Featured Fics this week on TLS:

MANY THANKS TO OUR GUEST REVIEWERS LaMoMo and Nicole this week, thank you so much for your time.

Tunes with Tony Masen by Just4ALE       

Summary: Our late night calls were fascinating. His attitude in person was frustrating. Stupid radio host with the velvety, seductive voice. Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde? Will the real Tony Masen please stand up?

Bella analyses data for a living, and lives to decode enigmas. Puzzles, codes, crosswords, trivia, you name it. She solves it. Her mind can break down everything and see relations and associations where the human eye can't even begin to fathom them. Her past is a secret that she can't share, and there are broken bridges that she can't and won't mend and that she keeps running away from. The other passion in her life is music. 70's music, if you please. Not disco, not the 80's. Let's stick to the serious stuff, the connoisseur stuff. There's a connoisseur above all others in San Francisco, and it's Tony Masen, the DJ hosting Tunes with Tony Masen every night on KFOG radio. 

What do Tony and Bella have in common? Music, for starters. They are both connoisseurs and they are both very picky with their tastes. Quizzes are a close second. Tony asks quizzes about music trivia on his show, and the sheer difficulty makes them accessible to "only the brave". Bella is one of the "brave", though Tony knows her as "Izzy". She is a regular caller, and she regularly gets the answers to Tony's unbelievably complicated and mysterious music trivia. They talk. A lot. On-air. Off-air. But is this real? Is there a connection, a relation, an association, as in Bella's puzzles?

There is. On a deeper level. Be prepared to follow them, and investigate.

The story will get you riveted. Tony's voice will mesmerise you. The plot will leave you hanging like a Sherlock Holmes mystery and will make you jump on your seat like The Fugitive. You will get mad when you don't get the answers to the trivia or the movie references. 

You will be completely floored when you discover what Alice's profession - REAL profession - is.

Be warned. And now run to read it....and Run Through The Jungle with Izzy and Tony (and, by the way, Just4ALE - why isn't there YET a chapter on Creedence Clearwater Revival????)

~MoMo

Fall to Ruin One Day by sleepyvalentina     

Summary: He wanted to be the most powerful man on earth. As far as she was concerned, he already was. Love. Longing. A decade of regret. Time changes nothing...or does it?

What if your first love that broke your heart ended up being a very powerful political figure?
What if you flew home to spend Thanksgiving with old friends and your true love ended up seated
beside you on that flight, where you could not escape? In Sleepy Valentina's FALL TO RUIN ONE DAY, Bella Swan fell in love with Edward Cullen in college. His political aspirations & lifestyle tore
them apart until he ends up next to her on a flight home for the holidays. Bella finds out for
herself that her heart, nor his, has ever healed. The question is will they get another chance at
happily ever after? I am completely owned by stories of True Love Never Fails like this one is.
If you love romance at all, you want to read this story.

~Nicole

 My Viking by sheviking   

Summary: Bella is captured by Vikings and brought with them to their home
country where her new fate awaits. Can she ever find happiness being a slave?
Will it make a difference that she is given to Edward to be his bed thrall?
Rated M for old time lemons.

Sheviking doesn't really need introductions. If you haven't read The Education of Professor Cullen or The Blizzard, you're either living under a rock, or missing a few essential staples in your general Twilight Fanfic Education.

This latest endeavour of hers, however, is a completely different mix. It's a period fic - where Edward, renamed Edvard for the occasion, and the rest of the usual suspect have stepped back in time a few centuries and transported into the savage, merciless, godless and ruthless civilisation of Vikings.

Truefacts? To our Isabella (an Englishwoman kidnapped from English shores during a Viking raid) these are true facts, they are the very tenets of her beliefs regarding this alien, warlike and fierce race. And her attitude stems from those beliefs from the very moment she crashes into Edvard's life as his serf, more specifically, as his new bed thrall.

It's a story of a bitter cultural crash, with two civilisation moudls that are as deep-rooted as they can be, and as such they are taken for granted by either Edvard and Isabella. It's a story of conflicted feelings and loyalties. It's a story, beautifully written and with a very clever and respectful "localisation" of our beloved canon characters that does not betray the essence of the characters as we know them but, on the contrary, enhances some of their most appreciated and cherished traits - Edvard's intense feelings, his protective instincts, his absolute belief in Bella on one hand, and Bella's inner strength, her ability to adapt to circumstances, her learning experience as she finds herself on alien shores.

It is hard to believe that this story started out in jest as a one-shot, out of a very funny and hot "what if" conversation where a group of fanfic addicts lamented the absence of a Viking Edward. Sheviking all too willingly rose to the occasion, and gave us this latest gem, concocting a bewitching, scorchingly hot story, even through the long and stressful last months of her pregnancy. Now that she has been safely and blissfully delivered of a healthy, beautiful Baby Viking Boy, join us in congratulating her and the rest of the Viking family, as we (not so) patiently wait for more. 

Here I am

Smooches

Momo

Strange Brew by Magnolia822

Summary: Soon-to-be college senior needs a summer job. Edward Cullen needs a worker for his new tasting room at Cullen Creek Brewery. She doesn't know much about beer, but she knows how to push his buttons.

Unusual fanfic location? Check. This story takes us to Burlington, Vermont. The usual suspects work together, but are not corporate moghuls? Check. The Cullen brothers and Jasper have a brewery, Cullen Creek. An usual, mysterious, fascinating Bella? Check. She is a vet student, independent, sassy, and sweet at the same time.

A slightly older, absolutely conflicted, self-berating, brooding and Edward? Check. He's going through a rough divorce, so we don't (or we do? watch out on this) have to worry about Tanya and he's fighting against time so that the brewery will make the grand opening day with a splash.  Our most beloved star-crossed lovers are faced with conflict and impediments? Check. Bella is Edward's employee, thanks to Emmett's snap decisions.

This story flows smoothly and effortlessly through its verbal humour, the charming setting of a New England summer, the constant banter and comedy of errors of a sassy, sarcastic and slightly secretive Bella that integrates very quickly in the mostly masculine staff of the brewery, much to Edward's continued and ill-contained chagrin.

The added allure and mystery of all this is that the author, of Cullen Sutras fame, has wisely and wickedly (for us poor readers) chosen to stick to one point of view up to now, and we are herded along the story through Edward's sometimes (often) warped perception of things, as he strings us along his barely contained hormones, his gradual realisation of a marriage that was never there to begin with, and his continued fascination with the multi-faceted, riveting canvas that is Bella's mind and heart.

Those who are also fond of the Cullen power couple, aka Esme and Carlisle, will be happy to hear that this story offers a very unsual, but highly entertaining Doctor Cullen. 

A sip of beer at a time (with recommendations, and a whole lot of to-the-point and well-informed research on the matter), the reader can't but drink this all in, and remains thirsty, waiting for more.

~MoMo