Review courtesy of Dark Faerie Tales

Quick & Dirty: Kiss the Flame is a steamy, seductive look at love and romance. The paranormal world of ghosts, immortals and candles really intrigued me.

Opening Sentence: We see ghosts every day; we just don’t realize it.

The Review:

Kiss the Flame is a steamy and seductive look at love and romance. It is not often that an author can surprise me with their take on the paranormal. This was my first taste of Christopher Rice and I don’t want to stop reading. I do have quite a few of his books on my TBR pile and now I really want to dig them out to see what else I’ve been missing. I haven’t been this sucked into a story in a long time, let alone a short story.

Laney Foley is in love but unfortunately it is with a teacher’s aide. She can’t act on her feelings while he is teaching her a class, it might jeopardize her scholarship. Laney can come up with every reason to not go out with her gorgeous teacher but he certainly makes it hard on her. Michael Brouchard is a man who has learned a hard lesson about waiting for love so he certainly isn’t waiting around to let Laney know about his feelings. But Laney has so many hang-ups about Michael, relationships and life that she just can’t get her head around what is happening to her. She is waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it does in a way, with a small candle shop hidden on the very fringes of the French Quarter in New Orleans.

Laney meets a mysterious man at the candle shop who says that all her fears and hang-ups will disappear if she follows the directions on the candle. A candle that smell just like the young man that she is in love with. Laney doesn’t quite believe her anxieties will just disappear with a candle so she holds off on lighting it. And it is a good thing, as a warning in the form of Lilliane Williams, a woman who has succumbed to the candle. Lilliane warns Laney the danger of what could happen if the candle doesn’t work and she also lets Laney know what could happen if it does in fact work. It is all just a huge gamble that Laney has to decide if Michael’s love is worth lighting the candle.

Kiss the Flame is a dark story with a character that really has to work on her hang-ups and the terrible self-doubt/self-esteem that has hounded her all of her life. I loved the angle of opening up and working through your doubts. Michael did seem a little too good to be true but he is definitely what Laney needed in her life. I loved the atmosphere and setting of this story. I really felt like I was in the French Quarter with Laney and Michael.

Overall, words cannot say how much I really enjoyed this story. It was quite sexual with two characters exploring their feelings for each other. I am excited to know that there are two other stories set in this same world and I cannot wait to explore the other levels to this paranormal world.

Notable Scene:

I’m not good enough.

There it is. A voice clear as a bell, a voice that sounds like her mother, her father, and all of her cousins rolled into one, a voice that speaks to her so clearly and with words that sound so carefully chosen, how could she not listen to it? How could she not heed its angry, hurtful advice?

You can go to as nice a school as you want, little girl, but it won’t change the fact that you are poor white trash putting on airs and he’s gonna smell this on you every day while you smell vanilla and campfires, and then he’s gonna drop you like a cold, hard stone.

FTC Advisory: Evil Eye Concepts, Inc/InkSlinger PR provided me with a copy of Kiss the Flame. No goody bags, sponsorships, “material connections,” or bribes were exchanged for my review. ( )