Comfort Reads: The Bride Wore White by Amanda Quick

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Content Notes: a list of content notes can be found at The StoryGraph

Back in the summer of 2007, I was pregnant, off for the summer, and decided to take things very easy. After losing our first pregnancy just a few months previously, I wasn’t willing to take any risks and spent that summer reading as many books as I possibly could. I finally went to our closest library only to discover that wasn’t where I was supposed to get my library card and after successfully acquiring said library card from the correct library, discovered Amanda Quick. Quick, the historical romance pen name of Jayne Ann Krentz, became my obsession that summer. I read them all. Every single title the library, and the surrounding libraries, had. I read through the trilogies that spanned time and pen names. Books set in the 1800’s written by Amanda Quick. Contemporaries written by Jayne Ann Krentz. Futuristic paranormals written by Jayne Castle. These books all contain her core story: an independent and ambitious woman saves herself from danger with the help of a handsome and grumpy man who has a complicated and tragic past. Some are incredibly dated, pretty sexist, and, with a lot of love, formulaic. But, I still love them and will continue to read them.

I have shelves of signed books and preorder swag. Whenever I find a hardcover in one of those bargain bins at Menards, seriously the best part of the store, I always buy them. Sometimes you just need a book that is going to go exactly as you know it will. No surprises, no new and exciting ideas. Just a book that brings a smile when you realize that you hit that point in the book, just like you knew you would. The books where they always say the whole name of a town or hotel every single time it’s brought up. The books where the villain always spills their guts as they’re about to harm the main characters. The books where everyone is so concerned about High Society and it’s Expectations. The books that make you chuckle every time you realize you could play a bingo card off the tropes. I love it all.

When I was prepping everything for my hysterectomy last week, I knew I would need an audiobook that I would enjoy but also not really need to pay attention to. Something that would keep me entertained but also not one that required 100% of my focus because hello, pain and pain meds are kind of known to be distracting.

So what did I pick? Wow, it’s in the title folks.

Book 7 of the Burning Cover series, The Bride Wore White, brings us the story of Prudence Ryland, aka Madame Ariadne, a psychic dream consultant who is obsessed with tea. (They all are. Every single heroine.) When a client mysteriously dies after a consultation, Prudence packs her bags and heads to Burning Cove to start a new life away from the suspicions of the tightly knit psychic community and the high society clientele they serve. There, mysterious circumstances cause her to enlist the help of Luther Pell and his investigator Jack Wingate. Together, Prudence and Jack race against time to uncover the threat against her and of course, fall madly in love with each other.

It was everything I could have hoped for! It truly was. Prudence does have real psychic powers and once in Burning Cove, goes on to get a job as a Librarian in an academic library where she quickly discovers she has a great talent in working with psychic research and materials. So of course she becomes obsessed with Jack’s manuscript on criminal profiling. Jack had a disastrous ending to his previous case which left him scarred and with horrible nightmares. With so much love, of course the psychic dream consultant falls hard for the grumpy handsome guy with nightmares! Truly, this book was exactly what I needed, when I needed it. The perfect comfort read.

If you’re interested in checking out this series, know that people from previous books show up, but you can definitely read all of them as stand-alone novels. If you haven’t read her Arcane Society novels, I highly, highly recommend them. The way the characters are woven together across time always makes for fun cameos and were an absolute nightmare to shelve at the Library.

I hope this book brings you as many smiles as it did me.

If you’d like to add this book to your shelf, you can click on the cover above or here for ordering information. I listened to my copy through Libby from my library.

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