COOKING UP A STORM by Ashley Ladd

Publisher: Totally Bound
Date published: June 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78430-083-8
MM
E-book
Reviewed by Helen
Weblink: https://www.totallybound.com/cooking-up-a-storm
Obtained via publisher
Rating: 4

An eccentric millionaire auditions five hopefuls to replace his head chef. Both Brooks and Rique are desperate to win the job, but for very different reasons. The millionaire lives on a private island in the Caribbean with some unusual features, but that’s not all the candidates need to worry about.


For such a short book, only eighty-seven pages, this story has a lot of mystery and nice plot twists. In some ways the millionaire sounds like someone who took Elvis Presley’s Graceland and mixed it with a few episodes of “MasterChef” and a dash of James Bond. But Ms. Ladd manages to avoid clichés and throws in a few unexpected extra twists of her own. She also successfully drives a perfect line between surprise and believability and kudos to her for that. The characters are also a lot of fun. Obviously in a novella and with a complicated plot the minor characters couldn’t all be fully developed. But the other chefs are well enough drawn for the reader to engage with them, and more minor characters are given a dash of personality and individuality as well. Ms. Ladd has included several hot, descriptive and erotic male/male, and male ménage scenes which are all plot and character driven.
My only complaint is several occasions when characters were given the wrong name which I found intensely annoying and made me go back to reread the scene thinking I’d missed some important point. I took off half a star for those occasions. They should have been caught before publication.


This is an objective review and not an endorsement of this book.

 

 

BEST MATES by Ashley Ladd

Publisher: Total E-Bound Books
Date published: July 2009
ISBN: 978-1-907010-62-0
Contemporary Ménage BDSM
E-book
Reviewed by Dawn


CLICK TO PURCHASE! Three friends find that falling in love was not the only thing that had them screaming for joy. When lovers Alec and Kevin decide to have a baby together, they hope their other friend- Jennica will get on board and carry their child for them. Jennica figures her last chance to have a baby walked out the door when she kicked her ex-boyfriend to the curb and cried on her friends, Alec and Kevin’s shoulders. With a secret she is holding, can these three friends find a way to take their friendship to another level before it is too late?

BEST MATES tells the tale of three friends who find their biological clocks ticking….loudly. For Jennica, at 36, she feels it’s just about gone and for lovers, Alec and Kevin, they want to add to their home with the woman who is their friend and to help her have the one thing she desires most of all: a child. I have to admit, the story sounded really good until I started reading it. The writing was great, tight and kept your interest but the one thing I found hard to do was care about the characters. They felt flat and a not really worth my time unfortunately. Ms. Ladd is a wonderful storyteller; I just wished she had fleshed her characters out a little bit more in BEST MATES.

BEST MATES has potential if it was a bit longer and the characters fleshed out a little bit more. As such, I wished I could give it a better rating than a three. Ms. Ladd is a fine storyteller that just missed the mark with BEST MATES. If you are looking for a short, erotic story with BDSM elements then grab BEST MATES.