Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

Dear Ms. Stuart,

This was the first book of yours I read and I’m glad I knew ahead of time that your heroes can be fairly dark. It helped me to like Alastair MacAlpin much more than I would have.

He is the famous jewel thief the Cat who steals from the rich, often while a guest at their parties but who also sometimes enters homes via the roof a la Connie Brockway’s All Through the Night. She is an impoverished noblewomen trying to support her mother and sister by doing Tarot readings for the nobility. He sees her at a party and decides to seduce her just for fun while she’s trying to maintain her diginity and find a wealthy husband for her younger sister. She’s been doing some card readings for a sleazy Bow Street Runner to help him nab criminals but he’s started to take too much of an interest in Fleur, the younger sister and is pressing Jessamine to do a reading to tell him who the Cat is. Everything comes to a climax on the night that Alastair decides to do his greatest heist, the last big one before retirement.

Alastair was a deliciously …

Dear Ms. Stuart,

Genevieve Spenser finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time when she arrives on billionaire Harry Van Dorn’s yacht. Harry is not only rich but gorgeous and charming, and his sexiness has gotten People magazine’s stamp of approval. He is known for caring about working conditions in his factories and is meeting with Genevieve to give away oil fields to charity.

Among the staff working for Harry is his practically invisible assistant, Peter Jensen. Peter is meticulous, bland and polite, except when Genevieve catches him casting a disapproving look at her seven hundred dollar shoes. He seems completely sexless and Genevieve thinks of him as “that gray ghost of a man.”

From this description some readers who haven’t read your previous book in this series, Black Ice, might assume that Harry is the hero whom Genevieve will end up with and Peter is just a fly on the wall. The nice thing is that they’d be wrong. Harry, it turns out, is a megalomaniac villain plotting to bring seven worldwide disasters he can profit from. And Peter, a secret assassin sent by a shadowy organization called the …

While I appreciate Ms. Stuart’s forthrightness, I do wonder where the Dixieland Mafia is right now. Miss Snark agrees with them that it is not the best idea to publicly complain about your publishing house. Shouldn’t helpful authors be all over Anne Stuart for committing career suicide? From a reader’s standpoint, I appreciate the forthright comments, but as a businesswoman, I guess I understand where the publisher is coming from.

Dear Ms Stuart,

Some of your books I love and them some of them are like Blue Sage. This was your first book I was disappointed in. It’s a “bad boy” book and if that isn’t shoved down readers’ throats a dozen times in the first chapter the Pope doesn’t wear a beannie.

Charles Tanner, Jr is going back to the small Montana town where 15 years ago his Korean vet father opened fire on the July 4th celebrations and killed 15 people and wounded one. Guess who the one turns out to be. Yep, that’s right. The heroine. He doesn’t expect a kind welcome (remember, he’s the Bad Boy) and acts surly to one and all. With the exception of a few people, he’s treated like poison and acts surlier.

Ellie is the town saint. She survived the massacre and went through years of rehabilitation before marrying the Judge, a man about 40 years her elder, who wanted to be able to leave her all his money. She’s also a 31 year old contrived VIRGIN! Ugh!

Strange stuff starts happening around town. Stuff like the things that happened before Charles’ father went …

Dear Mrs. Stuart,

Boy howdy some of your earlier regencies, gothics and contemporaries sell for a mint. Are they worth it? Well, in this case, yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause and this one is worth the money. It’s a light hearted romp with the proverbial regency characters of a spinster and a rake. Now really, what else should readers expect from the title?

The Spinster, Gillian Redford, is not a bluestocking but rather a woman who’s played nursemaid and housekeeper to her two older sisters and sister-in-law and is fast approaching thirty. Old-maidhood. While traveling back to the London home of her stiff-rumped brother, her carriage runs off the road and she ends up being rescued by The Rake, Ronan Patrick Blakley, the new Marquis of Herrington along with his drunk friend Vivien Peacock. After dropping Gilly off, the two make a wager that Ronan can get Gilly to fall for him within two months. He does but winds
up falling for her at the same time. After a flurry of plot twists, all’s well that ends well between the two plus we get a nice secondary romance for Gilly’s niece and …

Dear Ms. Stuart,

Most of the “A Century of American Romance” books have been winners and your entry for the 1930s, Angel’s Wings, is one of my favorite of your books.

Sophisticated flying ace Angela Hogan lives to fly but is struggling to keep her financially troubled air freight business going. Her major rival is a major slimeball, her fiance recently died trying to do a long distance stunt flight, and her mechanic is a drunk along with one of her pilots. Only a miracle will keep her going and that miracle is an arrogant, cocky war hero flier named Jack Clancy. Clancy likes “blonde, busty babes with bright red bee-stung lips, china-blue eyes and enough intellect to wipe their nose and not much more.” Angela is definitely not his kind of woman.

Angela knows that Clancy is definitely not her kind of man. But he can help keep her going til business picks up and he knows where she can get a reliable mechanic. They settle into an uneasy partnership and everyone else watches the sparks fly.

Angela is cool sophistication and Clancy is beer hall brawler. They both smoke like chimneys …

Dear Mrs Stuart,

I’m glad to see you get back to your nihilistic, “don’t give a shit” heroes but somehow being reminded over and over that Bastien is such a man took some of it away. All right, I wanted to say, I got the picture the first time and you don’t need to tell me again 15 more times. Nor give me any sob story background about his poor childhood with a mommy who doesn’t love him.

And the heroine. What is there to love about this clinging vine? At first I kind of saw her in a Mary Stewart heroine sort of way but MS heroines usually manage to grow and gain strength over the course of the book while Chloe just stays an albatross around Bastien’s neck. You’ve given us plenty of initially cowed heroines who’ve grown