Your last few books have had a sort of a madcap adventure feel to them and so “Bring Him Home” is a change in tone and pace. It deals with grief and recovery and discovery and relies less on external conflict and more on the internal changes that the leads experience.

Nathan Wyatt found a family in his SAS brothers but when their convoy was hit in an ambush, one of the men that held the group together becomes mortally injured. Nate has the choice of staying with his best friend, Steve, and saving Ross. Steve orders him to save Ross and leave him. Nate knows that this is the only genuine choice he has. He also knows he has the choice of allowing Steve to burn to death, trapped under the flames of a burning Humvee, or to provide his best friend relief. Nate does the right thing, both times, but his actions and the war scarred him and after he is discharged, Nate abandons his friends and his makeshift family which included Steve’s wife, Claire, their son, and everyone else important to him.

Eighteen months later Claire tracks him down in Hollywood where Nate is serving as a bodyguard to a rock star (the brother of the hero in What the Librarian Did). Nate and Steve and Claire had formed a family trust and now with Steve dead and Nate unreachable halfway around the world, Claire needs Nate to sign papers to revert all the property of the trust into her name. She wants to turn the dilapidated fishing boat that Nate and she went halfsies on into a charter boat business. Claire needs Nate to pay attention to their combined business matters so she can move on with her life. Nate is too busy getting “comfortably numb.”

What makes this a different kind of friends to lovers book is that neither Nate nor Claire had feelings for each other before Steve’s death. Nate looked at Claire as a true friend, but most importantly, Steve’s wife. For Claire, Nate was Steve’s brother in arms. We get a look at Claire’s past relationship with Steve. One of my favorite scenes in the book was when Claire was sharing with Jules, the fiancé of one of the members of Nate’s team that had also died in the same ambush, that Steve and Claire had been on the brink of divorce but that a letter from Steve had saved it. Claire admitted that they both wanted the marriage to be saved but that the letter was a turning point. It turned out that the letter was written by committee of Steve’s team members. They were all single and very invested in Steve’s marriage and the success of that marriage.

Claire returned, carrying a sheet of handwritten paper in a plastic sleeve. “I cried over this so much I had to protect it.” Narrowing her eyes, she thrust it across the table at Nate. “Give me an example.”

Nervously Nate glanced again at Jules and then down at the page, cursing that he’d ever raised the subject. Would this make things better or worse? He was a guy, how the hell would he know? He cleared his throat. “Okay, Steve would start with something like, ‘Without you, my life would be crap.’ We’d workshop that into…” Nate found the quote with his finger “‘—you make my life worth living.’ Trying to put a positive spin on a neg- ative statement,” he added, risking a glance at Claire.

Her expression, as she eyeballed him over the edge of the champagne flute, gave nothing away. “Lee, being our romantic, suggested some of the poetic stuff… changing ‘wife’ to ‘soul mate,’ for example.”

Claire exchanged glances with Jules but made no comment.

Nate stared at the letter, fighting that male sense of helplessness that told him nothing he did now would be right. “Okay, this line, ‘We have so much fun, in bed and out of it.’ That’s all Steve’s…except for the ‘out of it’ part. That change was group consensus—we thought it might look like Steve was being shallow.” Nate told himself to shut up now, but the continuing stony silence only increased his verbal diarrhea. “The marriage vow thing, for better or worse. I think Steve wanted to write about things having to get much worse before he gave up….” Desperately he scanned the page. “That sorta morphed into, ‘No matter what, I’m committed to you for the rest of our lives.’”

Nate could see them all now, four bearded, dust-covered young men agonizing over this damn thing while Steve paced camp, occasionally bursting out with, “It’s not frickin’ right yet…. It’s got to be right.”

A lump in his throat stopped him. He looked up. Claire had her head bowed, so did Jules. Oh, shit. Claire’s shoulders were shaking. “You’re upset,” he said helplessly.

A hoot escaped her…a hoot? She lifted her face and there were tears in her eyes. “Th-th-that’s hilarious!” The two women collapsed in paroxysms of laughter.

Nate stared at them in amazement.

“Can’t you see them?” Claire hiccuped. “Oh, Jules, can’t you just see them?”

“Right down to licking the pencil,” Jules managed to say, sending Claire into whoops again.

“It was a pen,” Nate said stonily. “And I don’t see what the hell is so funny.”

“You’re right, it’s beautiful.” With a last giggle, Claire wiped her eyes dry with a napkin. “Steve was so hopeless at this kind of stuff, and for him to do this, to lay it on the line in front of you guys…and for you all to agonize over it…” She leaned over and hugged him. “Nate, it’s sweet and funny and, well, thank you.”

When Nate discovers that Claire holds strong resentment toward Steve for constantly signing up for new tours, he makes it his mission to show Claire how much Steve loved her. As the Nate and Claire remember Steve, they help each other get over their grief and find space in their hearts for something new. Watching them both discover that newness was engaging. Nate becomes grumpy at other men finding Claire attractive, something he tells himself is a holdover of his protectiveness toward Steve. Claire realizes what other women around her acknowledge – that Nate is one very sexy guy whose endearing gruffness masques a tender heart and whose commitment to a cause or a person is never wavering. The biggest problem I had was the ending. The last few lines caused me some confusion and I wished for an epilogue. B+

Best regards,

Jane

P.S. That cover is terrible. It looks like some teenage vagabond coming home and not a sexy former SAS now turned bodyguard to the stars.

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I don’t remember reading a book like this lately. I’m sure that there have been ones written, after all, romance has been published for decades at a clip of several hundred a month. There are no new stories, only new ways to tell them. However, Marta Russell and Theophilus Mirkwood are two characters that seemed entirely new to me; characters I hadn’t met in fiction before.

This story read to me about two things: connections and opposites. Connections, particularly in this book, prevent seeing the world in black and white, seeing one person as wholly villianous or virtuous. The way in which the connections to people make us better and how, left to our own devices, our viewpoints and life experiences can be narrow and limited. The best part of an opposites attract story is this idea that the other can fill in where one is lacking, making the duo better than an individual. That is definitely true in “A Lady Awakened”.

The story is fairly simple. Martha Russell of Seaton Park is newly widowed and she is childless. While she regrets that she doesn’t have a child and that she will likely have to go and live off her brothers, she is prepared to do so. Her plans are forestalled by suggestion of her lady’s maid and the local clergy that everyone will need to wait to see if she had quickened before her husband’s death. The seed of fraud is fostered when Martha hears that the heir is a disreputable man who had taken advantage of the servants of the house many years ago and that her husband had shunned the heir prior to his death.

Martha learns that Theo Mirkwood has been sent down by his father after an escapade. She propositions Theo and offers to pay him money to father her a child. Theo is bemused but he is in need of money and impregnating his neighbor seems like a jolly way to pass the time until he is forgiven or he has enough money to return to town. Martha and Theo don’t think much of each either. Martha isn’t the merry widow that Theo would like her to be and Theo is far to reckless and irresponsible to appeal to Martha. Theo thinks quite a bit of his sexual prowess but Martha is unimpressed:

He was watching her, hands on his hips, satisfied to be the object of a lady’s scrutiny. “It’s all yours, darling, bought and paid for,” he said with what was probably a rakish smile.

What on earth did one say in reply to that? It wasn’t even accurate — she hadn’t paid him yet — but really, the less said on this subject, the better. Yesterday had been rather excruciating in that regard. Your skin is like silk. You smell like flowers. He must seduce chiefly on the strength of his good looks. He couldn’t expect to overcome any lady with poetic invention.

As the two spend each afternoon in bed, they begin to learn more about one another. Martha learns that Theo’s easy amiability makes it easier to connect with the tenants, to assist them in the manner in which Martha believes is important for the gentry to do. Theo learns from Martha that taking care of the land and tenants is more than a responsibility but a calling.

In reading the negative Amazon reviews, one of the negatives that is brought up is that Martha is engaging in a fraud. She is. She is trying to steal an inheritance from another person who is rumored to be a bad man. This is not without its troubling morality and is an issue that Martha acknowledges, even unto the end.

Another negative comment was that Martha is cold. She is. She is distant from others. She does not make friends easily and her lack of ability to make connections pushes her to further withdraw emotionally. But she is earnest in her desire to provide for those people around her. She feels their reliance keenly. Moreover, Martha recognizes the perilous position of a woman and seeks to set up a school wherein girls can gain an education, empowering them. Theo is distant as well, for all his amiabiity. His connections, while easily made, are superfluous.  Martha and Theo are subtle ends of an emotional spectrum.  Theo was undisciplined, but generous.   Martha was uptight, but thoughtful.

There is this great subplot involving Theo and a single laborer on his property. He learns that because the man has no family, when the man is older and can no longer work the tenant properly, he will be sent to a workhouse. It brings home to Theo how fortunate his birth and what kind of responsibility he holds in his hands. Theo has the ability to prevent Mr. Barrow from being sent to a workhouse. Theo’s transformation doesn’t come at the hands of Martha. She merely opens his eyes.

“The smaller families with older sons are fortunate,” he said as he and Granville moved along. “Two or more wages, and fewer people to divide them among.”

“The shape of your family makes a great difference, doesn’t it? I’m sorry the Weavers have no grown-up sons.” They were walking a path that followed a rail fence now, and from time to time the man rapped at some part of it, presumably to test the soundness of its joints.

“Mr. Barrow has no family at all? Not even nieces or nephews, I mean?”

“No.” This brought an extra gravity, he could see, to Granville’s weathered features. “He had sisters, I know, but they married long ago and settled somewhere far north.”

“No one to take an interest in caring for him, then.”

“It’s not as uncommon a case as one might like it to be. Reminds a man of the importance of marrying. Not a man of independent means, of course — you may look after yourself and then pay others to do so, if you choose.”

This sounded a dismal prospect. He must remember to think seriously of marriage, in five or ten years, and in the meantime, to ingratiate himself with his sisters’ children. “But Mr. Barrow,” he said. “There will come a time — soon, perhaps — when he can no longer earn a wage.”

“Aye, and after that, a time when he cannot keep house, and a time when he cannot care for himself.” Granville stopped, having found a place in the fence that did not make the proper reply to his knock. He rapped at it again, and then took out a pencil and a folded bit of paper to make some note.

Theo waited. “What happens to such a man at that time?” he said when the agent had finished.

He shook his head without looking up. “If a man does live to that age, and has no connections, like as not he ends in the workhouse infirmary.”

“Workhouse.” The one word was all he could manage.

Another negative is that the sex that Martha and Theo have is quite unsexy. This is also true. Martha hates sex initially. So much so that by the third coupling, Theo is having a difficult time even becoming aroused. The sex is actually a source of humor but it provides a marker for Martha and Theo’s intimacy. Initially the sex is horrible because neither have any feelings for another. As the two begin to like each other, the sex becomes better (although Martha begins to feel guilty about this) and then when the two fall in love, intercourse becomes both pleasureful and painful. Sex is almost a chore for both of them, something to get through in order to get to the good stuff which is the talking that they do after sex and the intimacy that grows between them because of the post coital discussions.  The sex in the book ranges from awkward to erotic, a range that I’ve rarely seen in one book.

I just appreciated so much watching Theo and Martha change, subtly, into better versions of themselves. How they found in each other something of value. There are so many wonderful small scenes in the book such as Theo watching Martha’s interaction with the vicar and thinking to himself that he wanted to see that look of admiration and respect on Martha’s face directed toward him. Or Martha learning how to make friends with Theo’s assistance.  The one small part of the story that I felt wasn’t as well integrated was Martha’s desire for a school for girls. I wasn’t convinced that her school would provide the empowerment that she desired and it lacked the flavor of the tenant / land management issues in the book. I also thought that the first three chapters started off a bit slow and I worried that Martha would be preachy and insufferable for the whole book (she’s not at all).

I don’t think I can really convey how amazing this book is. I hope people just give it a chance. Read the first chapter in the store. Take advantage of the “Sample” feature for ebookstores. It’s worth that small effort to see if the book captures a reader’s attention. I was captivated from the first chapter. A-

Best regards,

Jane

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I have been anxious to read your books since The Heir came out and circumstances (and other books) have always interfered with that goal until this month.  I bought The Virtuoso the day that it came out and sat down one evening with great anticipation.  The sad fact is that there scarcely seems a page goes by that does not include some kind of historical inaccuracy. The unstated invitation is to enter the book and put aside any form of reality and simply immerse oneself in the Burrowes world, as it is constructed.  The voice is lovely but the period feel of this story ranges from Regency to Victorian (both early and late) to even modern day sensibilities.   There is no resemblance to the Regency period as written by Heyer, Austen or even Quinn.

