Customer Reviews

An Unforgettable Lady

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

John Smith is a personal security specialist. His background includes special military, assassin, and intelligence. Now, he is a ghost. He has not used his real name in so long that no one alive can recall it. He has no address, no social security number, and his earnings are scattered in various numbered accounts throughout the globe. He is the best in his field. He got a few of the men he knew from his time in the military and began the firm called Black Watch, Ltd. John has never failed a client ... which is how he met HER!

Grace Woodward Hall, soon to be the former Countess von Sharone, is in the direct line of fire of a serial killer. The Times ran an article stating the names of the six most prominent women in New York. The article had been found beside the body of the first socialite.

John Smith agrees to be her personal bodyguard. Grace deals with John giving many of her hired personnel (such as a daily maid, a driver, contractors, etc) long vacations and putting his own men in place. She even deals with him moving into her penthouse, even though there is only one usable bathroom (since the contractors were not finished with the guest bath). But she was having a very hard time keeping her attraction to John stamped down. Then there is the stress of her work. Since her father died she has taken over as head of the Hall Foundation. Her father had groomed her for the position since childhood. However, there are a few old timers on the board who believe she should stop down and give the President and CEO position to Lou Lamont. Add to all this, stress of her pending divorce, her mother's harping, and more of her friends dying! And since Grace has never backed down from anyone or anything, she refused to cringe at ANY of this, including John's overbearing attitude!

John cannot help but love the feistiness Grace keeps sheathed in social politeness. For the first time ever he finds himself becoming emotionally attached to a client. That could be fatal. Yet he is unable to leave her safety in the hands of anyone else. After all, he IS the best!

***** Author Jessica Bird has a life long fan in me! This is the perfect blend of romance and suspense! From the beginning to the end I found myself eager to see what surprise would turn up next. If you are a fan of Sandra Brown, Stella Cameron, and Jayne Ann Krentz, then you MUST check out this author! *****

Reviewed by Detra Fitch of Huntress Reviews.

The past year has been the hardest year of Grace Hall's life. The year began with promise as she married a Count just like her beloved father wanted her to wed, but went down hill since. Her father suddenly passed away and she is divorcing her spouse. She is also being challenged as the CEO of her father's legacy, the Hall Foundation by the board and her dad's right hand man who felt he earned the head position.

To make her year more miserable, someone is killing six women who made a magazine's notable list. Two are dead and Grace is on the murder roll. Desperate, she reluctantly hires John Smith, head of Black Watch, Ltd. as her bodyguard. He is an expert at hiding his feelings, but Grace seems to get inside his skin as occurred when they first met and kissed before the initial homicide. As they fall in love, he rejects the notion of forever because she is glitter and he is mud, yet he will willingly die to keep his beloved safe from a serial killer who has easy access to victims living behind secure walls.

UNFORGETTABLE LADY, the sequel to HEART OF GOLD (which introduced Grace), is an exhilarating romantic suspense novel that sub-genre fans will enjoy. Though the villain seems odd, fans will enjoy the action, not just the serial killer subplot as the tension between the delightful lead duo grips the audience as well. Fans will demand more stories from those alpha Black Watch hunks and hopefully a hunkette too.

Harriet Klausner

This book was awesome. I read her other genre, in which she writes as J.R. Ward (she has in print Dark Lover, and Lover Eternal, so far) Found out she writes as Jessica Bird in contemporary, and I was SOOOOOOOO glad to find this out! This story is so moving, I fell in love with the story by the end of the 1st chapter.

He doesn't want to love her, she's rich, glamorous, and out of his league. Little does he know that she fits into his league and into his life just fine. Very realistic story.

I don't feel you'll be disappointed at all!!!!!!! A+++++! Way to go Jessica!

I admit I picked up this book because the author is well-known and successful in another genre, and I was curious but do not read paranormal. Judging by this 1 book, I cannot see what the fuss is about. The writing style is simple, the romance is so-so, the suspense plot is feeble with only 2 viable suspects, and the heroine pulls a couple of TSTL moves.

The plot centers around a serial killer offing prominent society women. Jhon, er John, is the bodyguard hired to protect the heroine who's on the list. Unfortunately the author doesn't build or sustain suspense very well. I never felt any creeping menace or sense of inexorable approaching doom. Huge chunks of pages went by with nary a mention of the killings. And with only 2 suspects (I guessed correctly if anyone's interested), there's not much mystery either.

