Winter Tales by Tiffany Reisz

(Original Sinners 8.7)

Buy links: Amazon US | Amazon UK

Blurb

An Original Sinners Christmas Anthology

Return to USA Today bestseller Tiffany Reisz's Original Sinners series with Winter Tales, a collection of three fan-favorite Christmas novellas plus a brand-new novella exclusive to this anthology.

In December Wine, the long-awaited story of Nora Sutherlin's first meeting with Nico can finally be told. Nora enlists her editor (and sometimes lover) Zach Easton on a mission to track down Kingsley's long-lost son. Nicolas "Nico" Delacroix turns out to be young, strikingly handsome, and very French. He wants nothing to do with his father...but everything to do with Nora.

This special holiday-themed collection also includes the novellas Poinsettia, The Christmas Truce, and The Scent of Winter (previously available only as ebooks). A bonus short story starring Søren rounds out the Winter Tales anthology.

Review

It won’t surprise anybody when I say I’m a die-hard Tiffany Reisz fan. In many ways she was my gateway drug to erotic romance as well as MM and up to a point she’s also responsible for me writing my own books. All of which means I’m probably stating the obvious when I declare that reading Winter Tales was a pure and utter delight.

As the blurb states, this book contains five novellas/short stories, three of which were previously published. If like me you’re not in the habit of re-reading books, the fact that The Christmas Truce, Poinsettia, and The Scent of Winter have been published before won’t matter; to me they read almost like new stories. Besides, there’s obviously no such thing as a bad time to reconnect with any of the Original Sinners.

The thing I love most about these shorter stories, apart from the opportunity to reconnect with my favourite Sinners, is that they fill in the gaps, those moments that were only hinted at in the novels. And, in doing so, they also give us the opportunity to get to know these characters we love, and think no longer hold secrets for us, even better than we did before we opened the book.

If I had to categorize these tales, I’d say that, despite being stand-alone shorts set at different times over the Original Sinner’s timeline they all have one theme in common: children and the (often fraught) relationships between parents and their offspring. And, as always it does so with a wonderful message hidden beneath the touching, sometimes painful reality the Sinners have to deal with—the sins of the father don’t condemn their offspring.

1.    December Wine

“It didn’t take much to get on Nora’s good side—all she ever wanted was a little abject devotion and total erotic surrender…the simple things in life.”

December Wine is basically wall to wall emotions. Nora meets and holds Fionn, Søren’s son with Grace. for the first time and gets to have her last (kinky) encounter with Zach before they all start behaving like reasonable adults.

That, however, is only where the emotional journey starts…and ends. In between Nora finds and meets Nicholas, who is Kingsley’s son although Kingsley has no idea he exists. She gets to tell Nico about Kingsley, the man he never knew existed, the man who fathered him. The timing couldn’t have been worse, since Nico has recently lost the man who raised him, the man he believed to be his father and deeply loved.

While I have (of course) read all Original Sinner’s stories and therefore knew what will happen to Nora and Nico next, I still read the descriptions of their first encounter with my heart in my throat and, at times, tears in my eyes.

A most wonderful combination of kinky delights and deep emotions, delivered in a way only Tiffany Reisz can.

2.    The Christmas Truce – a story in two parts

A story set first from Nora’s and then from Kingsley’s point of few, cumulating in an encounter between them and Søren on Christmas Eve but not before Nora and Kingsley exchange memories about previous Christmas’s with their priest.

3.    Poinsettia

“You’re much like a poinsettia, Bambi. You really are.”

He furrowed his brow at her. “How so?”

“Because everyone has this erroneous idea that you’re poisonous. And you’re not. You’re not at all.”

This story is set at a time when Søren is twenty-three, in Rome, and going by Marcus. In between classes in seminary, he spends time in a brothel where Magdalena, a renowned sadist, instructs him, basically by being truly sadistic with him.

We get to see Søren at a time when he was no longer the borderline out of control young sadist we met in The Angel, but not yet the collected, unflappable, and cruel task master he’d become later.

The interactions between Magdalena and Søren were a delight, especially the way they try to ‘out-sadist’ each other. But, as always with Tiffany Reisz, underneath the snark, the smart retorts, and cruel comments hides a deep layer of care, which comes in to brightly sparkling focus when Søren gifts Magdalena something for Christmas she was sure she could never have again.  

4.    The Scent of Winter

While there is a flashback to an earlier encounter between Kingsley and Søren in this story, the main part of it deals with two days they spent together in the ‘present’. Of course it involves sex and a lot of enticing pain, but the centre point of this story for me was the moment when Kingsley gives Søren the same advice Father Ballard gave Magdalena decades earlier. I just love it when stories come full circle.

5.    Blood & Snow – Bonus Short Story

Søren returns to Magdalena, who’s no longer young but still a sadist in charge of a brothel. And, as in the past, Søren visits her because he needs help, advice, or, to be precise, he needs her sadistic streak to put his world back into perspective and take away fears he has never been able to shed completely.

“Joy and terror—they’re twins, you know. Joy is born first. Then terror a few minutes later. Joy arrives when you recognize what you have. Terror comes on its heels, terror that you’ll lose the thing that gave you all that joy.”

Long story, very short: Winter Tales is magnificent and an utter delight.