I can’t really catalog all the errors in the book and while I am a historical rube, there were obvious ones such as the hero, Val Windham being referred to constantly as Mr. Windham.  This is explained later that it is at Val’s insistence but people who do know he is a duke’s son refer to him as Mr. Windham before he expresses his desire to be plain mister.     Val did not have a valet despite coming from a wealthy titled family and having quite a bit of money of his own. Instead, his friends such as a son of an Earl and another gentlemanhelp him dress and undress and ready for his bath.  In other scene, the landed gentry friend actually shaves Val and unbuttons Val’s pants for him.  Val is highly regarded for own two piano factories and being a wealthy “merchant.”  This is a duke’s son, the youngest, but a member of the nobility, and he and all of his friends (nobility and gentry) are doing manual labor refurbishing his own estate.

There is a certain nonchalance in which class is treated. For instance, Val dallying with a maid in a friend’s home. Val didn’t seem the type to exert his power over lowly help and take advantage of her in that fashion. Instead, it is just another example of the fluidity of class in the Burrowes book. It’s a modern sensibility, at times reading like a contemporary rather than a Regency set historical.

Ellen, the widow, baring her feet and ankles to dangle her naked feet in a pond next to Val, whose breeches are rolled up around his bare calves. Then he whips off his shirt and uses it to dry her feet.  It is the country and Ellen is a widow, but it seemed odd. They are mere acquaintances although they both feel an attraction toward the other but this scene is on the heels of Ellen chiding Val for using her christian name without her permission.

This propriety mismatch occurs throughout the book. At one point, Val is sitting with Ellen, at night and alone, with her in her nightgown and with Val’s arm around her. He muses that perhaps he should have written to her after stealing a kiss but then acknowledges that it would not have been proper:

Now he wished he’d written, though it would hardly have been proper, even to a widow.

Val often runs about with just a shirt that he sheds at any given moment but notes:

Val quirked an eyebrow at his friend, who had foregone cravat and waistcoat in deference to the building heat. “You’re in dishabille.”

Later Val and Ellen are lying outside during the day on a blanket.  They nap in a spoon fashion.  They awaken and proceed to touch each other intimately, with Val pulling up Ellen’s dress and Ellen removing Val’s shirt.  There is no concern exhibited by either that servants or individuals working on Val’s home just a walk away could come upon them.  Even in a contemporary, most individuals aren’t so brazen as to engage in public coitus like this without even a smidge of concern.

The plot is this.  Val is a virtuoso of the piano but after his brother died, he began suffering pain and discomfort in his hand.  He is advised to not use his hand and it is suggested that he may not be able to play piano again.  Rather than resting it, as instructed, so that he may play piano again, Val decides that he can do gross motor skill activities such as laboring which includes roofing and other refurbishments of an estate he won in a card game.  (As an aside, was there a delineation of fine v. gross motor skills at this time?)

Ellen is the Baronness Roxbury, Roxbury being one of the oldest titles short of the monarchy.  She lives on the estate that Val has won and apparently met Val a year ago where they flirted and shared a scorching kiss.  She also grows flowers and makes soaps and lotions.  These she sells in the village from a wagon.  There is some secret about her percuniary difficulties.

Ellen and Val rekindle their attraction when Val tries to come to terms with his infirmity.  Val tells Ellen that he can’t offer for her because of his crippled hand, but he does want to dally with her.  About half way into the book, a suspense plot is introduced.

Another drawback is the huge cast of characters.  There are so many people in this story and it is quite the challenge to place how they are all interrelated. For instance, Nick is a character referred to in the beginning as having overprotective tendencies toward Val. He’s a friend but why should he send his brother and the sons of another friend to “spy” on Val?

Val extended a hand, recognizing the tall blond fellow from his friend Nick’s wedding to Darius’s sister Leah just a few weeks past.

Nick himself does show up for a scene in the latter part of the book along with any number of men who may have appeared in previous books (or not).  When the story is just about Val and Ellen without all the extraneous people, it’s much easier to catch the threads of the story.  And there is a lot to like in this book.  There is some lovely imagery such as when Val is sitting next to Ellen who is in her nightgown and wrapper on the back porch of her home and she is rubbing salve into his inflamed left hand.

As she worked, he felt tension, frustration, and anger slipping down his arm and out the ends of his fingers, almost as if he were playing—

HIs arm is a barometer for his feelings.  Everyone recognizes it before Val despite it being spelled out for him by his doctor/Viscount friend.  His identity is that of being the Virtuoso, the fine musician.  It is what set him apart in a family of five boys and various number of sisters.  He regularly refers to Herr Beethoven and I found it strangely ironic that Val could idolize Beethoven without acknowledging Beethoven himself was a handicapped musician.

Ellen is a lonely widow who feels insubstantial because of her inability to provide an heir to her deceased husband. She dropped the title and does not socialize with the locals other than to sell her wares.  She’s a bit moody, a bit secretive, a bit sad.  Her affection for Val wasn’t just sexual in nature but arose out of a need for comfort and companionship.  I felt like we knew Val better; however, as much of the story seemed from his point of view.  Perhaps this was an intentional effort to make Ellen more mysterious.

The tone of the story is gentle; the physical relationship graphic and sensual; the unwinding langorous.  I found Ellen and Val both  engaging.   I enjoyed how the slowly the physical part of the relationship developed, no matter how inappropriate their encounters.  The prose is very nice.

This book would read so much better as a fantasy historical or perhaps even a country set contemporary.  If the setting wasn’t “historical”, then perhaps the obvious thumbing of authenticity wouldn’t really bother me.  Unfortunately, nearly every scene had me raising my eyebrows despite all the potential.  I wished that I could have accepted the invitation to lose myself in the text, but I simply could not do it.  C-

Best regards,

Jane

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I picked this one up when I realized I hadn’t read many historicals lately. This is the first in a three book series involving the de Lacey brothers who discover that their recently deceased father may have been a bigamist threatening their standing in society and their inheritances. Edward, the second son, has been managing the estates of the Duke of Durham for some time and thus it falls to him to see to securing the legal claim to their estates while his younger brother searches for the blackmailer. The eldest, and new Duke of Durham, appears to be a dissolute do nothing (I’m sure he’ll have some dark secret to regale us with in his own book).

Edward’s plans however, upset those of Francesca, Lady Gordon who is trying to retain a solicitor to assist her in obtaining guardianship over her dead brother’s daughter. When Francesca’s solicitor abandons her case to help Edward, she flies into a rage and confronts Edward, demanding that he compensate her loss by assisting her obtaining a new solicitor. Her fiery demeanor incites a passion in Edward that has been heretofore undiscovered.

The story starts out with Edward engaged to Louisa, a gently bred woman with whom he is in love. Despite his brothers’ urging to NOT divulge their scandal to Louisa, Edward does.

Edward nodded. “Agreed, except . . . I must tell Louisa.”

“Louisa!” Gerard frowned. “Must you?”

“How can I not?” Edward frowned back. “She deserves to know.”

His brother looked unconvinced. “I know you care for her, but I suggest you reconsider. You’ll have to put the wedding off because of Father’s death, but there’s no need to tell her of . . . this.”

“Gerard, she is my fiancée,” Edward replied, each word coated in ice. “I cannot keep something like this from her.”

Gerard hesitated. “Perhaps you should, if you want to keep her as your fiancée.”

Edward stilled. “I will pretend I didn’t hear that,” he said quietly. “Louisa is a woman of understanding and discretion. Moreover, she is the woman I love, and the woman who loves me. I wouldn’t dream of keeping such a terrible secret from her.”

Of course, Louisa doesn’t keep his secret, breaks their engagement and sells the story to a scandal sheet. From that point on, Edward spends most of his thoughts contemplating Francesca’s beauty:

Now that he was staring at her, he seemed unable to stop. His eyes roamed over her face, beautifully flushed, and her gleaming hair, so glorious against her skin. The other day, when she railed at him for stealing her solicitor, she’d been magnificent, in the manner of an avenging Fury. Francesca Gordon in a passion was quite a sight. The little devil that had invaded his mind tonight couldn’t stop comparing her to Louisa, who went pale and silent in emotional upset. Francesca—he really mustn’t become accustomed to thinking of her as such—reacted with anger and action. She stormed his house, the home of a total stranger, and upbraided him for inadvertently ruining her hopes. She said she would never forgive him, and smiled wickedly when he called her a managing female. By God, one could have a rousing good row with a woman like this, and then. . .

In fact, it isn’t until 43% of the book (mine was a digital arc) that Edward ponders Louisa’s betrayal, this woman that he loved so greatly that he could not countenance keeping such a secret from her. I think Francesca may have spent more time contemplating Edward’s loss than he did. This bothered me a great deal during the first half of the story. So much of the first half is Francesca and Edward thinking lustful thoughts about the other and that just didn’t fit. Shouldn’t Edward have felt a twinge of hurt, after all, he referred to Louisa as his “idealized model of womanhood” and despite this passage in the middle of the book, his broken engagement has little affect on him.

It hurt too much to think of the woman he had loved, honorably and faithfully, betraying his confidence and jilting him without a qualm. He wanted to know why. He wanted to demand she explain herself, even though he had no desire to repair the breach now. He wanted to know how he could have been so deceived in her character; he had thought her loving and loyal, trustworthy enough to hear his darkest secret and keep it so.

On the one hand, I am supposed to believe that Edward was deeply in love with Louisa. On the other, I’m to believe that this emotion can be cast off in a matter of hours and transferred onto Francesca. Once I gave up thinking about this, I appreciated the story once more. In other words, if I, like Edward, totally forgot about his prior love and Louisa altogether, I enjoyed the romance between Francesca and Edward.

I liked that Francesca, a widow, had a prior good marriage. There were definitely surprises that occurred in the second half that I hadn’t anticipated and that added a level of poignancy to the story. The dispute over the dukedom was set up well and read very plausibly. There was one scene in which Edward was yelling at Francesca for acting dangerously when she kissed him to shut him up which I thought was a nice gender reversal. I actually found the agnst free way in which they embarked on their affair was refreshing and I enjoyed how completely they enjoyed each other.

Having said that, I never saw Francesca as a lively, passionate woman outside of Edward’s previous experience. Sure, she showed a strong desire to be a mother to her niece, but that just didn’t seem very “fiery” to me. And Edward’s character wavered between kind of uptight in the beginning to completely unfazed about having his affair with this widow be well known amongst society. In short, I never got a good handle on either character. I didn’t feel like I knew them. I felt more like their actions were played out according to what the scene dictated rather than having the scene dictated by their characters. Both characters are perfectly likeable, but not very real. C

Best regards,

Jane

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

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I had enjoyed your book, The Dangerous Viscount, enough that I wanted to read the upcoming The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton. The rub was that I hate reading series out of order. What’s an anal reader to do but backtrack and get the first book in the Burgundy Club series, The Wild Marquis? And that’s exactly what I did.

The Wild Marquis begins with a murder. Joseph Merton’s murder. Joseph is a bookseller, and he is swaying while approaching his room at an inn, having celebrated the acquisition of an important document hidden in a collection of books with a couple of drinks, when he opens the door to find his books strewn and himself facing a familiar man who immediately knifes him and leaves him bleeding to death.

The story then shifts forward a year to a book auction at Sotheby’s. The late book aficionado Thomas Tarleton’s collection of books is up for sale, and according to the catalog, the most valuable in the collection is the illuminated French manuscript known in English as the Burgundy Book of Hours.

The Marquis of Chase entered Sotheby’s after seeing a handbill bearing Tarleton’s name. Although the name Tarleton rings a bell in his mind, the marquis, whose close acquaintances call him Cain after his other title, is puzzled by the Burgundy manuscript’s presence in Tarleton’s collection. For years, it was among his family’s prized possessions. His deceased father would not have willingly parted with it, and Cain had therefore believed the book belonged to him.

Not only does Cain feel possessive of the manuscript, he believes that if he can learn how Tarleton came to own the book, he will also learn his late father’s secrets and thereby gain a way back into his mother and sister’s affections.

As a teen, Cain was cast out of his parents’ household and had to find a way to survive. He was taken in by prostitutes who found him mugged on their doorstep, but his religious parents and even his less devout but very proper aunt were so shocked by his presence there that they refused to have anything to do with him. The rest of society soon followed suit. His father could not keep Cain from inheriting the title and fortune after his death, but his mother has shut him out of her life and his sister’s.

Now Cain misses the women in his family, and longs for a modicum of social acceptance. Following the instinct that the Book of Hours may unlock the mystery that was his late father, he questions Lord Hugo, a bibliophile, on the subject of the book. Hugo doesn’t know how Tarleton acquired the book but when Cain mentions that he himself is interested in purchasing it when it is auctioned, Hugo recommends that Cain seek advice from a knowledgeable bookseller and recommends one J.C. Merton for the task.

What Cain doesn’t know is that J.C. Merton is Juliana Merton, the widow of the murdered Joseph. Juliana also has a painful past, and now that her husband is dead, she is struggling to make a go of the book business since many book collectors don’t give female booksellers the same credit for expertise that their male counterparts get.

