Twice as Wicked by Elizabeth Bright

I was offered Twice as Wicked in e-reader format by NetGalley in exchange for a review. I chose it because of my long-lasting, slightly-loath-to-admit love for Regency romances. ;)

This is a nice and easy rendition of the classic Regency. Alice is a twin, whose sister has passed away, sent away in shame to give birth out of wedlock. Her sister refused to name the father, and Alice spends a while in mourning. When she finally decides to go through her sister's things, she finds a clue to the identity of the father and decides to find him and exact revenge for her sister's abandonment and subsequent death.

However, when she finally meets and finds the seeming culprit, Nathaniel Eastwood, a peer (of course), she is confused. He doesn't seem like a heartless rake, and she rather enjoys his company. He has his own troubles - it seems quite clear that someone is trying to murder him, and he suspects that Alice is part of that plot.

General romance book confusion ensues, along with the need to figure out who's really got murder in mind, but it's well-written and the characters are pretty well developed. Alice winds up doing a lot of soul-searching on how to be a twin without a sibling, and Nathaniel's relationship with his family is a growth experience. I enjoyed the plot, though the ending seemed a bit rushed, and I was wrong about something I suspected would occur, which was disappointing.

In a quick search, it seems like it's this author's first book, but I notice that the cover reads "Wicked Secrets Series" so there may be more on the way. If there are more, I'll keep reading.

The book will be released on Monday, 10/9/17, and it looks like amazon.com will offer it on Kindle for $.99, which is a great deal - it doesn't feel like a "cheap" read.

Fans of historical romance should like this one.

How I'm Spending my Afterlife by Spencer Fleury

I was afforded the opportunity to read this book with an Advanced Reader Copy from NetGalley, prior to its publication on October 3rd.

The description intrigued me - a lawyer who is under investigation by the FBI has decided the best way to escape is to fake his death. He's got some money stowed away, he has some set aside for the wife and daughter he's leaving behind, and he's got a plan to head to Costa Rica. But even from the get-go, the reader realizes he's kind of an ass.

We've all probably at some moment or another wondered what our own funeral will be like. Alton gets the chance to actually see his, and what he finds is not at all what he expected. Because of this, he just can't quite seem to get gone.

Told as if he and his wife, Nicole, are being interviewed - either by the same therapist or possibly a therapist for her and an investigator for him? - the narrative switches between their first-person viewpoints.

I feel that this is meant to be a comedic take on the unreliable narrator trend that started with Gone Girl. Alton starts off seeming pretty normal, if a bit of a jerk, but as he goes along, you find yourself in disbelief that this guy graduated law school. Stupidity barely seems to cover it. Nicole definitely seemed like a more sympathetic character at first, but she also isn't close to perfect.

I personally didn't much like this book. While funny at times, I found both narrators to be so unsympathetic that I almost didn't care enough to finish. The problem, of course, of knowing that they're telling the story as past tense (and Alton gives away pretty early on that people find out he's faked his death, so there's no premise that he may get away with it) is that, well, you know he doesn't get away with it. That took away any kind of urgency I had to get to the end of the story.

The only person I really liked in the story was the four-year-old daughter, and we don't ever get to read her thoughts...

I was a little afraid that I was judging harshly, so I read a couple of reviews on other sites, just to get a sense of what other readers are saying. The reviews I read seemed to be overwhelmingly written by guys who thought the book was really funny... I don't normally think of myself as having too much of a girly personality or someone who doesn't appreciate what men like (I'm surrounded by males in my everyday life) but just maybe this is one of those stories that appeals more to guys, because women would want to smack him every step of the way. ;)

Unfortunately, I can't recommend this one.