Grace was an okay heroine. She just seemed overwhelmed for a large portion of the book, trod on by everyone from her mother to her employees. She starts to get it together towards the end but then ruins things with the aforementioned TSTL stunts. Why must heroines who know there's a killer after them elude their bodyguards to go jogging alone? Why do heroines have Mace handy to use on said bodyguards but never on the actual villain? To add to the cliches in the plot, the police arrest the wrong man and the heroine is unprotected when the real killer strikes. Of course the hero arrives at the last second.

John didn't really grab me because I never felt that I got to know him well. There was some good banter between him and Grace in the beginning, but it got tiresome as they refused to give in to their attraction or were conveniently interrupted while groping. The unresolved sexual tension led to frustration bordering on cruelty, with the hero getting mean and flinging the wh_re word at Grace. Ughh. At least when they finally gave in, after a couple of hundred pages of frustration, I expected fireworks to go off. Instead we get only 2 pages of to-the-point lovemaking. And subsequent sex is all behind closed doors. Now I don't demand graphic sex scenes in every book (really!), but when an author builds up the lust so much there needs to be some payoff.

The whole subplot with Callie felt tacked on and didn't interest me at all. I could see that it helped strengthen Grace by removing the weight of her father's shadow, but it occurred too late in the book to be totally successful with that. It also distracted from the serial killer plot just when it should have been rising to its climax and dissipated whatever tension the author had managed to build. It got increasingly obvious too that Callie was being set up as the heroine in a sequel and the space devoted to that proved annoying. Plus I didn't think it showed the heroine in a great light either, that she seemed most concerned whether Callie was a golddigger who would try to claim a part of her father's estate. Nor did she offer to share any of her inheritance with this close relative who was clearly down on her luck.

In short, this book had a lot of problems. If the romance was more convincing, I might still have given it 4 stars. But it felt too much like lust rather than love to me. I didn't like that John abandoned his job of guarding Grace near the end (even if he did arrange a substitute). Would a man in love do that when the woman he loved was in danger? Also there weren't enough or hardly any scenes of the hero and heroine being actually happy together. A longer epilogue with some loving scenes would have gone far toward painting a convincing HEA here.

At least my curiosity about this author has been satisfied. I won't be picking up any of her other books any time soon and this one goes on the swap shelf.

I'm a HUGE fan of the author and have purchased every one of the Black Dagger Brotherhood series that I can't put down but this one seemed be a little anticlimatic! in her series mentioned, she made you feel for the charactors, most of whom are flawed and not at all what you'd expect. Yet someone finds and gives them love unconditionally and the the story thread is totally engrossing. In this book, it's hard to feel sorry for the heroine who has not only unflawed, remarkable beauty, but a fabulous fortune to go with it. So her marriage is kaput! Snap out of it and join the club. She's weak willed and at 30 still can't stand up to her snot of a mother! The incredibly handsome body guard would have fit in well with the brotherhood. Just needed a little love. It took the path of so many contemporary penny dreadfuls - stick to the brotherhood, this one left me wanting to slap the heroine aand tell her to "grow a pair!"














i'm

Grace is a socialite in new york featured in a magazine for top successful women or something like that. When women from that article get killed Grace hires a bodyguard to keep her safe. John is the owner of a security firm and is highly recommended. John is an alpha.. my way or the highway mentality. Grace is a kind hearted smart business runner who enchants everyone around her, including John. Grace wants John to be with her, to stay. John doesn't know what he wants, he is so use to living as a ghost anything else scares him. They fight their attraction to each other killed all the while keeping safe from the murderer.

This was a romantic suspense, to me it wasn't all that suspenseful. I knew who the killer was from the very beginning. To me it was obvious, don't know if it was like that to others. It was a good plot, an ok story delivery, but not one i'd ever read again and I wish I would have gone to the library instead of buying it.

I LOVED THIS BOOK! After recently discovering that the great JR Ward also writes as Jessica Bird, I emptied almost all of my amazon gift card money into hunting down these books. I am soooo glad I did. This book had a totally winning recipe of being to the point, pared down with a sharp focus on the hero and heroine John and Grace. Ms. Bird did not try to bog the story down with other plotlines and she created (at least for me) an Alpha Male, Type A, Uber Hero that I spent the majority of the book drooling over. Does John have some serious head junk. Heck yeah! and seeing grace use her quiet, fierce, persistent personality as a battering ram to that head trash was so much fun. As the book goes on she becomes stronger and more confident of herself, her abilities and her future and she is taking John with her almost whether he likes it or not.