Lord Hugo is an exception, and when Cain turns up on Juliana’s doorstep, he proves to be one as well. Juliana is excited by the opportunity to help a wealthy, titled customer bid on such an important manuscript, because if she does so successfully, such a coup could help her gain many more customers. If she can’t make a go of her business, Juliana may be forced to marry a fellow merchant who doesn’t appeal to her that much in order to survive.

Cain is attracted to Juliana and she is equally drawn to him. He learns of her interest in a Shakespeare Folio that is also part of the auction and she discovers that he has hidden facets. But Cain has never ruined a woman’s reputation before, and he doesn’t intend to start now. So it is almost a surprise to the two of them when they go to bed, and more so when they begin to fall in love.

Unfortunately, things become complicated after Cain receives a letter from his sister Esther that hints at her need of his help. Without more social polish, Cain will be unable to aid Esther, and Juliana is not appropriate wife material for a marquis. Can Juliana and Cain overcome the differences in their social backgrounds as well as their fears and vulnerabilities to find love?

While The Wild Marquis wasn’t perfect, I enjoyed it a great deal. As with The Dangerous Viscount, it took a while for my interest in the story to be engaged. In this case it was because at first glance the pairing seemed to be treading familiar ground – titled, wealthy, womanizing hero and respectable widowed heroine.

As it turned out, though, appearances were not quite what they seemed. Although Cain had been around the block, he wasn’t your typical rake in that he genuinely respected the women in his life, had not actually slept with some of them, and helped them when he could. Juliana’s secret past, which was only revealed partway through the book, made her a distinct character as well.

A couple of other problems kept me from adoring the book. First, I felt that Cain’s proposal to Juliana came rather abruptly, though I understood that there were reasons why he had to seek a wife. And he went from only reluctantly offering to marry her to desperately wanting her as his wife in what felt like the blink of an eye. I would have liked to see Cain reflecting on this change in attitude for at least a couple of paragraphs if not a page, because the brevity of this dramatic shift was so short and almost offhand, it took me a lot longer than it might otherwise have to catch onto the fact that he’d begun to view Juliana as The One, someone who fulfilled him as no other woman could.

Second, here was also a great deal of potential for depth of emotion in this book that I feel wasn’t fully utilized. I am a reader who loves to have my gut hit or my heart wrenched by a book. Neither this book nor The Dangerous Viscount did that for me, but I still enjoyed them both. Although the tone of The Wild Marquis is lighter than what I often prefer, I found the characters so endearing that I was only slightly disappointed at the lack of emotional intensity.

I liked Juliana and had a lot of sympathy for her and her situation. Without giving away spoilers, her childhood and her circumstances were far from easy, but hers were not the typical difficulties found in most romances. Juliana was also intelligent and not without some ambition. I really liked her, and I loved that she actually knew how to use birth control.

Cain was even more wonderful, and not just for superficial reasons like his good looks and his position in society. Not even just because of his own tough childhood (which was also atypical!). I loved his affection for people, especially women, and the way that it didn’t manifest simply as lust, but also as respect and a willingness to listen and to help. In Juliana’s case, Cain’s reactions went beyond his usual responses, to admiration and love, but even before that happened, he had already won me over with his warmth, decency and humor.

The world of London’s bibliophiles, booksellers and auctioneers provided a great backdrop for the story. The identity of Jospeh Merton’s killer’s was easy for me to guess at, but the mysteries surrounding Cain’s father and Juliana’s past stumped me and held my interest throughout. This was a genuinely touching novel because it was a story of two loveable people, both outcasts in their way, finding the acceptance, understanding and love they deserved with one another. B/B+.

Sincerely,

Janine

Book Link | Kindle | Amazon | nook | BN | Borders
| Sony| KoboBooks

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: The Dangerous Viscount by Miranda Neville
2. My First Sale by Miranda Neville
3. REVIEW: Wild, Wild West by Charlene Teglia

Here’s a testament to the fact that Twitter can sell books. I’ve enjoyed your personable tweets so much that when I saw on SonomaLass’s website that she enjoyed your newest novel, The Dangerous Viscount, I decided to get my hands on a copy.

This was back in October, before I bought my Kindle, and at the time, I couldn’t find the book at the Sony Store, so I did something I almost never do anymore — dragged myself to a brick-and-mortar Barnes and Noble, where after some difficulty with a bookseller who didn’t know how to spell or pronounce “viscount,” I finally found a copy of the book.

Was The Dangerous Viscount worth the hunt? After a slow first quarter, my attention was caught and when I finished, I closed the book feeling entertained and satisfied. Before I get to the reasons why I felt this way, an introduction to the story and its charming characters is in order:

As the first sentence of The Dangerous Viscount says, “It all began with a glimpse of stocking.” The stocking in question is made of pink silk, and belongs to Diana Fanshawe, who, like Sebastian Iverley is a guest at Mandeville House, the home of the Marquis of Blakeney.

Blakeney is Sebastian’s cousin, but there is little closeness between the two men. Sebastian, though heir to a viscount, is a mere mister, bookish, poorly dressed and relatively unworldly, while Blakeney, a duke’s heir, is known for his athleticism, far more fashionably dressed, popular with the ladies and has little respect for Sebastian, whom he calls “Owl.”

Unfortunately for Sebastian, who falls into an instant infatuation with her, Diana Fanshawe is intent on becoming the Marchioness of Blakeney. Diana’s family lives in the vicinity, but Blakeney and his parents snubbed Diana, her siblings and her parents, when Diana was young. This only made Diana want Blakeney more but when she made her debut, he took no notice of her because of her lower birth. Instead, Diana married a kind, wealthy, and middle aged lord.

Now Diana is Lady Fanshawe, widowed and wealthy. She also dresses in high style. All of this has won her an invitation to Mandeville House, and this time, she is determined to capture Blakeney’s romantic interest and snag a proposal from him as well.

As for Sebastian, Diana only thinks of him as “Blakeney’s peculiar cousin.” She is polite but disinterested in him, though she allows him to accompany her on a brief visit to her eccentric parents’ home. This begins to change, though, when Diana and Sebastian return to Mandeville House. There a discussion between Diana, Blakeney and Blakeney’s friend Lamb of Sebastian’s inexperience with women turns into a challenge to Diana’s beauty, and she wagers Blakeney five hundred pounds that she can get Sebastian to kiss her.

In the following days, Diana finds ways to get Sebastian alone, and Sebastian falls for her. Despite his reticence and his inexperience, he does kiss her. She regrets having made the bet and hopes Sebastian will not learn of it, but of course, he does — and this comes about just as he is planning to ask Diana to marry him.

After overhearing Blakney and Lamb discussing the bet, Sebastian leaves Mandeville House to attend to his dying uncle, a misogynist who kept Sebastian away from women as a child and instilled some misconceptions in his heir.

Sebastian’s uncle dies, and Sebastian inherits the title of viscount. Unable to put Diana from his mind, he returns to London and asks his closest friends to help him remake himself into a fashionable man, the kind who would capture Lady Diana Fanshawe’s affections. He vows that he will make Diana fall in love with him, and then teach her what rejection feels like.

As mentioned before, The Dangerous Viscount began slowly for me. For the first ninety or so pages, I felt disengaged from the story and wasn’t sure if I should keep reading.

I think this was because Diana was so far out of Sebastian’s reach, and Sebastian, in Diana’s eyes, beneath her notice, that it was hard for me to feel any romantic spark in their interactions. Also, Sebastian’s initial interest in Diana seemed superficial to me since it was based on nothing more than a glimpse of stocking. It wasn’t until Sebastian learned of the wager, inherited his title, and set out to transform himself and get a little taste of revenge that I decided to stick with the book.

I am glad I stuck with it though, because it did become entertaining once Sebastian began to dress well and Diana sat up and took notice. Despite their flaws, the main characters were charming and endearing. I liked the way they both matured in the course of the book. I also loved the way the book turned the typical genre conventions on their heads — that it was the hero, rather than the heroine who was bookish and in need of a makeover, for example, and that he was the virgin and she the one who introduces him to sex.

I did feel that the turnaround in Diana when she decided she preferred Sebastian to Blakeney felt rushed, but I loved what happened as a consequence of that decision and Sebastian’s desire to balance the scales (I don’t want to give it away).

There were times when I wanted a little more darkness to this story, but at other times I enjoyed your deft hand with humor. The different inclinations of the characters — Sebastian’s interest in collecting rare books, Diana’s in fashion, Diana’s sister Minerva’s focus on politics and diplomacy, Diana’s father’s obsession with weighing everyone, and Diana’s mother’s dog-breeding hobby — gave the book warmth and tolerance. The combination of quirky eccentricities with humor reminded me a bit of some of Amanda Quick’s historical romances.

When I finished this book, I was glad I’d hunted for it and stuck with it through the slow beginning. I’m now interested in reading more of your work in the future. B for The Dangerous Viscount.

Sincerely,

Janine

Book Link | Kindle | Amazon | nook | BN | Borders
| Sony| BooksonBoard

Related posts:

1. My First Sale by Miranda Neville
2. REVIEW: The Viscount’s Kiss by Margaret Moore
3. REVIEW: Viscount Vagabond by Loretta Chase

I am a sucker for survivor stories. I think it is because one never knows how one will act in really terrible situations but you hope you will be one of those that will bravely pick themselves up and move on.   Or maybe one knows that you will be a wallower but it’s still nice to read about the courageous people?   Or maybe no one really likes a wallower and thus writers avoid them?   Age old questions with no answers.

Anyhew, Ellie Bond lost her husband and her daughter in a terrible car wreck that left Ellie with a broken heart and a head injury.   Ellie is high functioning but she has significant memory loss. She cannot recall people’s names or even the name of a particular kind of coffee.

She calls a friend of hers, Charlotte maxwell, who runs a staffing agency providing the wealthy with domestic help from chauffeurs to cooks and nannies. Ellie is a great cook but Charlotte is uncertain.   Finally, (after Ellie plays the pity card – she’s not above playing dirty here) Charlotte agrees.   Ellie simply has to get away from her town, her memories, her loss.

“Sometimes it felt as if she were inhabiting the body of a stranger, and she could feel her old self staring over her shoulder, noticing the things she couldn’t do any more, raising her eyebrows at the mood swings and the clumsiness.”

Charlotte gets her cousin, Mark Wilder, to agree to take Ellie on as housekeeper/chef.   Wilder is a manager of music stars and Charlotte promises Ellie that Mark spends most of his time away from home traveling with his clients, going to award shows, and making deals abroad.

Mark was had a bad penchant of picking up strays, waifs, women who are fragile, and helping them along.   But once they were healthy and not needy, they left him.   It fits with his chosen vocation as a manager. He finds unknown artists and launches them.   In his personal life, he is determined to stay away from the needy ones.   Ellie seemed like one of those needy women and he wasn’t going to fall for her no matter how attractive she was.

When Ellie first meets Mark in person, she feels a surge of sexual attraction.   He was amazingly handsome and charismatic in person.   Thankfully Ellie remembers her doctors telling her that her sex drive could be affected by her brain injury and thus Ellie can chalk up her unwanted physical response to that pesky head injury.   ”It was just her stupid neurons getting themselves in knots because of the damage they’d suffered.   What a relief!”

Of course, it is not her head injury.   It’s just a convenient excuse, one that Ellie can use to rationalize away her response.

I didn’t think that Mark’s past relationship with needy women, particularly his ex wife, really fit the analogy that was being drawn. Helena didn’t leave Mark because he wouldn’t cater to her but that he wasn’t rich enough to cater to her in the manner she wanted.   That’s less about helping someone on their feet and having them leave you. So I thought that wasn’t a well played out comparison.

But I liked the idea that Mark is the one who is always trying to help the wounded birds along while getting his fingers nipped at when the birds are ready to fly.   It certainly appeared that Ellie, the head trauma girl, was a wounded bird.   But as Mark and Ellie began spending time with each other, Mark marveled at her strength and resiliency.

(I felt that there could have been a lot more done to draw out Mark’s past negative behavior and shown how he grew as a person from allowing himself to be taken advantage of, determining what it was that he was trying to fill (emotionally that is) and how he changed).

This was a sweet and emotional read that I felt didn’t diminish either the loss nor the second chance at love. B

Best regards,

Jane

| Book Link | Kindle | Housekeeper’s Happy-Ever-After | Nook | BN | Borders |
Fictionwise | Books on Board | Sony

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I don’t think I’ve read any significant number of your novels but I wanted to read a historical. How I Met My Countess blurb promised a reconciled lover story and I thought I would give it a try. I purchased an ecopy.

Miss Lucy Ellyson married Archibald Thatcher, a clerk, who eventually became the Marquess of Standon.   When Archibald died, Lucy became one of three Dowager Marchionesses.   The Standon line of men apparently do not have long lives.   Lucy is initially presented as a socially inept who creates all kinds of havoc, unintentionally.    All three of the Dowagers are young but do not get along.   Lucy, in particular, is the subject of quite a bit of disdain because of her lowly birth.

