Jayne Castle introduced her unique Harmony world in Bridal Jitters. The story itself is good, not great, however she managed to include a lot of information in a novella about people.

Virginia Burch and Sam Gage are partners, offering a combination service to people exploring the vast underground catacomb under the dead alien city Cadence. Their first client hires Virginia and Sam to remove a large ghost waterfall, but some of the client’s hired hunters instead try to kill them. They escape into what may be an alien cemetery, and eventually turn the tables on their attackers.

Sam and Virginia are not as real as most of Castle’s characters, their romance reads more distant. There are several sex scenes but not a lot that would tell us why they fall in love.

Jayne Castle has a true gift for creating characters we care about and who feel real, and sometimes her stories are so engrossing that it feels as if we are experiencing the characters’ lives, not simply reading about them. Bridal Jitters doesn’t deliver at her usual level, possibly due to the length and the fact she packed in a great deal of background on Harmony.

It’s still a decent story and a very fast read. My library offers Bridal Jitters via Overdrive and you library may be similar. I wouldn’t advise paying for this.

2 Stars

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Illusion Town starts out with a bang and the action never stops. Hannah West makes her living finding things and her latest client is Elias Coppersmith. The two had hit it off over email and now are meeting in person. The next thing Hannah knows is she is waking up in bed, married to Elias. Neither can remember how they got there and retrace their steps to learn that Elias had hired Hannah to help unlock an alien gate that shut several of his team members in a cavern, and that the pair were attacked when they tried to get out to the site.

The story proceeds, filling us in through Hannah’s and Elias’s thoughts about their investigation and themselves. As usual in Jayne Castle’s books Hannah and Elias find they have a strong psychic bond as well as a romantic one, and that both need the other to help survive.

Much of the novel is excellent. Hannah and Elias are interesting, vibrant characters whom Castle makes come alive. The side characters, especially Hannah’s adoptive aunts, help push the story along although I didn’t find them particularly necessary.

There is one part that seems ridiculous. Hannah inherited a psi map to a museum/carnival that is filled with dangerous psychic artifacts and is hidden in the alien catacombs. For some reason her ancestor who brought these from Earth to Harmony saw fit to put extraordinarily dangerous para weapons in the form of carnival rides and arcade attractions. This seems on par with wrapping rat poison in candy wrappers. In any event Elias and Hannah are able to use the weapons to save themselves and Hannah sells the artifacts to Arcane for lots of money.

The romance between Elias and Hannah feels more alive than in a few of Krentz’s/Castle’s lesser books. Both are already primed to like and trust the other even before meeting, then joining together to search out their missing evening brings them together. There are a few sex scenes, almost no vulgarity and no blasphemy.

4 Stars

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