The first of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ Chicago Stars books, It Had to be You is a fun romp through the world of professonal sports. I am not a football fan, but a reader doesn’t need to be fond of a sport to enjoy a well-told story.

The heroine wants everyone to believe she’s a sexy bimbo. Her camouflage works all too well. When she inherits her estranged father’s professional football team,  she needs all her assets–including her brain–to survive.

The hero is a sexist he-man trying to manage a team whose owner is a sex kitten with no interest or respect for the sport.

The author introduces us to football players as people, not merely oversized-thugs. The focus is on the team, not the game (thank goodness!) which makes this the first great sports romance.

The Book Bingo category is BEST SELLING ROMANCE and what better book to fill that square than Jayne Ann Krentz’s 2019 release Promise Not to Tell. This story is the third in a trilogy revolving around adults who, as children, survived an intentionally set fire in a cult compound where their mothers were hostages.

Three of the male survivors were adopted by the local cop. As adults, they formed a detective agency. Each story of the trilogy revolves around finding the cult leader who tried to kill them so many years ago. Each heroine has a different issue for which she needs a detective’s help.

If you’re a fan of romantic suspense, I highly recommend the entire trilogy.

Many people I know consider Natural Born Charmer their favorite SEP novel. It’s definitely in my top five, but it didn’t make my top three because I really hated the end.  It has marvelous characters, a great plot, the best secondary love story in a SEP book, humor, pathos, community, texture, art, music…and a really lame ending.  For me, it was almost anticlimactic.

I went back and read the ending again, and it’s not as lame as I remember, but the problem is I remember it as lame. I simply couldn’t believe the heroine’s initial reaction when the hero “returns” to avoid a misunderstanding. And that’s where I get stuck. The heroine eventually returns to “form” and all is well, but it’s that initial bit that I remember.

I guess that’s my problem, not the book’s, but  that is why the book is only in the top five and not the top 3.

Of all Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ Chicago Stars books, This Heart of Mine is my favorite. She takes the sister of the heroine of It Had to be You (Molly Sommerville) and pairs her with the hero’s nemesis from Nobody’s Baby But Mine (Kevin Tucker). SEP admits she finagled their ages a bit to make the story work. She is forgiven because Molly and Kevin are a great couple.

Molly writes children’s books and is colorful and sparkly. Kevin is an immature jock who learns there’s more to life than football. There are rough moments  when the author gets into some uncomfortable topics–example: sexual harassment isn’t always male to female. There are two parts that make me cry every time I read the book.

Sometimes I dislike SEP’s secondary romance plots.  I’m undecided about the ones in this book. I do like that the older woman is sticking up for herself after years of marriage in which her desires were ignored. No one is going to push her around now. I found the young couple annoying, but they had to be in order to grow.

SEP intersperses  excerpts from the heroine’s book throughout the novel, which I found enchanting. It was as if Molly couldn’t handle her emotions herself, so had to give them to her characters in order to acknowledge them. And like the older woman who doesn’t let anyone push her around, Molly, too, grows a backbone at the end of the book.

Kevin has to face his past–both at the hated church camp he’s inherited and his roots.

Molly and Kevin are layered and nuanced; they both grow in maturity.

Over all, I give this book five stars.