The current Duchess of Standon decides to place all three Dowagers in her old home and demands that they live together and if they don’t like their situations, they should all remarry.   She leaves them her Bachelor Chronicles. I assume that this all relates to a previous series of books.   Sadly this information is all imparted far into the book such that I found the first chapter to be a complete muddle.

After the first chapter, however, we spend the next third of the book revisiting when Lucy Ellyson first met, and fell in love with,   Justin Grey, Earl of Clifton. This was my favorite part of the book. Lucy Ellyson is the daughter of a premiere spy who was taken out of the game by his age and injury. Now George Ellyson serves as a spy trainer and his home is where agents go for final testing. Ellyson has two daughters, the lively and beautiful Marianna and the quiet beauty Lucy. There is not an agent that moves through that house that doesn’t fall in love with one of the sisters and Justin and his brother, Malcolm, are no different.

Justin, or Gilby, as Malcolm calls him, is an uptight aristocrat who wanted to prove himself worthy of the Clifton title. He had romanticized the work he would be doing for England but comes to realize how truly dangerous this position might be. In his arrogance, Justin thought he would go over to France, do something really wonderful, and come back to England with a distinguished career. In his training at the hands of the Ellysons, he realizes that the work that he volunteered for could end in his death.

"Darby. Was he a good agent?"

Lucy drew a breath to steady herself and nodded. "Yes. One of the best, or so I always thought."

He straightened a bit, his shoulders going taut. "And now?"

"Well, he failed," she said, hating herself to have to say such a thing about the man.

"And what would have made him the best?"

"Coming home," she said, sitting back and looking up into Clifton's eyes, so darkly serious.

Lucy and her sister devote themselves to training Malcolm and Justin as best as they can to ensure that these two agents will be the “best.”

This part of the story shows two people full of their own biases, slowly change and recognize the value in the other. They fall in love, part, but promise to wait for one another. But obviously Lucy did not wait and Gilby took seven years to come back.

The remainder of the book relates the story of the reconciliation. It also sets up the next two books in the series. I really felt the second half struggled to match the tone and quality of the first half. The focus is away from the couple together. Continued conflict relies on misconceptions, a secret baby plotline, and a kind of madcap mystery plot. I really didn’t get much satisfaction from the resolution of the mystery plot either. Too much of the end of the story is spent on the three dowagers, the Bachelor Chronicles, and other superfluous storylines but I did enjoy watching Lucy (Goose) and Gilby fall in love. C+

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased at Amazon (affiliate link), Kindle (which is $1.00 cheapter) (non affiliate link), or other etailers.

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3. REVIEW: The Sinful Life of Lucy Burns by Elizabeth Leiknes

When Submit Wharton married Henry Channing-Downes on her sixteenth birthday, she had no idea what to expect from this scholarly man 43 years older than she. Her father had named her to her purpose in life, but as Submit insightfully notes, he "was not very astute in his choices, merely lucky." And that luck had much more to do with the success of marrying his middle class daughter into society than in molding her personality. For while Submit was, in many ways, Henry’s "creature," she was not shaped into some milquetoast acolyte; rather, Henry pushed and challenged her into intellectual and emotional independence. That she tempered these with deep affection and love for her husband was more her choice than Henry’s, since he never mastered his discomfort with winning a pretty, bright, drastically younger wife.

And Henry is not alone in that; from his first peek at the young widow (he never saw or communicated with her until Henry’s death) Graham cannot make sense of Henry and Submit’s marriage, either, assuming the petite woman bound in yards of black silk must either be little more than an abused child grown sympathetic to her abuser or happily liberated from marriage to an impotent, arrogant, cruel old man. That she refuses both explanations baffles Graham, a man who, at 38, is at his own crossroads. He cannot decide whether he loves his mistress, a married American woman, Rosalyn Schild, who carts her cuckolded husband around like another piece of luggage, and whose audacious, extroverted beauty seeks the glamour of marriage to the Englishman who inspired the barely fictionalized sensation, "The Rake of Ronmoor" serial. A laundress has sued him for paternity of her twins, and despite his innocence, a sensational past has obliterated any convincing defense based on the truth.

While not in full ennui, Graham knows something in his life – he, most likely – must change, and that change occurs unwanted and unwontedly when Submit Channing-Downs shows up with a box of pornographic drawings featuring a much younger Graham Wessit and a popular actress. Henry’s will has instructed Submit to deliver the box to Graham, and neither is particularly happy about the result. Graham is forced to confront his unresolved feelings toward Henry, his cousin, his erstwhile guardian (Graham’s parents died tragically when he was eight), and a man who so deeply disapproved of Graham’s excesses that he did not protest when Graham was thrown out of Cambridge, prosecuted criminally, sentenced to prison, and then to the pillory for those pictures. That Graham was likely unconstitutionally capable of conforming to Henry’s expectations did not matter to either; Graham secretly wanted approval and Henry openly wanted obedience, and for years the two remained estranged.

The pictures, then, borne by Henry’s arresting young widow, seem both a punishment and a perverse opportunity. For Graham, there is one more chance to get back at Henry for being such an unforgiving son of a bitch. While Submit carries with her a small hope that Graham might help her in defending Henry’s will, which he wrote by hand in the service of excluding his only, illegitimate son, William, who is determined to win both title and property. William has already had Submit evicted from Motmarche and tied up the estate assets, leaving Submit with little money and even fewer public advocates. Graham, who has been half-heartedly lending William money, finds Submit’s independence and her isolation surprisingly appealing, even as he suffers embarrassment and anger over the "gift" from Henry of his scandalous past, hand-delivered by yet one more symbol of Henry’s superiority.

To say that Graham and Submit are befuddled and fascinated by each other is an understatement. From the beginning there is a force between them that belies their superficial differences, electrified by Graham’s antagonism toward Henry and Submit’s shock at the drawings (of course she peeked in the box!) and bafflement at Henry’s motives in sending her to Graham with them. Indeed, Henry’s presence dominates Submit and Graham’s relationship for much of the novel, by turns as judge, benefactor, antagonist, and primogenitor. At some points he seems a substantive presence in Submit and Graham’s tentative friendship, as Submit clings to his memory for support and Graham strives to re-direct Submit’s romantic interest to himself.

The extent to which Henry brings Submit and Graham together and the extent to which he keeps them at odds seem roughly equal. Graham wants so much to understand this woman who some liken to a crow (or in William’s case, to a spider), because "whatever it was about her that attracted, it was subtle." Like the way she can acknowledge Graham’s magnetism without being drawn too close to a man who dressed "as if he wanted not merely to bowl a person over but knock her down with his good looks." She disapproves of his experimentation with fireworks, while he disapproves of her unremittingly black wardrobe and dutiful mourning affect. And while both are at loose ends, emotionally, neither can find a safe harbor in the other’s company. In short, Graham and Submit rattle each other in profound ways. Submit is not interested in the trappings of Graham’s superficial bounty, while Graham is pruriently interested in what lies inside Submit’s dress, as well as her mind and heart. Graham is smarter and more insightful than he appears, while Submit is more rebellious and romantic than she appears. It is on some level chemistry – like the friction igniting Graham’s fireworks – that makes their attraction so frustrating and so irresistible:

“You are devastating,” he said honestly. Her skin, he realized, was flawlessly smooth, something a man wanted to touch. What she was was tactile. She had a fine, gold down along her cheek. He watched her mouth, waiting for it to open, thinking of the teeth that overlapped in front. He ran his tongue along the back of his own.

"Don’t do this," she said.

"Do what?"

"Pretend I’m your sort." Her eyes slid to him rather meanly. "Or you mine."

"I don’t have a sort."

"Of course you do."

"Which is?"

"Laughing, pretty women." A pause. "Mrs. Schild."

He made a disgusted sound. "So I am the dark and morose fellow with a penchant for trivial women."

"Mrs. Schild is not trivial."

He made a glum twist to his mouth. “You were meant to deny the whole description.”

He rolled out flat on his back.

In many ways, Black Silk is an elaborate strip tease, as these two characters slowly peel away their own and each other’s layers. And for much of the book, their budding friendship is quite chaste, which is ironic considering it is built quite solidly on a foundation of profanity, heretical disobedience, and impure desires. Yet there is an honesty in their evolving closeness that is disorienting enough to make them more and more visible, and therefore vulnerable, to each other. And over time that shared vulnerability begins to replace Henry’s ghostly imposition.

Henry’s importance, though, is not extinguished in Submit and Graham’s eventual union; in fact, it is the mystery of Henry’s motives that endures beyond the book’s conclusion. The aura of prurience surrounding his relationships with both Submit and Graham is not completely dissipated, either, although I would argue that it is transmuted by the authentic compatibility between Graham and Submit, as well as the prospect of their deep and lasting happiness together. And in that there might be a clue as to what Henry still has to offer these two people so powerfully shaped – positively and negatively – by what the world seems to expect of them.

Graham was confounded to remember Henry that week and his damned philosophical approach to life as he made what Henry would have called “Kierkegaard’s leap of faith.” To survive, all mortals had to trust in someone, something, Henry claimed. Though, unlike his friend Kierkegaard, Henry was not a God-trusting man; he made the leap of faith in himself-’as if he were God. In any event, for Graham it was an unsettling leap. He didn’t truly trust Tate, or Fate or Life, or even Henry or himself, for that matter.

In (simplified) Kierkegaardian terms, without that leap of faith, a person grows a hole inside that he tries to fill with various God substitutes. Thus grows his spiritual "despair," his distance from God and from peace, which creates unhappiness and dissatisfaction and can drive a person to curse and rebel against God (as Henry admitted on his deathbed he had done). So here are Graham and Submit – one of whom has so many friends and virtually no one he can trust, while the other has lost the one person she could trust, leaving her virtually friendless and homeless – feeling contradictorily attracted to someone who represents everything they distrust.

What does Henry’s refusal to take that leap of faith mean for two people Henry brought together in such a strange way? For Graham, "[a]ll his life, it had been perhaps simply this: Not wanting to be different from Henry so much as wanting all he had in common with Henry to total a different sum-’a happy existence." Submit, who had been happy with Henry, found in his death the fear that “[w]ithout him, it seemed a part of her grew dark, as if a light had been turned out, an aspect of her never to be fully known and loved again.”

There are many enmeshed images in Ivory’s novel and symbols accumulate quickly and plentifully: the black silk of Submit’s dresses and the black satin lining the notorious box of pictures; the ambiguities created by Henry’s obsessive will and the complexities among Submit, Graham, and William’s interconnectedness; Darwin’s theories and the question of whether Submit and Graham can adapt and evolve beyond their incomplete selves. Black Silk is intellectually rich and infused with a variety of philosophical and scientific principles and theories. It is a dense book, a difficult book, at times.

But for me, its brilliance lies in that powerful image of Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, which is echoed and reflected in the balanced fulfillment that Graham and Submit’s relationship ultimately represents:

“Submit, listen to me. There are probably good reasons why we shouldn’t be together. But the overriding fact is I love you, and you love me-’you need me. I can keep your life from becoming hopelessly earthbound. And I need you, as sure as leaps in the air need gravity.”

The leap of faith Submit and Graham take is not essentially spiritual, although it certainly transcends anything they had previously experienced. And unlike Henry, who could never accept his own happiness with uncomplicated contentment, Graham and Submit have the opportunity to combine their very opposite, elemental characteristics such that their leap is one to faith in love – their own and each other’s – to joy and acceptance and the trust that comes from the interdependence of two unique and independent individuals. In this, I find Black Silk’s superlative (A+) genius, along with my own joy in knowing that the faith I place in the world Ivory creates is unquestionably a leap worth taking.

This book can be purchased in used mass market paperback. Avon also re-released the book in a nice trade paperback format which you can buy new or you can buy in ebook format from Sony or other etailers.

This book was provided to the reviewer by either the author or publisher. The reviewer did not pay for this book but received it free. The Amazon Affiliate link earns us a 6-7% affiliate fee if you purchase a book through the link (or anything for that matter) and the Sony link is in conjunction with the sponsorship deal we made for the year of 2009. We do not earn an affiliate fee from Sony through the book link.

Related posts:

1. DUAL REFLECTIONS, PART 1: Black Silk by Judith Ivory (Judy Cuevas)
2. REVIEW: The Serpent Garden by Judith Merkle Riley
3. DUELING REVIEW: Black Ice by Anne Stuart

When I first read the book in 2001, I fell in love with it from its earliest pages. Therefore, this time, I approached the prospect of rereading it with both excitement and trepidation. How could a novel possibly be so satisfying a second time? Yet how could a book that had transported me to such heights fail to enchant me again?

