I enjoyed Lottie, there’s sense of humor sprinkled into her POV, plus Lottie’s very proactive in the plot, she’s not one for waiting around for things to happen to her which is always preferable, and for the most part she comes across as admirably strong-willed although that trait made it challenging to buy that she’s allowed her family interfere with her sex life.

I didn’t feel like Simon was as fully realized as Lottie, his personality didn’t come through as well as hers did, and I guess for me, that wasn’t helped by my main issue with this book which was the amount of sexual thoughts these two characters indulged in for the first half of the novel. It just seemed like Simon was so busy thinking about what he wanted to do with Lottie that there was little room for truly getting to know much else about the guy beyond his sexual appetites.

I know this book is from Harlequin’s discontinued Blaze line so I certainly expected a sexually charged story, I had no problem with the actual sex scenes, but I did feel like it went overboard with those aforementioned sexual thoughts, to the point where I couldn’t help wondering how they managed to be functioning adults when they have such one-track horny minds.

It’s completely a personal preference thing, there are plenty of readers who will love how overt their interest in sex is, I just tend to feel like if there’s natural chemistry (which there is here) it doesn’t have to be so heavy-handed, subtle touches and looks and yeah, the occasional explicit thought will get the message across just as well as spelling out every single desire that pops into their heads, especially since all that spelling out of their thoughts left fewer pages to weave in more of the great gothic-like atmosphere the author crafted and a large chunk of the novel passed by before an actual story truly felt like it had kicked in which is unfortunate because the mystery, the intrigue, and the suspense were really entertaining. ( )

Great story set around Halloween. It's sexy and mysterious! ( )