Put them on your must read list. Wish they’d bring them all out in print or electronic format again. My print copies are getting worn out since I re-read them about every year.

For currently pubbed: Carrie Lofty’s What a Scoundrel Wants. Come on, y’all, Will Scarlet. Full disclosure – she’s my CP, but I don’t think that prejudices me too much.

and Sharon Kay Penman is the…best of the best,

Granted, but not if you’re looking for a romance. Since she writes about real people, in very turbulent times, almost everyone has a depressing end (her author’s note always seems to say something about how the only people who got a happy ending in the book were the ones she made up *sigh*).

Titles: A Falcon’s Heart, This Dangerous Magic and Wicked Charms.

The writer is now Pocket author Lucy Blue…she may be something else mow, too.

Veronica Wolff, Josie Little, Lynn Kurland (early non-magical ones), Monica McCarty, Michelle Willingham, Jo Beverley (always, always fabulous), Samantha James, Lynsay Sands… I know I'm forgetting a few. Will be back commenting later as I remember.

Veronica Wolff and Monica McCarty’s books are both set in the 1600s. Good books, but not Medieval. And Wolff’s books are also time-travel, which IMO makes them paranormals, not historicals.

I love Roberta Gellis's Medieval books, and I've been enjoying Karin Tabke's “Master of” series (even if whoo-damn do those people take a lot of baths).

All the chirping birdies and pretty rainbows that were always a part of the previous romances I had read were missing from this book. But the payoff for sticking with the story and reading about the dark and incredibly brutal side of the Norman invasion was well worth the investment of time and emotion.

Like so many others I found Julie Garwood and loved her stories but Medieval Romances lend themselves to a darkness that must be hard to write with a HEA ending because really good ones seem to be so few and far between.