The storyline of Black Silk centers, to some degree, on Graham Wessit, the thirty-eight year old earl of Netham, and on Submit Channing-Downes, the twenty-eight year old widow of Graham’s cousin Henry, the Marquess of Motmarche.

Although we only get to see him in Graham and Submit’s memories, the deceased Henry plays a significant role in the book from early on, when his will sends his widow, Submit, to present Graham with a small bequest.

Henry’s death has left behind not only a venerable Marquessate and a wealth of unentailed properties whose possession has now become a bone of contention between Henry’s widow and his illegitimate son William, but also a small, mysterious black lacquer box whose contents call into question everything Submit thought she knew about her husband.

Submit was fifteen when she met Henry and sixteen when they married. Her father, a commoner who made his fortune from a butchering business, wanted very badly for Submit to marry into the nobility, and Submit was, if not exactly true to her name and submissive, then more than willing to make a social success of herself. Henry’s interest in her was wholly welcome to Submit, although her husband was forty-three years her senior.

For twelve years, Submit and Henry had a happy marriage, and their contentment with each other was as satisfying to them as it was incomprehensible to others. Since the marriage began with Submit sixteen to Henry’s fifty-nine, for all that Submit viewed Henry as a husband, not a father, he still had a significant role in shaping her character, her tastes, and her outlook on life.

After opening the box, Submit begins to wonder if there was another dimension to Henry, one she did not know about. She attempts to deliver the box to Graham, a cousin of Henry’s whom she has never before met, hoping that he will have an explanation of its contents -’ one that will enable her to continue to view Henry with the same admiration she has always felt for him.

But Graham is not interested in admiring Henry, and he himself is also a study in contradictions. He has many flaws, as Submit and society see it. For one thing, he is often embroiled in one scandal or another, a state of affairs that began when he was a young boy and his father shot and killed his mother (since Graham had been raised by nannies, this did not damage him as deeply as it might have otherwise).

The latest of these scandals is the pregnant girl who descends on Graham at his club in the first chapter, a laundress carrying twins she falsely accuses him of fathering. It hardly matters to anyone but Graham that he is innocent of these charges, since he is guilty of much else. Even his friends accept the pregnant girl’s word without giving the matter much thought, causing Graham to alternately nurse wounded feelings and ponder all that he may have, wittingly or unwittingly, done to bring about this circumstance.

Then there is the childlike joy Graham apparently takes in everything from extravagant house parties to his very married mistress, Rosalyn Schild. Rosalyn is popular, vivacious, and American, and Graham tries to be in love with her. But the affection Rosalyn inspires in so many people doesn’t add up to the solid commitment from Graham which Rosalyn craves and Graham thinks she probably deserves.

Into this situation comes Submit, bearing what Graham recognizes as Pandett’s Box, a container he would no more open than he would “a box full of adders.” Somehow, Submit’s presence turns into an invitation from Rosalyn to visit in her home, and Submit, who is staying at a very modest inn on a limited income while the court debates whether Henry was of sound mind when he left her the bulk of his estate, accepts the invitation.

Submit hopes to pin down Graham on the subject of Henry and the box, or at least, get him to take the troublesome container off her hands. But the Henry Graham describes is not the Henry Submit knew and loved. Although he took Graham into his home as a child, Henry’s attempts to discipline Graham met with resistance, and Graham’s view of his cousin and former guardian is far more critical than Submit’s.

Graham unsettles Submit, not just because he makes it difficult for her to enshrine her memories of her husband, but because of his seemingly capricious enthusiasm for things like fireworks and photography, his disturbing self-awareness when it comes to his notoriety and leading man looks, and most of all, the way he defies easy categorization.

For his part, Graham also finds Submit difficult to catalogue. She and her relationship with Henry are two enigmas, puzzles he can’t seem to solve. She is not what Graham thinks of as Henry’s type — and yet she was Henry’s wife, in every sense of the word. Submit’s presence in Rosalyn’s home causes Graham to begin to reexamine Henry, and Henry’s motives in sending Submit to personally deliver Pandetti’s Box.

If these two people aren’t complex enough, the other characters are also multifaceted. Henry, Rosalyn, William, and the pregnant girl I have already mentioned. There are also Arnold Tate, the Queen’s Counsel who represents Submit in her lawsuit and Graham in a paternity suit the pregnant laundress brings against him; Gerald Schild, Rosalyn’s faintly pathetic but also faintly heroic cuckolded husband; and an interesting former lover of Graham’s named Peg.

Will Graham win his paternity suit and clear his name? Will Submit win her own suit and become the wealthiest widow in England? Will William overcome the obstacle his illegitimate birth presents to the courts and become the next Marquess of Motmarche? Will Rosalyn ever come to care that her husband Gerald still loves her, or will she keep pining for marriage with Graham? Will anyone ever understand Henry’s mind, heart and his will (in both meanings of that word)? And who is writing The Rake of Ronmoor, a serial based on the thinly-disguised love life of one Graham Wessit? Most importantly, will Graham and Submit ever realize how marvelously well-suited they are for each other, despite their oppositions; how well they fit together regardless, or perhaps even because of, all their contradictions, ambiguities and sharp angles?

These are the questions at the heart of Black Silk, which is surely, from a literary perspective, one of the most accomplished novels in the genre.

I have to acknowledge that I have never had such a difficult time writing a review as I have with this one, for three reasons: (A) I was afraid I would fail to do justice to the many marvels of this book, (B) there is so much material to talk about in Black Silk that I feel I am in danger of writing a book about it, rather than a review of it, and (C) as badly as I wanted to enjoy this book unreservedly once more, the truth is that this time, I do have reservations.

Ivory plumbs her characters to an astonishing depth, and lets us see each one through the multiple perspectives of other people who are both blind to some aspects and keenly perceptive of others. She can also make me forgive almost anything — even Henry, whom I might normally view as a child molester, becomes a human being worthy of attention and sympathy.

If there is a more insightful author in the genre I don’t know who it is, and she is also a wordsmith of the first order. Her prose is like Graham: playful and celebratory. It has the richness of white chocolate mousse, and it is also filled with joie de vivre and generosity. She has a love for human foible and for every physical sense, and reading her, I feel as though she wants to fling her arms around the whole of creation itself.

The first time I read the book, I was enthralled from the very first pages, and so deeply absorbed in the many rich and subtle shadings of the characters, and in the beauty of the words themselves, that it didn’t even occur to me to think of this book as slow-paced. I remember shrugging when others complained that it crawled for them.

This time, though, I was really daunted by its length (I estimate it is about one and a half times as long as today’s single title romances) and it took me about forty percent of the book to get absorbed in the story. Oddly, it was the description of Henry’s courtship of the teenaged Submit that drew my attention more successfully than the beginnings of Graham and Submit’s relationship. But even after this point in the story, I could only read several pages at a time because there was so much to take in on each page, and the end result was that I took a full month to finish reading the book.

You know the line in Richard III, where he calls out “My kingdom for a horse!” This book is stunning, superlative, but for much of the time I was reading it, I felt I would have given a kingdom for a little more narrative drive, something to make me turn the pages- not fast, exactly, but faster.

If I had to try to verbalize what I feel, is that I wish Ivory had done more distilling. The novel lacked potency for me. There were layers upon layers of characterization, of symbolism, of subtleties, and there were linguistic pyrotechnics to equal Graham’s fireworks, but it was like something essential got lost, or tangled up, in all those layers, and eclipsed by those verbal shooting stars.

The book felt like a complex, elaborate, beautifully wrought intellectual exercise. The blood-pumping heart of the story seemed to me, this time, to be buried under layers and layers of cerebral fat. I could see that Graham and Submit were perfect for one another, but I wanted to feel a deep, irreversible connection between them. I wanted my heart to beat faster at the thought of these two people connecting.

I don’t know if it’s intellectual laziness on my part — I hope it isn’t — but when I read, I want to feel the characters are exposed to me, laid bare, in all their painful vulnerability and hearts full of yearning. Here, I just didn’t get enough of that. I got everything else about these characters, detail upon detail, but not enough of their deep, vulnerable cores. It’s like the story was as encumbered as Submit in her hoops; it couldn’t take off and run.

I felt as if there was a glass wall between me and the characters and I can’t really say why it was there this time but not the first time I read Black Silk. I can say that it makes me very very sad that I felt that way. I’m not sure if it’s a lack in the book, or a lack in me.

And so, grading the book is as difficult as writing about it. I now view Black Silk as a flawed but brilliant book; and whereas eight years ago I would have had nothing but praise for it, and given it an A+++, I will now add a word of caution for readers to be patient with it, and lower my grade to an A. Because even with all my reservations, I can’t give it less than that.

This book can be purchased in used mass market paperback. Avon also re-released the book in a nice trade paperback format which you can buy new or you can buy in ebook format from Sony or other etailers.

This book was provided to the reviewer by either the author or publisher. The reviewer did not pay for this book but received it free. The Amazon Affiliate link earns us a 6-7% affiliate fee if you purchase a book through the link (or anything for that matter) and the Sony link is in conjunction with the sponsorship deal we made for the year of 2009. We do not earn an affiliate fee from Sony through the book link.

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I think this might be your most emotional romance yet.   I certainly felt a little misty eyed (damn you) at the end of the story.   Hannah Napier and Joe Lawson meet under inauspicious circumstances. Joe is exhausted and all he can hear is the loud sound of an engine next door. It’s keeping him from enjoying some solitude and it’s bound to wake his kids.   Hannah is working on her motorcycle.   Once it’s finished, Hannah is going on a long awaited road trip, escaping her ex fiancé  and her sister who have found love together.   She thinks Joe is good looking but a jerk and Joe, well, he doesn’t appreciate Hannah’s physical attraction either.

Joe lost his wife, Beth, in a car accident a couple of years ago and he is left to parent their two children.   He feels like he is losing control over his kids. He does not want to be  over his deceased wife Beth. He resents his body’s attraction to Hannah.

Worsening the situation is that the one place where Hannah felt safe, a bar/restaurant called The Watering Hole, has been purchased by Joe. It was Beth’s dream to own a restaurant and when she died and he found himself needing to be with his kids, he quit his job as troubleshooter on oil rigs and bought this restaurant.   I found the scenes about and in the restaurant to be unnecessary. It seemed contrived that Joe would buy the one place that Hannah enjoyed hanging out.   Given that they lived next door to each other, I wasn’t sure why this was even included. It didn’t add anything to the conflict and after a couple scenes, the bar was almost forgotten.

These are two reluctant lovers. Hannah hasn’t really recovered from the body blow to her heart and ego when her fiancé  jilted her for her sister. Joe is trying to reconcile his love for Beth and his feelings for Hannah.   Hannah is so much one of the guys that the holding of the door open for her is something that gives her pause. She feels completely out of here element. Their first date is a study in awkwardness.   Problematically, Hannah is getting near completion of her bike and  Joe can hardly bring himself to talk about the wife’s death without choking up.

They both acknowledge that they are too screwed up to be dating and from then on, the flirting, the talking, the companionship comes easier and harder. Easier because there is no pressure and harder because neither are ready to expose themselves to vulnerability by admitting that there might be a future for them.

It was really wonderful watching the two of them fall in love and it was heartbreaking to see them face difficult challenges. This was a very emotional book and I admit to feeling a tiny bit manipulated at the end.   I kept thinking that they had both already suffered and now you were laying this on top of it???

Ben and Ruby were very conflicted about their dad dating, as were Hannah’s mother and Joe’s mother. Everyone seemed to question Joe and Hannah together. I liked it when Joe responded to his mother’s request that Ben come stay with her:   ”No. We’re a family. He can’t opt out when it suits him. We have to work this through.”   There weren’t easy solutions for any of them although Ben’s resentment over Hannah’s inclusion in their lives resolved rather quickly toward the end.

I loved Hannah and the way that she grew back into believing in herself with the help of Joe and Ruby and even Ben.   And Joe as the struggling single father falling back in love was sweet.   B

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased at eHarlequin.com or in ebook format from Sony or other etailers.

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I don’t think I’ve read a Blaze Historical before (and I’m not even sure what a Blaze Historical is). I’ll admit that I passed over this book initially when I was perusing the eHarlequin ebook website because the blurb which included a reference to Prince of Wales and I am always nervous about the incorporation of Very Famous People in books. But! I am so glad that I did get this as an ARC because I actually thought the book was great and I wouldn’t have read it had it not been sent to me.

Mariah Eller is a widow whose sole inheritance from her deceased husband is the Eller-Stapleton Inn. One evening she is called to the Inn because several wealthy gentlemen were about to smash out the windows, molest her serving girl, and generally destroy the inn. Worse, because the so called gentlemen have signed her register under fake names (Jack Sprat, Jack B Nimble, Union Jack, Jack A. Dandy, Jack Ketch, Jack O. Lantern), she can’t even hold them responsible if they do wreak havoc. Her only choice is to lull them into a drunken stupor. Upon arriving in the inn’s public room armed with her wits, a fiddler, and a lot of liquor, Mariah recognizes that one of her “guests” is Bertie, Prince of Wales. Mariah does her job well enough, flirting with six men and ostensibly drinking them all under the table that she catches the interest of Bertie.