John was deep, brooding, rude but frickin hot! When at his nastiest, he was totally not the man any woman would lay her head down and dream of at night but when he was at his best, most lovliest, vulnerable, predatory & protective, I kept wiping the drool off my chin.

Now this book is simple in its approach, it is not fancy and heavily layered with subplots, blah, blah, blah and the protagonist is so wimpy it leaves one to wonder how that little troll was able to wreak such havoc on the silver spoon set. I could only put it down to them being TSTL.

What absolutely worked for me was having John and Grace move in together throughout the crisis. It made sense. You're protecting a person you would want to be as close as possible to them and living in the confines of the same home allowed the entire focus to remain on the duo and to keep the tension high in a good way. The addition of a long-lost relative toward the end sets up the next book quite nicely as well. Also while I have come to anticipate the intensely expressive, lengthy and plentiful love scenes in JR Wards books there is no such occurrance here. In fact, the intimacies take place fairly late in the book and are very short but trust me when John & Grace finally do give in... Aye Caramba.

I for one could totally see John Smith as a member of the brotherhood and in fact applaud Ms. Bird/Ward with once again coming up with another finger lickin male to die for.

*Spoiler Alert* Before I tell you why I found this story garbage, let me say that I'm a MEGA fan of JR Ward. Her Black Dagger series was my new addiction when it started and she's a master at the craft, no doubt. That's why when I saw she'd written normal contemporary, I did all I could to get my hands on this novel.

Garbage. First off, Ward is awesome at sexual tension, and John and Grace definitely had it. The premise wasn't all that original (brooding bodyguard protecting wealthy heiress) but I don't care, stories are re-told all the time. The tension was thick and immediate (yay) and sooo drawn out, I was panting at the pages waiting for them to finally get it on! My heart was pounding, especially after John expressly tells her he'll "make love to her like no man ever has" or something to the nature. Whoa, mama!!! So you can see how I was so ready for that to happen. And when it finally did...

Splat. About three paragraphs of the worst lovemaking scene I've ever read. He literally touches her boob, gives her a little french kissing, a few thrusts and BAM. Done. And afterward...they're so overwhelmed by their magnificient lovemaking neither can speak??? Spare me. But I kept on reading.

So the HUGE conflict that is keeping them from being together is the fact he has a security business, travels a lot and mainly puts his life in danger around the clock, while she runs a company and has social commitments. They are opposites. "It will never work." Page after page this is made clear. So toward the very end of the book (and I mean the last 10 pages!!), the only thing that resolves this conflict is the hero suddenly realizing he wants to be with her. Sure, he goes through an emotional growth, realizing he was pushing her away because he was "hiding" behind his work, but that's it?? In like, two sentences. There are no details given as to what he'll do about his business, or how they'll make it work. It was just...boom. He's going to be with her and they'll deal with the details later. BORING. To some this may not be disappointing, but after reading 300+ pages of this conflict, I expected much, much more in the resolution. They could've decided that on page 35.

Sorry, but this was such a disappointment. Hopefully the sequel is better!

Having re-released her original contemporary romances, it was nice to go back and read JR Ward's beginning. The story of socialite Grace and her body guard, rough fmr. military assassin "John Smith" has all the hallmarks of "opposites attract". But if you're reading the Crave series, you recognize a lot of Isaac in John and their stories of love's hurdles are very much the same. The only difference being the mystery at the core of Lady...who's killing the socialites and why. She gives you two suspects fairly clearly so you won't be guessing who for long. And if you're paying attention, you'll figure out the murderer and the why of it all long before it's over. Not nearly as hot as the BDB series and less raunchy than the Crave series. It's romance on par with traditional contemporary romances.

If you've read J R Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood books, you've seen her do this sort of thing before--and much better! If, however, you haven't read many romances, this is an excellent one. I read this last night and it certainly kept my interest, but Ward can write this kind of book in her sleep. It's like eating a candy bar, satisfying while you do it, but an empty experience. It's pretty much a generic (but fun) romance of a wealthy, upper class woman who is in danger and guarded by the working class man with poverty and abuse in his background, making him unwilling to love. Ho, hum. Ho, hum. Seen this a million times before.