“Gracie C. McKeever (c) September 2009
Tasting Fear is a collection of three novellas all linked by the three heroines, the D’Onofrio sisters, and the mysterious circumstances behind their adoptive mother’s death.
In “Outside the Limit” oldest sister Nancy is the reliable sister, the organizer that everyone counts on. She’s also the manager of several musical acts and is a bit of a workaholic. When her mother is killed and clues pointing toward foul play connected to the Nazis and hidden treasures begin to mount, the sisters are on their guard. But it’s not enough to prevent Nancy’s near abduction in the stairwell of her own apartment building. Except for Liam, the carpenter her mother hired to renovate her home before her death and whom she intended for Nancy to meet, Nancy would have wound up in the hands of her mother’s killer.
Liam is big and steady as an oak. At thirty-seven, he’d love to settle down with a woman in his upstate home, someone who likes to cook and sew, a homebody. And ambitious and independent Nancy D’Onofrio is so far removed from his ideal that he can’t imagine getting involved with her. But his body is another matter and has ideas of its own.
In “Ask for More” Antonella, or Nell to her friends and family, has a mammoth crush on one of the customers who comes to the restaurant where she waitresses part-time. He comes the same time every day and never raises his eyes from the laptop he brings with him. He orders the same thing every day too and doesn’t seem to notice anything outside of his laptop screen. Nell’s employer and self-appointed surrogate mother and her co-workers refer to her crush as Strip Steak and though they encourage her to “go for it” and get him to notice her, they think he’s too unimaginative for her. For Nell, a poet and the family linguist pursuing her doctorate in literature, Strip Steak aka Duncan Burke and his inflexibility could be a problem, but Duncan proves to have many more layers than meets the eye.
Duncan is the pit bull of his family, intense, detail-oriented, reliable, logical and unromantic. It is his cool logic and practicality that gets him into hot water with the idealistic and sensitive Nell again and again. But when The Fiend and Co. resurface and attempt to abduct Nell, Duncan’s intensity and detail-orientated nature prove life-savers for Nell and exactly what she needs.
Finally, there’s youngest sister Vivi. In “Ready or Not” Vivi is a tough, tattooed and pierced artist who likes keeping people off-balance and guessing. When she agrees to go to Oregon to stay in the empty apartment of one of Duncan’s combat buddies for safety’s sake and until The Fiend can be caught, it is her very untraditional appearance and attitude that throws Jack Kendrick for a loop and sets him on edge.
Vivi is not what Jack expected at all. From Duncan’s vague description of the situation, he had not expected the “teenager, neo-hippie sexpot” that he rescues when Vivi’s camper-van home gets stuck in the mud on his land during a rain storm. He did not expect to be so totally attracted to someone so inappropriate and obviously flighty and likely to leave him at a moment’s notice should he be stupid enough to let his heart get involved either. But there’s no accounting for tastes…or his suddenly energized, rampant libido.
This collection of stories proved an entertaining and exciting ride, each story and h/h growing on the reader like a comfortable, well-loved sweater as the book moved along. Engaging characterizations, sizzling h/h chemistry, snappy dialogue, humor and the usual chills, thrills, spine-tingling suspense and psychotic, beyond-evil villains readers have come to expect in a Shannon McKenna romance abound. Oh, and let’s not forget lots of hot, erotic sex between intense, protective alpha males with serious abandonment and daddy issues and vulnerable but independent, spirited career women who just need a little love, tenderness and reassurances that there's more to life than the perfect job.
I highly recommend this for McKenna fans or just fans of the erotic romance suspense genre.”
Gracie wrote this review Thursday, October 1 2009.
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