Book Review: Beloved Lives by Marilyn J. Evans

Beloved Lives: A Paranormal Romantic Suspense Novel by Marilyn J. Evans

Genre: Young Adult (Paranormal/Fantasy Romance)
Date Published: January 26, 2018
Publisher: TCK Publishing

She Must Choose Between Living Her Past and Creating a New Life

April Robins is a mess. Her diet and wardrobe are disastrous, she's stopped exercising, and the nightmares are back—nightmares that started at puberty and didn't stop until she married. Now that she's divorced, the dreams are worse than ever, and April's malaise has her cat and her best friend, Trish, worried.

April decides it's time to get her life back in order by running and eating better. She also agrees to attend a class Trish thinks will introduce them to new guys. When April meets the class instructor, Mitch van der Waals, an expert in the paranormal, she discovers they have a lot in common including a mutual attraction. When she and Mitch start dating, both cat and best friend approve.

But when the hospital where April works as a medical technologist hires Dr. Weston, a handsome, new cardiologist, things get complicated. At her first meeting with Dr. Weston, April faints. As he shows more and more interest in her, she finds herself unaccountably affected by Weston, sometimes irritated, other times literally falling into a trance in his presence.

April realizes Weston was a key player in her past lives as she struggles to find the root cause of her nightmares through past life regressions, sessions in the sleep lab, and strangely spontaneous trances.

Does she have a choice between being who she is now and who she seems to have been over and over again?

Solving the mysterious origins of the nightmares that have echoed down through April's many lives could be a matter of life and death, in this life and beyond.

Readers of romance books about past lives like Angelfall by Susan Ee, The Immortal Rules by Julia Kagawa, and The Steward by Christopher Shields will love this paranormal romance and suspense book.

Beloved Lives: A Paranormal Romantic Suspense Novel by Marilyn J. Evans had a different and interesting premise. I really enjoyed seeing the histories between April and Weston. I wish we could have gotten a bit more relationship building through the glimpses of their histories as I never truly felt their chemistry, and I didn't understand why they were drawn to each other to begin with. I felt even less chemistry with Mitch. The cat was fun, but he didn't at like a cat at all. I kept expecting him to be some kind of paranormal creature. He would have made a better dog. I like the twist the ending took. That was unexpected. I'm 50/50 on this one. I feel like there was so much good stuff to work with when it came to their past lives and the characters themselves... I just needed a little more meat on the bones.

Beloved Lives by Marilyn J. Evans was kindly provided to me by the author for review. The opinions are my own.

Marilyn J. Evans was born in Chillicothe, Missouri. She has lived in Kansas City, Missouri, since 1972 except for two years (2003-2005) when she lived in southern England. For twenty years she worked in research laboratories studying human autoimmune diseases. For the next twenty years she was a regulatory auditor for the pharmaceutical and biologics industries. Her first book, "Beloved Lives", a paranormal romantic thriller, was published in 2018. Her novella, "Wasting Water", appears in the anthology, "Undeniable: Writers Respond to Climate Change", available from Amazon or from Alternating Current Press.

To learn more about Marilyn J. Evans and her books, visit her website.You can also find her on Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter.

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