The Prince of Wales dispatches Jack B. Nimble a.k.a Jack St. Lawrence and Jack O. Lantern, Baron Marchant, to procure the services of Mariah as Bertie’s new mistress. Bertie only engages in liasons with married women so Mariah is presented with the dubious honor of becoming a whore for the prince as well as being given over to some faceless man in marriage. Mariah has few options. As Marchant tells her, “One word from the prince and your thousand-pound loan can be paid and stricken from both ledger and memory. A different word, however, could bring the note due this very day. You are surely clever enough to see the advantage of allying yourself to such power.”

Mariah is clever enough to see she has no choice. Jack has provided her with a list of 4 gentlemen. Mariah insists on meeting all of them and Jack will be her escort. Mariah does not set out to seduce Jack, but the sexual attraction between the two is strong and Jack, well, “She was striking, sensual, self-possessed and had already proven she had as much command over his body as he did.”

But even if Jack where to marry Mariah, there is the problem that Bertie expects Mariah to be delivered to him and he would not be happy with Jack sampling the wares. The St. Lawrence family has always been a friend to the crown and in exchange for services rendered, Jack’s brothers have been able to gain advantageous marriages. Jack is expected to do the same.

There are some drawbacks to the story. Jack is portrayed as a man of science and learning but I felt that this part of his character was underdeveloped. The ending crumbled a bit for me because I didn’t feel like I had enough sense for the type of man Bertie was that would allow for the resolution that occurred. I needed more backstory or worldbuilding as it pertained to Bertie.

Overall, though, Make Me Yours read like a breath of fresh air. I loved Mariah and her embrace of her sexuality. Her husband was a worldly man and awoke in Mariah a passion that she hadn’t known existed. When he died, she missed that physical attention. While Jack is not the aggressor in this story, there is no denying that he has power from simply being a man and this power is well met by Mariah’s own self possession. One of my particularly favorite scenes is when Mariah is purportedly making a list of things that Bertie might like in terms of clothes, scents, and other female accoutrements. It’s a seduction scene of dialogue:

“What do you think–is her more visual or tactile?” When he scowled, she clarified, “Is he a looker or a toucher?” Holding her pencil poised, she appeared thoughtful. “He seemed to like having his hands in my hair.”

“It’s not for me to say,” he bit out, filled with images and indignation.

“I only ask because you are my sole source of information, and it has a direct impact on what sort of garments I buy. Some men like to see a woman’s bounty grandly and brazenly displayed. Others prefer to have to peel away layers of frilly armor to reveal a woman’s intimate secrets.”

A woman’s bounty…frilly armor… intimate secrets…Every word was an incantation conjuring salacious images in his head.
….
“Very well.” She broke the silence and made a note on her pad. “You refuse to discuss the prince’s preferences, so I shall just have to be guided by your own.”

“Mine?” His grip on his walking stick and his jaw both loosened.
…
“As a representative. Most certainly. You hunt together, attend the same functions and admire the same fashionable ladies, do you not? Then what appeals to you must, by all logic, appeal to him.”
….
“So, Jack St. Lawrence–” her voice lowered and lapped around his tensed body in warm, suggestive waves “–in intimate situations, do you prefer to see a woman arrayed in permissive silk lingerie or cinched into stern-boned corsets and twenty-button gloves?”

His teeth ground together. He squeezed his eyes tighter and his whole body tensed. Provocative flashes of nipples veiled by translucent silk and breasts bulging above black satin boning flared in his mind. Punishment indeed. The silk in his vision slid…the corset loosened…blue eyes burned and wine-sweetened lips beckoned…tempting and accusing him. Hypocrite.

I can see this appealing to many historical romance readers and I hope that they don’t miss it because it’s packaged as a category. B

Best regards

Jane

This book can be purchased at Amazon or in ebook format from Sony or other etailers.

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While you have been a long time commenter on Dear Author, I hadn’t picked up one of your books until recently. I kept meaning too but I never saw your name within the lines at Harlequin I usually perused each month. Jayne’s reviews of various Harlequin books has encouraged me to step outside my comfort zone and so when I saw your name, I immediately snapped up the title. I had no idea what to expect.

The Bravo Bachelor must be a continuation of members of the wealthy Bravo family. Gabe Bravo is the fixer. If there are problems or bumps to the furtherance of the Bravo empire, Gabe sallies forth to smooth the way, eliminate the obstacles in such a charming way that the impediment was apologizing for being there in the first place.

Gabe Bravo, however, meets his match in Mary Hofstetter. Mary owns a small patch of land that was willed to her by her now deceased husband. Gabe’s father has determined that this patch of land will be the site of a future Bravo resort. Mary is pregnant, alone, and cash poor but she keeps saying no because her husband wouldn’t have wanted her to sell and she doesn’t really care to sell either.

Gabe is fairly savvy and recognizes that Mary is not going to be open to flattery and affirmation. “He studied her face for a moment, thinking that his job here would be easier if she were a little needier and not quite so smart.” Instead, he tries to show her the beautiful resort, how it will fit into the landscape and how it will provide her and her unborn child with every opportunity:

Here’s what matters," he told her. "Sell that overgrown hundred and twenty acres out there to BravoCorp at the price I’m going to offer you this morning and you’ll be a wealthy woman. You-’and your baby-’will never want for anything for the rest of your lives. You can go to bed and get some rest when I leave because you won’t have to work. Not today. Not ever again."

I’m convinced, but Mary, not so much.

With another soft grunt, she sat a little straighter. "There are worse things than not having a lot of money. And better things than being rich. Things like a place you love to be. Like having good people to care for, who care for you. This ranch is the place I love to be. And as for having to work, well, isn’t that a lot of what life’s about? It’s true I’m pretty beat today, but I like to work, most of the time. And if I sold out to BravoCorp so you could carve the land my husband loved into pricey half-acre lots, well, I’d never forgive myself." The coffeemaker sputtered. She glanced toward the sound.

In just a few paragraphs you showed me that Gabe was really persuasive and that Mary was more interested in her own principles than the easy way out. The reason why this is so valuable is because this is exactly the conflict that plays itself out later in the book. It’s foreshadowing in a quiet but meaningful way making me realize that every scene is the story was carefully chosen to convey a message about the characters and not just filler. I really appreciated that.

Mary goes into labor shortly after Gabe’s presentation and Gabe finds that he cannot leave her alone. Mary’s mother in law was set to take care of her but Mary is delivering early and the mother in law is gone. Gabe’s innate sense of responsibility requires him to stay by Mary’s side through delivery, through her stay in the hospital, and then settling her at home.

The more time that Gabe spends with Mary, the more that he appreciates her good sense and practical and optimistic look on life. As for Mary, it’s hard not to be persuaded that the grass is blue when Gabe is describing it. Mary and Gabe fall into a physical relationship which suits them both until Mary realizes that she has no place in Gabe’s life; that he has a life outside of the ranch and the baby and that he has never invited her into that part and Mary becomes dissatisfied.

It was interesting to watch how Gabe inexorably tries to take over Mary’s life, to mold Mary into the perfect companion for him. He doesn’t do it because he doesn’t respect or care for Mary, he simply does it because it suits him, it makes his life more comfortable. Mary, though, grapples with her principles against the easy way out (see aforementioned introduction of plot conflict FTW!).   She cares a great deal for Gabe but she sees that a continuation of the situation between her and Gabe would result in a loss of self respect, a loss of her own sense of self.

This was a quiet romance but a smart one. I liked both Mary and Gabe. There wasn’t too much of the former Bravo characters. I thought that the relationship progressed naturally and the ultimate point of conflict was very authentic. It certainly encourage me to pick up more Rimmer books in the future. B

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or ebook format from the Sony Store and other etailers (up until April 1, you have to buy the ebook directly from Harlequin).

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Had you not sent Dear Author the ARC of this book for review, the cheesy cover, hackneyed title, and curious cover quote from Eloisa James – “So hot the pages smoke . . . ” – would have thoroughly deterred me from picking it up on my own. Which would have been a shame, as A Rake’s Guide to Pleasure is a much better book than all of those superficial markers suggest.

Both Emma Jensen and the Duke of Somerhart are in disguise, she as a widow of body, and he as a widower of heart, two incredibly lonely people who are grieving for more losses than they can even let on to themselves. The duke, Hart (or Winterhart, as he is now casually known), has never fully recovered from an early emotional loss, a true fall into love that ended disastrously and with incredible public humiliation. Emma has lost the entirety of her family, including a thoroughly reprobate father and an uncle whom she loved and who provided what little security and happiness she had after her mother’s early death. Left with a very small inheritance, Emma remains for a time with a local family, but ultimately plots to make her fortune in London as the fictitious dowager Lady Denmore (the title that still belongs to a distant relative), free to gamble and play at various games of chance without seeming too scandalous.

Except that Somerhart cannot keep his interested eyes from her, tempting her with a dangerous attraction and attracting the attention of the ton, who take Somerhart’s interest as confirmation that Emma is his latest mistress. Emma is both deeply afraid of and deeply attracted to Hart, afraid that he will remember her from the brief time they met at her father’s home (during one of his famous bacchanaliae) and downright terrified because he calls to her innate sensuality, a characteristic she ruthlessly suppresses because she does not want to be like her father. Hart is equally off balance around Emma, who calls to the innate romantic in him, a part of his personality he has cruelly attempted to dismiss from his character, and which has successfully obeyed his discipline until now. He finds Emma’s spoken resistance to his intention to make her his mistress an irresistible challenge, especially given her apparent disregard of society’s views of women who gamble for high stakes. He does not know that desperation drives Emma far more powerfully than true bravado, and his pursuit of her sexual attention brings them into a tense and tentative friendship – the kind of mutual sparring that draws them inevitably closer even as it is meant to sustain emotional barriers.

All of this may sound quite ordinary for the genre, clichéd, even. And it is to some degree. Through the first few chapters of A Rake’s Guide to Pleasure, I fought the sense that I had already read this book so many times before (and I am sure I was still under the negative thrall of that title, cover, and author quote), persisting more from obligation than enjoyment.

But as Hart and Emma grow closer, and as Emma struggles against several real dangers imposing from her past, my engagement in the book and its characters deepened. I recognized an emotional current under all the formula that buoyed the characters and the conflict, and I resonated with pockets of prose that lifted above the norm. I knew I was reading a different book than I thought I was when I reached this passage:

Emma sighed and let her hand fall away from her body. She was alone as she’d always been, and it would not do to forget it.

Snow blew against her window, a speckling of icy drops, and Emma was drawn toward it. Lights from the rooms below shone across frosted grass. A tree branch sparkled with a thick layer of clear ice. Nothing moved but what the wind blew. Another empty night, and she was tempted again.

She wanted to run down the stairs in her bare feet and sneak out a side door. She wanted that blast of impossible cold, the stinging of her skin. She could walk for miles, she thought, before her body froze into crystals and was picked apart by a gust of wind, scattered into the world like magic. The little pieces of her would float forever, the whole sky would be her home. Everywhere. Nowhere.

All of a sudden I could feel Emma’s loneliness and despair, the sense of emotional isolation that made her more than a stereotypical Romance heroine fighting unmasking, impoverishment, and eventual degradation. Instead she was a woman who was feeling so alone that she was imagining her own annihilation into everything and nothing. At that point in the novel I became focused on Emma in a new way, rooting for her to find the kind of happiness she never contemplated for herself, urging Hart to be the man that she needed. Because as emotionally in control as he always kept himself, and as much as Emma threatened that control, he is downright well-adjusted compared to Emma, and for me, the book’s success depended on him recognizing and understanding that.

Without revealing the turn of events in Hart and Emma’s relationship, I will say that I was pleased with how these two characters moved through the stirrings of their growing relationship. Hart can be a jerk, but he is also smart and – shockingly – he thinks things through, recognizing, if a bit late, that things are not what he initially thought they were. Emma, who feels the need to be punished more acutely than her desire to be loved, is drawn more to Hart when he is cruel to her than when he is kind, as his kindness represents a temptation to that dark sexuality in herself of which Emma is so terrified. And while his cruelty inflames her lust, as well, it allows her to maintain some semblance of emotional independence and determination to hold to her original purpose. And while that purpose may frustrate any chance of romantic happiness for Emma and Hart, it deepens the sense of authenticity in her character, a consistency that allows me to believe that Emma really is determined to tend to her own security and safety, unwilling to fully depend on or trust anyone else. Though I realized the depth of Emma’s unhappiness, I admired the consistency of characterization and the dignity in that for a female character who claims to be determined. How refreshing that she did not magically trust in the power of the romantical penis to make her all better. And while Hart had quite a few stereotypical rakish characteristics, he rises above his type through the exercise of real intelligence – the ability to distinguish between truth and a lie, even if it takes him a little while (again, more realism!). This quality proves crucial, because short of a lot of sappy plot crises or a variety of emotional deus ex machinae, actual intelligence displayed by at least one character is necessary to overcome the emotional stubbornness of two bruised (even broken) hearts.

