Widowed Lady Catherine Wodeway comes to town to keep an aunt company, and perhaps find a new companion. On her first week there she meets Max de Rohan, a former policeman and current employee of the home office. Max has a somewhat mysterious past, and a definite desire to avoid an entangling relationship with a…
Beast by Judith Ivory is one of my two all-time favorite romance books and also simply one of the best books I have ever read. When I read books or watch movies, afterwards I have a certain feel for them, a textural sensation. Beast has left me with one of the richest, most voluptuous “feels”…
Let me state that it is difficult to summarize Black Silk without doing it an injustice, because this book, this story, these characters and their interpersonal relations are so unusual, so remarkable, and so complex that the whole is near nigh irreducible. I mean, is it possible to admire the Mona Lisa a square inch…
The Devil’s Bargain was a wonderful surprise. The cover blurb worried me: the alpha-hero-seeking-revenge plot has been done to death. But Edith Layton has taken this clichéd plot element and made it work in a fresh, touching and often funny love story. Sir Alasdair St. Erth has returned to England after several years abroad. He…
I don’t have the difficulty some readers do with fake-royalty stories, especially if they have an historical setting. What I do have difficulty with, however, is unsympathetic characters, and the heroine of Her Highness, My Wife teetered on the verge of almost too unsympathetic for my taste. A very attractive hero and a plot that…
I’ve been a bit worried about European historicals lately. In the past year or so I’ve run across far too many featuring ridiculously contrived cutesy plots, heroines for whom the TSTL designation is unquestionably an understatement, and, of course, that oh-so-familiar cardboard “rake” with the macho nickname. With this book, Karen Hawkins has stepped onto…
George and the Virgin was exactly what I needed to read last weekend. It was fun. It was funny. It had only the teeniest, tiniest, most negligible bit of angst – just enough for character development. It has the honor of being the only book I’ve read for review this year where I did not…
The Suitor by Sandy Hingston starts out as a romp, as Alain Montclair repeatedly attempts – and fails – to catch the attention of an English heiress named Lady Katherine Deveraux. Then, in a surprising twist, the lighthearted tone of the beginning chapters falls away, and the story becomes one of adventure and epic romance….
Being a romance reader in the current publishing climate is not easy. Publishers, like television execs, seem to figure if something is a success then similar books will also be successful. Thus they keep publishing those same things, over and over and over. The thing in this particular case is the Regency-set historical and lately…
New Orleans is an occupied city in 1862, and the locals have no reason to trust the Union military currently in charge. So when a respected Creole doctor, Henri Santerre, is mysteriously murdered while visiting the graves of friends, few expect the murderer to be pursued or caught – especially Emmanuelle de Beauvais, who witnessed…
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