I’m always wary when I pick up a historical romance, especially a medieval. Am I going to encounter characters who talk, think, and act like they belong in a contemporary or will the author’s slavish devotion to accuracy drive me nuts with too many “thee”‘s and “’tis”‘s? Will there be too much history, even for a history buff like me? I’m happy to report that Ana Seymour avoids all these pitfalls in her latest novel, and she delivers a good story, to boot.

In the time of King John, minor knight Nicholas Hendry returns from the Crusades, only to find chaos. Thinking him dead, his father deeded the family estate to their archenemy, Baron Hawse. Hawse has no intention of giving it back; to add insult to injury, he even wants to marry Nicholas’s mother. As if that weren’t bad enough, the first day he’s home, a woman Nick doesn’t even know spits in his face!

The woman is Beatrice Thibault, sister of the late Flora, Nick’s last lover before he took off for the Holy Land. Flora died giving birth to Nick’s son, and Beatrice is afraid that if he finds out about little Owen, Nick will want to take the boy from her. Such a wastrel and rogue doesn’t deserve the child she’s come to think of as her own. Thus Beatrice tries to hide Owen, but this is easier said than done, and soon enough Nick discovers that he’s a father. He also admits he wants Owen’s aunt as much as anything else, and he sets out to show her he’s not the same man he was four years ago. How he accomplishes that, all the while struggling to get his land back from Baron Hawse, makes for a fun read.

The characters are sympathetic and easily understood and, more important, their behavior fits in with the time period of the story. No twenty-first-century characters walking around in chain mail here, thank goodness. And the dialogue contains just enough of the flavor of medieval speech to convey a sense of the period without pulling the reader out of the story. I wish more authors understood this.

Often, authors fall into the trap of putting a child in the plot, only to have him overwhelm the action or the love story. Happily, that doesn’t happen here. Owen may be the catalyst for drawing Beatrice and Nicholas together, but Seymour deftly keeps him where he belongs, in the background. Even the storyline about Hendry Hall never overtakes the primacy of the relationship between hero and heroine. Really, the only fault I could find in the book was the villain. There were hints that Baron Hawse was a bit more complex than the run-of-the-mill bad guy, but soon enough he devolved into little more than a cartoon character. Other than that, reading this was an enjoyable experience.

As noted above, The Rogue is the second in a series of books, written by three authors, about a group of comrades-in-arms. I liked this one enough to look for last December’s release, The Champion, by Suzanne Barclay, and I’ll keep my eye out for Shari Anton’s The Conqueror, to be released in April. If those two authors do as good a job as Ana Seymour has in I’m always wary when I pick up a historical romance, especially a medieval. Am I going to encounter characters who talk, think, and act like they belong in a contemporary or will the author’s slavish devotion to accuracy drive me nuts with too many “thee”‘s and “’tis”‘s? Will there be too much history, even for a history buff like me? I’m happy to report that Ana Seymour avoids all these pitfalls in her latest novel, and she delivers a good story, to boot.

In the time of King John, minor knight Nicholas Hendry returns from the Crusades, only to find chaos. Thinking him dead, his father deeded the family estate to their archenemy, Baron Hawse. Hawse has no intention of giving it back; to add insult to injury, he even wants to marry Nicholas’s mother. As if that weren’t bad enough, the first day he’s home, a woman Nick doesn’t even know spits in his face!

The woman is Beatrice Thibault, sister of the late Flora, Nick’s last lover before he took off for the Holy Land. Flora died giving birth to Nick’s son, and Beatrice is afraid that if he finds out about little Owen, Nick will want to take the boy from her. Such a wastrel and rogue doesn’t deserve the child she’s come to think of as her own. Thus Beatrice tries to hide Owen, but this is easier said than done, and soon enough Nick discovers that he’s a father. He also admits he wants Owen’s aunt as much as anything else, and he sets out to show her he’s not the same man he was four years ago. How he accomplishes that, all the while struggling to get his land back from Baron Hawse, makes for a fun read.

The characters are sympathetic and easily understood and, more important, their behavior fits in with the time period of the story. No twenty-first-century characters walking around in chain mail here, thank goodness. And the dialogue contains just enough of the flavor of medieval speech to convey a sense of the period without pulling the reader out of the story. I wish more authors understood this.

Often, authors fall into the trap of putting a child in the plot, only to have him overwhelm the action or the love story. Happily, that doesn’t happen here. Owen may be the catalyst for drawing Beatrice and Nicholas together, but Seymour deftly keeps him where he belongs, in the background. Even the storyline about Hendry Hall never overtakes the primacy of the relationship between hero and heroine. Really, the only fault I could find in the book was the villain. There were hints that Baron Hawse was a bit more complex than the run-of-the-mill bad guy, but soon enough he devolved into little more than a cartoon character. Other than that, reading this was an enjoyable experience.

As noted above, The Rogue is the second in a series of books, written by three authors, about a group of comrades-in-arms. I liked this one enough to look for last December’s release, The Champion, by Suzanne Barclay, and I’ll keep my eye out for Shari Anton’s The Conqueror, to be released in April. If those two authors do as good a job as Ana Seymour has in The Rogue, I think I’ll be satisfied, and you probably will be, too.