I want to return for a minute to that cover quote by Eloisa James. While the quote itself makes me sigh in frustration, it is not entirely inaccurate. Or rather, it is true that the more sensual aspects of the book are energized by both emotional and physical intensity. In a genre so familiar with sex and sexuality, I am often bored by the sex scenes in Romance. But here there are some of those pockets of surprising prose to give the same old new emphasis. At one point, for example, Emma’s “sex beat like a sharp, beautiful pulse.” Although I don’t think that phrase makes perfect sense logically, it worked for me emotionally and narratively, especially in conjunction with the next sentence: “Her limbs felt numb and insubstantial, as if she’d burned into nothingness.” That echoing of annihilation, this time in a very different way, still lonely but not alone, and its contrast with that very alive sexual heartbeat, captured all the yearning and frustration of this scene in which Emma watches Hart pleasure himself at her urging. The contest for sexual power between Emma and Hart drives much of their early love play, and it works well to mirror and magnify their various emotional battles (both within themselves and with each other). It is, indeed, hot, but since prurience and its potentially devastating consequences is such a strong theme in the book, that heat takes on an added dimension (ironizing the cover quote even more), both for the characters and the reader.

Although I have focused primarily on Hart and Emma, there is a rather extensive list of secondary characters, some of whom are very intriguing – like the Duke of Lancaster, who offers Emma an authentic friendship, and whose own story will be told next – and some of whom are frankly irritating (Marsh, for example, whose lechery was so one dimensional as to be uninteresting). A young man from Emma’s past, a would-be suitor whose religious zealotry is indistinguishable from madness, has a substantial part to play, although I wished his character had been drawn with more nuance, especially given his importance to the novel’s resolution.   Yet there was also a particularly touching scene in which a young man stands up for Emma when she could have simply been left to the wolves. It was those more thoughtful scenes, along with the stronger aspects of the central relationship, that I enjoyed in A Rake’s Guide to Pleasure, and there were enough of them that I came away feeling that this novel is a solid B. Now I am looking forward to the adventures of the deceptively mysterious Lancaster – and to knowing how he got that impressive scar across his neck.

~Janet

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or Powells. No ebook format.

Related posts:

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3. REVIEW: Pleasure for Pleasure by Eloisa James

Thank you for sending your book to us to read. You may, however, regret this decision if you read the review. I suggest not reading it. Reviews are for readers and in this case, that maxim is doubly true.

Summary of the story is that Lloyd Vance, a detective from Alaska has moved to Lake Barri, Colorado. He meets Courtney Hudson, a widow of 3 years and middle grade author of middle grade bestselling books, at a bar. They hit it off but before a relationship can start, Courtney’s cousin, Pilar, is killed in a hit and run. Lloyd and Courtney must face several impediments to their fledling relationship such as Courtney’s widowhood, Lloyd’s deadbeat father, Courtney’s critical mother, and a slow resolution to the hit and run.

Sadly, the best thing about this book is that I got it for free. The writing simply didn’t suit my taste nor did the characters.

Lloyd and Courtney meet in a bar and after exchanging names, occupations and one spectacularly bad pick up line and decide to go home together and have sex.

"Maybe the stars aligned on this night, and destiny shone down on us to get together."

Courtney and Lloyd "make love" (Courtney’s words not mine) and from this amazing sexual experience, the two feel like there might be the basis for a serious relationship.

I am not against one night stands nor do I believe that the one night stand cannot develop into a meaningful relationship. The problem is that the one night stand comes as a complete surprise and with very little forethought. Why is Courtney going home with this guy she just picked up at a bar. Is she generally like that? Is he generally like that? Courtney was a young widow whose husband died just three years ago. Is that why she is picking up some stranger in the bar?

The story relied on celebrity names for physical characteristics so now I am imagining the hookup between Will Smith and Alicia Keys. Likewise, the writing itself rests on cliche after cliche:

• I think we should also check out the local watering holes
• Like a runaway freight train, neither could possibly change the direction they were headed, blissfully blazing a path to ultimate fulfillment.
• Lloyd took some solace in those words, though the proof was in the pudding,
• But they can’t take the place of your own flesh and blood.
• Their loss can definitely be our gain.
• Their bodies contoured perfectly as the fire between them became an all out inferno.
• We’re two fish out of water, if I’m reading you correctly.

The story that you are telling doesn’t seem consistent with the behavior exhibited by the characters. For example, after the hit and run, Lloyd wonders how this will affect his relationship but then says he is more focused on finding the perpetrator.

"He wasn’t sure how this might impact his relationship with Courtney. Right now Lloyd was more focused on ensuring the hit and run driver was brought into custody to answer for ending a life prematurely."

But for all his focus on the hit and run, it turns back to the relationship.

"I want this case, Steven."

"I’ve already given it to Martinez."

"So reassign it to me."

Steven gazed across the desk at him. "Okay, what aren’t you telling me?"

"I knew the victim-’Pilar Kendall. We hung out a bit when I first got here."

"I see."

"No, you don’t. I just happened to meet her cousin, Courtney, at the club last night. And we made a connection."

"Oh, and so now you feel obligated to make things right by finding this driver and making the arrest?"

"Something like that."

I don’t find that either Courtney nor Lloyd are intentionally unreliable narrators but that is how they appear. Another example is that you want us to buy into the idea that Lloyd is this super great guy and not a player. But looking at his relationship with Courtney’s cousin:

Pilar Kendall. They had gone out on a couple of dates, if you could call them that, but the chemistry just wasn’t there.

to

She was a fun girl, if not someone he could imagine falling for in a serious way.

Or in talking about the death of Courtney’s cousin:

"No, she didn’t." Lloyd bit down on his lip. I hope her death doesn’t come between us.

and

Lloyd met Courtney’s hard eyes. Uh oh, he thought, looks like Pilar’s digging a hole for me even from the grave.

I was frequently confused by the writing as well:

Lloyd realized he had overreacted. Of course they would find the culprit in reasonably short order. The evidence pointed in that direction, even if a person of interest had yet to be identified. Or was he missing something?

They have no eye witnesses but a set of tire tracks, paint scrapings, and broken glass and he thinks that an arrest is in the offing?

Lloyd took some solace in those words, though the proof was in the pudding, as the cliché went. So long as the person remained at large there could be no letting up. If not for his sake, then for Courtney’s.

Again, I don’t understand what this sentence means. What proof is in the pudding? That there was no evidence? Or that the arrest was soon to be made? That they were devoted to finding the killer?

The dialogue is stilted and formal and replete with dialogue tags:

Lloyd: "It must take some real talent to be able to write for today’s kids, many of whom have the attention span of about five seconds at a time."

The sex scenes also contain oddly formal words and also strange descriptions:

"That’s what they all say," she kidded.

"And desirable as hell."

"Is that why your eyes are ballooning?"

"Yes, just as my taste buds are going crazy. I want you."

I have to confess this is the first time that I’ve read about taste buds getting aroused outside an episode of Top Chef. Then there is the strange juxtaposition of different animal species in another sex scene:

They made love lasciviously, experimenting in new, ero!ic, passionate ways and returning to previous tried and true ones, pleasuring each other to dizzying heights.

Courtney’s voice purred as she galloped atop him . .

Purring and galloping? Or the seemingly physically impossible bedroom activities:

The kiss began as nibbling around the outer edges of Lloyd’s mouth before Courtney went for the gusto, sucking on his lower then upper lip, and both at once. She put her tongue inside his mouth and Lloyd took the lead, tasting and sucking it. They gave themselves to each other again with passionate intimacy.

Is it possible to suck on both lips at once? Needless to say, this book was simply not my cup of tea. D

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or Powells or ebook format.

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Of the authors writing historical romance, you are one of my absolute favorites. Not too long ago, I sang the praises of your previous book, The Secret to Seduction, in what is one of the longest, most detailed reviews I have ever written.

After I finished reading that book, I was tremendously excited to share my enthusiasm for it with the world and to try to understand the reasons it had been such a magical reading experience for me. In contrast, after finishing your newest book, The Perils of Pleasure, I find this review far more difficult to approach.

How does one do justice to a book that had all the potential to be sublime, but instead was better than average, good, worth reading, but not quite all that one was hoping for? How do I balance out its weaknesses and its strengths and convey to readers both my frustration that this book fell short of greatness and my hope that they will give it a chance nonetheless? I suppose the place to start is with the plot summary:

Colin Eversea is both a gentleman and a scoundrel. At least half the women in Pennyroyal Green, the village that Colin hails from, are in love with him. And though Colin himself has always thought to marry the beautiful Louisa Porter, he has never let that stop him from dallying with countless others.

But now Colin’s charmed existence has come to an end. Colin is accused of murdering a man who insulted his sister, and the only witness who can prove his innocence has vanished. Colin is sentenced to hang and jailed in Newgate, and he is uncertain who is responsible for what has befallen him. Is it one of the members of the Redmond family, whose feud with Colin’s family goes back centuries, or is it his own older brother Marcus, who is in love with Louisa Porter and who is scheduled to marry her within days of Colin’s execution?

Colin is certain that he doesn’t have long to ponder these questions, but on the day of his execution, he is rescued, blindfolded and then brought to a hiding place where a mysterious woman tells him she will not release him from his bonds.

To Madeleine Greenway, Colin is nothing but a job. Madeleine has been paid to save his life and promised a generous final payment upon delivery of Colin. The final payment will enable Madeleine to purchase a farm in the United States and leave her life in England behind her. Madeleine doesn’t know who the person who paid her is or what that individual plans to do with Colin, and at first she doesn’t care. But when the money is not delivered and instead an attempt Colin foils is made on Madeleine’s life, she reluctantly agrees to let Colin tag along while she tries to figure out why anyone would want her dead.

For much of the rest of the book, Madeleine and Colin have to dodge the soldiers who are on the hunt for Colin and other people who might turn him in for the reward that has been offered for his capture. In the process, the two grow closer as they piece together the clues that will help them discover who tried to kill Madeleine and who arranged for Colin to be arrested for a murder that he did not commit.

And Madeleine and Colin are both torn. For Colin it is a question of whether his resolve to marry Louisa is stronger, or whether his new feelings for Madeline are more powerful. For Madeleine, it is a question of whether she will let Colin charm her and leave her as he has countless others, or whether she will listen to her instincts of self-preservation, which whispers that she could have that farm in America if she turns Colin in for the reward.

The Perils of Pleasure could have been a keeper for me, if it hadn’t been for a few flaws.

First, I felt that the humor and charm which I so love in your writing did not suit the dark subject matter of the book, especially in the first half, which was set in London’s rough neighborhoods and which had the hero cheating death on the gallows and then on the run as a fugitive. While the jokes were occasionally funny, I also felt that they distracted me from the intensity of the situation the characters faced and sapped some of the grittiness that section of the book needed to have.

Second, I felt that there were some inconsistencies in the characters’ backgrounds.

In Colin’s case, I found it difficult to reconcile his rakish past with his powerful determination to stop his own brother’s wedding because he himself was so committed to the idea of marrying Louisa, especially since Louisa herself lacked spark and it was hard to see what would attract both Colin and his brother to her.

In Madeleine’s case, I found it hard to believe that the woman who was clever enough to effect Colin’s rescue with flash bombs and black powder (even if she had to hire others to do that work) would not be able to tell that the gunpowder in her gun was no longer good, or that she would think of turning Colin in for the reward on the one hand yet put her last penny in a child’s shoe on the other.

There are times when contradictions in characters can serve to make them multi-dimensional, but in this book, I felt that the inconsistencies undercut my ability to fully believe in the characters.

Perhaps another reason for that was that in certain ways, Colin and especially Madeleine seemed opaque, since Colin’s motivation for having both commitment to Louisa and a wandering eye was not revealed until the end of the book, and most of Madeleine’s past remained shrouded in mystery until around the halfway point of the story. (Since as as a reader I spent a good portion of the book in Madeleine’s POV, it also began to seem contrived that she did not reference her past in her thoughts for half the book.)

I thought the second half of the book was much stronger than the first. Here, we were given many of the answers to the questions about Madeleine, and learning the truth about her past made her character more whole and complete. This was also the part of the book where Madeline and Colin grew closer and their circumstances improved, so that the charm and humor which had seemed jarring in the book’s first half were more fitting in the second. I enjoyed the second half of the book very much.

I want to mention that The Perils of Pleasure has quite a few strengths. Among them are the unusual plot and setting. I thought the piecing together of the mystery was very well done, and I loved that the book was set in parts of London we don’t often see and featured some unusual side characters.

