsel in distress type of situation where the weak weak woman had to be saved by a strong man. This seems to go down three tracks - if the woman is presented as strong and able to take care of herself, which one would lead to believe given Cat's back-story, then a) she gets knocked out and that's the explanation for why she needed to be saved; b) she gets injured in the process and is in the process of mostly saving herself when the big man turns up, or c) she saves herself and the big manly man turns up to save the day to find that he was needed more as transportation away from the crime scene. That's, of course, in the rare situations when the woman is presented as strong. Most of the time the woman is just represented as this fragile injured bruised flower whimpering in a ball of fear. I'm not going to say what happened, just that events unfolded in a way that both annoyed me and kept me from lowering the rating.

I've only read two books by Tiner, but I already see a pattern. Everyone who turns up in the book has to have some romantic connection presented for them to deal with. As in, in the prior book the main characters were Derek and Rebecca, but various other people were set up with 'people to play with'. The receptionist, the lab tech, etc. In this book, a second pattern point that I hadn't thought of until this moment popped up. In addition to everyone, including the 13 year old boy, finding some opposite sex person to drool over (and yes, it always has to be an opposite sex person), there's something of a jumble of people to wade through to see who might end up matched up - in terms of the main woman in the story.

For example, in the first book, Rebecca's mom gave Rebecca's phone number to Derek's mom. But it was Mitch who called and got entangled with Rebecca. While Derek hovered angry-like. In this book, Cat just kind of had two men somewhat aggressively pursue her (Mitch and a guy named Paul), while in the background a third man moaned in pleasure at every glimpse of Cat (this being Ethan's principal).

In the end, despite displaying several cliché’s and issues I normally dislike, I enjoyed the book well enough to be entertained. If you liked the first one, you'll probably like this one. If you didn't read the first one . . um . . *rereads what I wrote to see if I gave spoilers*, technically you don't need to read the first book first since there are different main characters in the two books, but you'll 'know' what happened in the first book, for the most part, by reading the second.

(And for the love of all that is rational, don't read the third book before the first or second. Probably shouldn't start it before writing whatever you wanted to write in a review. I admit that starting the third book before writing anything in this box kind of impacted what I wrote here).… (meer)

My first book by this author and my tenth Chick-Lit book. At least I think its Chick Lit. I’m not going to get bogged down again, as I have in the past, so I’ll just note in passing that – other than ‘contemporary romance involving a woman as the lead, family, and plenty of humor’ I’m still not 100% clear what differentiates Chick Lit from Romance (especially since so many books I’ve read seem to have those characteristics to a lesser or greater extent, and many books I’ve read labeled Chick Lit appear to be lacking, to me, in humor).

This is one of those books that I found hard to stop reading, to put it down. I just kept moving along, pulled for whatever reason. That’s vaguely strange, on one hand, as that’s what is normally said for a fast paced thriller, and while this one had violence and a tiny bit of action, it’s by no means a thriller. I’m not going to say it was an easy read as I’m sure someone else could attempt it and find that it isn’t – for them. But it was an easy read for me. Easy in that I found myself easily drawn into the story, and finding it difficult, as I noted, to put down.

The book had a lot of little flags here and there that I would probably, if written differently, have found off-putting, labeled them as being red flags. A couple come near, but do not immediately come together for various reasons. Sometimes I get annoyed when people play cat-and-mouse around having a relationship, with many books adding a dash of miscommunication. Written poorly, those types of books are tiring, tedious, and boring. Then there are those couples who meet, and instantly move in together. Those can be annoying for other reasons; though it is hard to think what they might be since that particular storyline never seems to actually occur. Well, this one had a ‘flowed naturally’ feel. There was a reason why they were apart when they were apart, and there was a reason why they were together when they were together. Flowed naturally – wasn’t forced, the things that kept them apart seemed reasonable and not a ‘trick’ by an author to ‘build’ forced tension, and the reasons they were together were similarly of a natural feel. Though, flags were there. There was a certain melodramatic vibe that might have built and expanded to consume. But it didn’t.

Wow, no idea what I’m writing. Hmms.

The characters, for the most part, seemed fully formed. The main ones at least. The mother, Barbara, seemed a little bit ‘pesky mother who can’t shut up about marriage/boyfriends/etc.’ cliché-like. The receptionist, June, was on the edge of coming across as a little too ‘perfect’. An aged woman who fit perfectly and ‘magically’ got what needed to be done, done. Though there was an enough there to keep from falling over that edge. The best female friend Marilyn seemed a little thin, but she didn’t seem to fall into any clichés. So . . . what I’m really saying is that the characters seemed strong, except for Barbara and Marilyn, but, while Barbara came off as a stereotypical nagging mother cliché the book wasn’t about her so it’d be hard to build her up more. I suppose more could have been done to fill Marilyn out more, though I’m not sure when that might have occurred, since Rebecca, the main character, seemed to always be working. And even when she wasn’t at the Vet office, and was near Marilyn, they couldn’t interact as much as might otherwise occur, as Rebecca was being a coach, and Marilyn was being a parent in the stands (Marilyn’s daughter being one of the player’s on Rebecca’s team she was coaching).

Now I remember why I normally just say if characters were thin, or strong, or clichés, or whatever. Because I’m just babbling now. So . . .

Plot: strong/solid
Characters: mostly fully realized with a few clichés here and there
Romance: Several romances occurring, all but one seemed relatively well done. When Jimmy the vet tech had a woman pop up for him to ask out, did kind of cringe a little. I recall thinking at the time that it all seemed a little too . . . .bah, not sure how to word it . . .a little too ‘must find matches for all my characters!’ type vibe (no, not all characters hook up with someone, so that vibe doesn’t really ‘work’, but that’s what I was thinking at the time).… (meer)