Release Day: The Play by Karina Halle

A troubled Scottish rugby player who doesn't play by the rules.
A vivacious man-eater who's given up on love.
When it comes to Lachlan and Kayla, opposites don't just attract - they explode.

Kayla Moore has always been comfortable with her feisty, maneating reputation. At least it was fine until she hit her thirties and saw her best friends Stephanie and Nicola settle down with Linden and Bram McGregor, leaving Kayla to be the odd one out. Tired of being the third wheel with nothing but one-night stands and dead-end dates in San Francisco, Kayla decides to take a vow of celibacy and put men on the backburner.

That is until she lays her eyes on Linden and Bram’s cousin, hot Scot Lachlan McGregor. Lachlan is her sexual fantasy come to life – tall, tatted, and built like a Mack truck. With a steely gaze and successful rugby career back in Edinburgh, he’s the kind of man that makes her want to throw her vow right out the window. But Lachlan’s quiet and intense demeanor makes him a hard man to get to know, let alone get close to.

It isn’t until the two of them are thrown together one long, unforgettable night that Kayla realizes there is so much more to this brooding macho man than what meets the eye. But even with sparks flying between the two, Lachlan can’t stay in America forever. Now, Kayla has to decide whether to uproot her whole life and chance it all on someone she barely knows or risk getting burned once again.

Sometimes love is a game that just needs to be played.

AMAZON  ***   AMAZON UK  *** AMAZON AU *** B&N *** iTunes

Karina Halle is a former travel writer and music journalist and The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today Bestselling author of Where Sea Meets Sky, Racing the Sun, The Pact, Love, in English, The Artists Trilogy, Dirty Angels and over 20 other wild and romantic reads. She lives on an island off the coast of British Columbia with her husband and her rescue pup, where she drinks a lot of wine, hikes a lot of trails and devours a lot of books.

Halle is represented by the Waxman Leavell Agency and is both self-published and published by Atria Books/Simon & Schuster and Hachette in North America and in the UK.

Hit her up on Instagram at @authorHalle , on Twitter at @MetalBlonde and on Facebook. You can also visit www.authorkarinahalle.com  and sign up for the newsletter for news, excerpts, previews, private book signing sales and more.

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Review of The Pact by Karina Halle

Synopsis: It all started with a pinky swear…

Linden McGregor is tall, rugged, and gunslinger handsome; a helicopter pilot with a Scottish brogue and charm to spare. He’s also one of Stephanie Robson’s best friends and has fit into that box for as long as she’s known him.

But some relationships can’t be boxed, can’t be classified, can’t be tamed.

Back in their mid-twenties and tired of the competitive hit-or-miss dating scene of San Francisco, Steph and Linden made a pact to marry each other if neither one of them are in a serious relationship by the time they hit thirty.

It sounds like fun and games but as the years to thirty tick past and lovers come and go out of their lives, the pact becomes larger than life.
Sex is inevitable. Friendships are tested. Hearts are on the line.

The pact is about to change everything.

3.75 Stars!

Review: The story of two friends that become lovers always has a strong pull for me, so I was really excited to read this book. The first part of the book was really slow, however, so I was having a difficult time getting into it, at first. Stephanie, Linden, and James are three friends that have survived most of their 20's together, despite Stephanie having dated James at first. One night, around their mid-20's, Linden and Stephanie make a pinky swear with each other that they will get married, if they are both still single by age 30. Thus begins the countdown to see what will happen in the next few years. You begin to see, too, that both have very strong feelings for one another, but they have always held back, for one reason or another. It's actually a little sad, and Linden seems to realize this, that it takes something supposedly done as a joke, to actually help these two move forward.

I think what is so difficult about this book is that both like each other but almost seem to purposefully not choose the other, which causes both of them to be in relationships that they are not happy in and with people that are such horrible second choices. Linden ends up with a girl who hates his friends, and tries to boss him around and control him with sex, and it just confused me because he was supposedly this strong, self-assured player type, and then this is who he chooses? Stephanie is not much better, and she makes some pretty strange decisions herself.

I do have to say, however, that the story really picks up in the second half, and that is why I was able to finish the book. Stephanie and Linden finally get together, and there is so much heat, and even a little bit of angst, in their story, at that point. Stephanie, bless her heart, is finally all in, but then Linden begins to let other people make decisions for his heart. Overall, the second half helps this story.

Jessica