His Wicked Promise is the literary equivalent of a K-Tel album. It’s not horrible or anything, but it reads like a rehash of the “greatest hits” of several authors. You may not have read this book yet, but you have certainly read most of what’s in it somewhere else before, and more than once. Glenda…
My Lord de Burgh, Deborah Simmons’ fifth in this series of seven brothers, has many things going for it: Stephen, the most handsome of the de Burgh brothers; Brighid, a beautiful, strong-willed heroine; a bit of magic; a bit of mystery; and a sweetly satisfying ending. While this is not the best in the series…
Mothers will do anything to protect their children, and this instinct is at the heart of The Countess. Eglantine de Crevy, married and widowed twice, has responsibility for three girls. There’s her stepdaughter Alienor, her daughter Jacqueline (both from her first marriage), and from her second marriage is baby Esmeraude, distraught and inconsolable now that…
When reading books connected in a series, I’ve noticed a problem with consistency for a lot of authors. One of the books will be wonderful, another merely okay, and another, disappointing. I have not read On Bended Knee, the book connected to this one, but from the review of it, it sounds like it was…
Ach. When will authors learn th’ a wee bit o’ dialect goes a lang, lang wee? Ta try ta read a bluidy book where awl te dialogue is in brogue is nay ‘n easy task, ye ken. And after a wee while, ya jest want ta poot ta book dun and give’t up entirely. Ya…
For fans who yearn for a medieval book in which the characters do historically accurate things like believe in God, Candice Proctor’s The Last Knight could be the answer to a prayer. In a refreshing change of pace, heroine Attica d’Alerion seems to be a product of her times rather than a transplanted Valley girl….
I know an author is really talented when she makes me enjoy a book with a premise that I basically dislike. By Possession is a medieval romance about a knight and a woman who was born a serf, bound to his lands. Though her status as a serf is in question, she spends much of…
I don’t require pinpoint historical accuracy, but I have a hard time getting into a book if people keep doing and saying things that are completely out of character for a period. A 15th-century legendary Robin Hood-like figure with a 1930s radio serial name like the Midnight Shadow? A heroine named Bria, a future noblewoman,…
I have been glomming Ruth Wind/Barbara Samuel for a while. The results have been quite successful, but locating her full-length historicals as written under her real name has been difficult. I searched longest for A Bed of Spices, the book I had been most eager to lay my hands on, since it is one of…
Dark Sapphire, Lisa Jackson’s new medieval romance, has a good sense of its time period and a memorable villain. Sadly, those are the only good things I can say about it. Bland characters and bad writing made this book a chore to finish. Sheena and Keegan met as adolescents when their fathers, who loved the…
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