(Original Sinners 8.7)
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.
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.