I also feel that Madeleine’s background was unique in a romance heroine and that she was very intriguing for that reason. Although I wish her past had been revealed earlier on, I really liked her streetwise mindset and her strong sense of self-preservation.

Finally, I love your way with language (metaphors especially); for example, this description of a countess: “She looked like a delicate, provocative little moth.” I really appreciate the fact that you find new and unusual ways to say what it is that you have to say. Even when your plots and characters seem familiar, your words invigorate them.

In this case, plot, heroine and language all felt fresh and new, which is why it is frustrating that the book did not fire me into the stratosphere as a couple of your others have. Perhaps the challenge for authors is one of high expectations. Unfair is it may be, the truth is that the more you blow me away with one book, the harder it becomes for the next book to please me. Despite that, I still enjoyed The Perils of Pleasure, and I believe that other readers will, too. B.

Sincerely,

Janine

This book can be purchased in mass market or ebook format.

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I’ve been eyeing your books for a while and decided to take the plunge with this one. After all it’s short (actually extremely short) and discounted at Fictionwise as it’s new so I figured I didn’t have much to lose. After reading it, I’ll be trying some of your other books.

As I said the novella isn’t long but I feel like I got to really see and know the protagonist, Amelia Sinclair, in that short span of time needed to read it. It’s also got a really good period “feel” to it.

Amelia Sinclair has lived all her life with the decorum expected of a 19th century banker’s wife. She remained faithful to a husband who never loved her, raised three children, and turned away the love of a lifetime. Now widowed at the dawn of a new century and facing her second fifty years, she decides she can no longer deny the love that has burned within her for decades. Can she throw away the only life she has ever known in order to find the only life she has ever wanted?

She’s a woman who’s always done what was expected of her, lived her life as others said she should, raised three children to be proud of and yet a woman who’s lived a lie for decades. For whatever reason (and I didn’t get a sense of what that reason was beyond duty, perhaps) she turned away from a love few people are blessed to know and put her feelings aside. Up until now, when she finally can seek out the man who’s always held her heart. Amelia seems to me to be the kind of woman who dives into her retirement (for surely that is what it really is), wears purple proudly and snaps her fingers at continuing to do what she ought to. I liked her. I think you were correct in writing the book just from Amelia’s point of view – any others would have entailed either lengthening the book or trying to cram too much into it. It’s satisfying just as it is. B

~Jayne

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A while back, Jane reviewed your second novel, What a Gentleman Wants, and gave it a B. After enjoying your debut, What a Woman Needs (a B- for me), I thought I'd give your second book a try. I wish I liked it as much as Jane did, but for me, What a Gentleman Wants wasn't quite as enjoyable as your debut.

The first scene in What a Gentleman Wants introduces twin brothers David and Marcus Reece. Marcus is the Duke of Exeter, while David is merely his heir and scapegrace, ne'er do well brother. When Marcus catches David with a married woman, he sends him to Brighton. It's on his way there that David has a carriage accident in the Hamlet of Middleborough. Because he can't be moved, Hannah Preston, the vicar's widow, takes him into her cottage until his recovery.

During his convalescence, David realizes what an admirable woman Hannah is, hardworking and responsible. Although she is not a member of the nobility, he realizes she is a better person than he, and decides that he can too become a better man, with Hannah as his inspiration and his role model. So David asks Hannah to marry him.

Hannah isn't in love with David, or even attracted to him, but economic constraints are about to force her to move into her father's house, and she does not want her four year old daughter Molly to grow up under his roof. So Hannah agrees to marry David, little realizing that soon afterward he changes his mind.

Under the influence of his friend Percy, David has a brainstorm and decides to do something he hasn't done in years: forge his brother's signature, this time on a marriage license. In this way, Hannah will end up with money when Marcus inevitably pays her off, and David will have a chance to tweak his annoyingly perfect and autocratic brother.

After the marriage ceremony, David brings the unsuspecting Hannah and her daughter to the house of Marcus's mistress and leaves them there. He sends Marcus a letter, a marriage announcement to the Times, and another missive to his stepmother and sister, filled with a tall tale of Marcus and Hannah's whirlwind courtship.

When Marcus discovers what his brother has done he is furious, but he can't bear to break his stepmother and sister's hearts by revealing David's deception, so he makes a deal with the equally infuriated Hannah. If Hannah, who wants no part of Marcus, will remain in London for a month pretending to be his wife and then retire to the country, Marcus will settle a dowry on her daughter, and give Hannah a cottage of her own. Although Hannah has misgivings, she agrees.

It takes over a hundred pages for the book to come to this point, and over forty pages go by before Hannah and Marcus even meet. While I liked the premise, I felt that this was too long for the book to come to this point, and I did not become engaged in the story until a good sixty pages into it.

Part of that was because I was impatient for Hannah and Marcus to begin interacting, and part of it was because I felt that there were some unnecessary explanations of David and Hannah's characters and their feelings in that section of the book. I would have preferred to see these aspects of the characters revealed through actions and gestures, so that I could then infer my own conclusions about the characters. Subtlety engages my imagination in a deeper way, and I wanted more of that in this book, and especially in its early sections. I nearly gave up and stopped reading during that beginning portion of the book.

You have a pleasant voice that I enjoy reading, so I persisted, and once Hannah and Marcus began their masquerade as husband and wife, you did a wonderful job of evoking the unwanted attraction that developed between them. There are some terrific scenes in which Marcus and Hannah are thrust into one another's company, and later, other ones in which they begin to seek reasons to be in each other's sphere. You have a genuine gift for depicting romantic longing, and here I had all the subtlety I could want –" a look here, a touch there, a near kiss, all had me melting.

Unfortunately, this section of the book does not last as long as I wanted it to. While I'm glad that no immature misunderstandings or contrivances got in Hannah and Marcus's way, I'm also disappointed that the question of their love for one another was settled rather quickly, and the book soon detoured into a suspense plot about counterfeiting that didn't feel well-integrated into the story. This then goes on for well over fifty pages.

In the end, I feel that the book is like a sandwich, with its slow beginning and suspense plot ending comprising two rather stale pieces of bread and the middle a delicious and very appetizing gourmet filling that I want a lot more of.

I'm also left with questions about Marcus's stepmother Rosalind's eagerness to welcome a nobody like Hannah into the family and the role of duchess. The reason given is that Marcus refused to ever marry, but that too, doesn't quite ring true to the times, and to his position, without a deeper look into his character than just the mentions of his annoyance at women's pursuit of him. I kept expecting a deft psychological exploration of his motives, like the ones you provided for the main characters in What a Woman Needs, but in this case, there wasn't one.

I enjoyed parts of What a Gentleman Wants very much; others, not so much, and I'm left with a difficult decision as to what grade to give the book. The writing is clearly better than average, but I know I won't reread it, and so, looking once again at our review grade explanation I settle on C+.

Sincerely,

Janine

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I’ve been slowly reading my way through your backlist, and several of your older regencies have found a permanent place on my bookshelf. Among them are Dark Angel, Dancing with Clara, A Christmas Promise and others. Unfortunately, A Certain Magic won’t be joining these books.

A Certain Magic begins when Alice Penhallow, a 29 year old widow, arrives in London from Bath. She has come to London to help her sister in law nurse her children, who are suffering from the measles. Shortly after arriving there Alice meets her former friend and neighbor, Piers Westhaven.

Some of the early conversation between them did not feel natural to me, because Piers and Allie talked about things they already knew, and I felt that they would not have needed to discuss them. For example, there’s this bit:

“Well,” he said, “I wish you had not left home, Allie. I have no reason to spend time at Westhaven Park any longer. First Web dying two years ago and then you purchasing a house in Bath last summer and taking yourself off. It’s deuced lonely at home without either of you.”

“Is it?” she said. “But I did not have a great deal of choice once Web’s cousin decided last year to move into Chandlos after all. The house belonged to him. And I am not complaining. It was the only one of Web’s possessions that did not come to me, and he would have left me that, too, if he could. Oh, I could have taken a house in the village, Piers, but I did not think it fair to stay in the neighborhood. There are those who would have said I had been forced from my own home, and that would not have been fair at all. It was better to move right away.”

Piers, a widower, has recently become the heir to Lord Berringer, and is now expected to remarry. Alice learns from Piers that the widow of an old friend, Lady Margam, has written to him asking him to help her eighteen year old daughter Cassandra make her entrance into society. Piers finds the request amusing and agrees to escort Cassandra to the theater providing that Alice and a gentleman of her acquaintance accompany them. Alice invites Sir Clayton Lansing, a suitor who has pursued her from Bath to London, to join them as well.

Alice is not attracted to Sir Clayton and although Piers admires Cassandra’s curves and her rich and vulgar uncle, he can’t imagine consummating a marriage with her. It is clear that Alice and Piers are much more well suited to one another, but despite that, Piers keeps finding himself offering to escort the shy and overwhelmed Cassandra to other events and places.

This is more or less what happens in the first third of the book, which is the portion that I read, and that’s the reason that I did not read further. Part of the problem is that Cassandra is a character who lacks spark, and she is in many scenes. I am sure that her dullness is intentional, there to show that if Piers married Cassandra she would, as Alice knows, bore Piers silly in short order. But she bored me just as fast.

You do an excellent job of showing that Piers and Alice have a warm rapport with one another, but it was not enough to keep me turning the pages. There are a few glimmers of what could have been some emotional material, but for me, there were not enough of these.

Yes, I learned that Alice had a child who died in his crib, and that Piers lost his wife and infant daughter in childbirth. These events could have been the source of a wealth of angst, but Piers and Alice’s grief and suffering over these deaths were not explored as much as they could have been, at least in the portion of the book that I read.

Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the way through the book, it also becomes clear that Alice has been in love with Piers since she was fourteen. I think if this had been apparent earlier on, I would have been more invested in the outcome of Piers’ courtship, but by the time this information was revealed, I was frustrated with the sedate pace of the story.

I really wanted to love this book, but instead I lost interest in it. There is nothing egregiously bad about it; Piers and Alice seem like nice, likable people, deserving of a happy ending. But they and their situation simply weren’t compelling enough for me, and I did not have the patience the slow pace of the story required. For me, A Certain Magic lacked a certain something, and I give it a DNF.

Sincerely,

Janine

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Marcus Reese, Duke of Exeter, is a pragmatic man. When confronted with the angry husband of his brother’s latest paramour, Reese sets off to find his brother, save his life and his sister’s season from Scandal. It matters not that he has to interrupt a bout of tupping between brother and paramour. He’s also not a fast man. Said paramour murmurs to him that it was a little exciting to her to have him watch them. Exeter is quick to set her down:

“You are sadly mistaken if you think the sight of you riding my brother like a common strumpet was remotely exciting to me,” he said. “I suggest you purge the thought from your head.”

Here was my first clue that this book would not be like all the other historicals I have read. It would not feature a dissolute rake who needs to be redeemed by love. I started getting excited and I was barely a few pages in. Exeter sends David out of town to wait out the scandal that is bound to develop.

David heads off to Middleborough but is injured in an accident. Hannah Preston, the vicar’s widow, takes him into her home and nurses him back to health. David grows to like Hannah and offers her a marriage of convenience. He needs some respectability and Hannah needs the money because with her husband gone, she has little funds to care for herself and her daughter. If she doesn’t accept David’s offer, Hannah will have to go and live with her father who had since remarried and has no need for Hannah. It seems that marriage is her best recourse. But David isn’t really quite ready to be shackled and unbeknowst to Hannah he signs his brother’s name on the marriage license.

Exeter and Hannah’s attempt to extricate themselves from the sham marriage is complicated by Celia, Exeter’ sister, and Rosalind, his mother. Both are incurable romantics and delighted that Exeter has finally married. Even if the marriage doesn’t seem all that appropriate, Celia and Rosalind are determined that this will work. Their clever machinations are misread completely by Exeter which was kind of a treat. He thinks he knows it all, but really doesn’t.

Exeter is a bit removed from his family even though he loves them. He wants everyone including his new and temporary wife to call him Exeter. He doesn’t know the names of his servants. Why should he? He’s Exeter. The vicar’s daughter doesn’t really know anything about the peerage. She never intended to live amongst them. But she begins to the like the trappings of wealth and would miss the silk sheets and garments once the farce of the marriage is over. It’s great to see a haughty man fall and fall he does for the warmth and good heart of Hannah.

The romance is a bit complicated by the fact that Exeter is investigating a counterfeit situation. He’s been drug into it because some of the fake bills have been passed by his brother, either knowingly or unknowingly. This did provide a bit of a suspense to the book to move the story along (although I enjoyed the romance more than the suspense part). However, the action sequence toward the end seemed tacked on and not in keeping with the character development. If the suspense had been better integrated into the story, I would have given it an A. As it is, I enjoyed this story the first time and then the second when I wrote up this letter. B

Best regards,

Jane

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