Island starts the book with a bit of agency&emdash;when her boss dies and her job goes pear-shaped, she doesn’t just sit there and do nothing to try and get the truth. But she also gains more as she goes along. She’s got not one but two alpha males trying to protect her but also use her for various reasons&emdash;including pissing contests&emdash;yet she’s the one who cooks up a strategy to solve the mystery and begins to see it through. Part of me is happy that she hasn’t reached the point where the violence is ho-hum to her or that she has hardened herself to ignore even an enemy in desperate peril.

This book is FUNNY!!! At the beginning of every chapter, there is an excerpt from a romance novel. I’m assuming (guessing) they’re made up, but they are either super corny or over the top erotic drivel. Island’s thought processes also had me cracking up laughing and at one point and I accidentally woke my hubby up in the wee hours of the morning. When he asked what I was laughing at, I explained and for some strange reason, he didn’t think it was THAT funny. The poor man needs to read more.

Beating Ruby is the second book in author Camilla Monk’s Spotless series and after falling in love with this quirky heroine in the first book, I was so excited to get my hands on an early copy of this new installment. Well, Ms. Monk has given us another fun, suspenseful, and well thought out story in Beating Ruby. I loved it!

This is not your average romantic suspense. The series actually has quite a complex, interesting plot, weaved into an extremely entertaining, quirky, and funny story. I absolutely love Monk’s sense of humor. There were many moments of this book where I was laughing out loud, having come upon an unexpectedly funny part of the story, such as a mini octopus wearing a hat of shaved salad, or a pool full of flesh-eating platypuses. Yes I am serious, and yes it actually works, even though the platypus is a native animal of my country (Australia), and in my opinion way too cute to be flesh-eating. But I guess that’s the point!

While I enjoyed Spotless, I definitely feel that Beating Ruby surpassed the bar its prequel raised. It still had the same sassy humor and brains that Spotless had. However, I feel Beating Ruby brought more emotions that Spotless just didn’t touch. Of course, there was plenty of leftover turmoil from secrets revealed in Spotless to fuel the emotional fire as well as questions that still needed answers.

It so far is proving to be a hugely enjoyable series, full of suspense, action, romance, and sexual tension all wrapped in a quirky funny writing style that is hard to not enjoy.