Valerie Bowman’s The Footman and I is the first in a series where a group of friends – a duke, a marquess, an earl, you get the picture – pretend to be servants. I thought this was an unusual premise that had the potential to be either very good or very bad. Well. It was…
In Marked by Fire, book one in her Sons of Britain series, Mia West has mined Arthurian legends and given them a new slant, so that while the characters are mostly familiar, they don’t always fit the roles we may be used to seeing them in – for instance, Arthur isn’t the son of Uther…
Evie Dunmore’s series about a group of young women activists in late Victorian Britain continues with Hattie’s story, Portrait of a Scotsman. Like the previous two novels in the set, this one is extremely well written and strongly characterised; the lack of agency of well-bred young ladies of the period is again critically examined, and…
In Anne Gracie’s The Scoundrel’s Daughter, Alice Paten was left with debts after her husband, Lord Charlton, died. He lavished his money on his mistress. But Alice has made economies, and at the age of thirty-eight, she’s finally able to relax a little. And then a man shows up, saying he’ll publish her husband’s scandalous…
The blurb for A Blues Singer to Redeem Him, promising a perilous interracial romance between the son of a Mafioso and a blues singer in a Jazz Age speakeasy amid the looming threat of the KKK, earned this title an instant high place on my TBR. Sadly, it failed to live up to my expectations…
The Duke Who Loved Me treads familiar ground for fans of Jane Ashford, though it has excellent momentum and is hopefully the beginning of another great series. James Cantrell has inherited a dukedom, only to discover a mess. His great-uncle, the late duke, had some kind of madness and left his home in a shambles,…
Sarah MacLean opens a new series with a bang in Bombshell. Revisiting characters from previous books – most notably The Day of the Duchess – she finally delivers a love story for Sesily Talbot, the remaining ‘Soiled S’ Talbot sister left unmarried. However Sesily is no retiring spinster. Instead we discover she’s leading a secret…
He’s the battle-hardened son of a bastard, raised in the wilds of New York. She’s the sheltered, blue-blooded darling of the London broadsheets, destined to marry a duke. Their worlds could only collide in a boardinghouse by the London docks…and when they do, the sparks would ignite all of England. Nothing can stop Hugh Cassidy’s…
Julia Justiss’ historicals often read somewhat like trads with a little extra depth to them, so I pulled The Bluestocking Duchess out of my stack and came away quite charmed. The hero and heroine start off on somewhat equal social footing. Jocelyn Sudderfeld is the daughter and sister of scholars who work under the patronage…
Diana Quincy’s The Viscount Made Me Do It boasts an interesting idea for a romance with a smart and strong heroine, a sense of drive and purpose, and an interesting mystery. But the suffers from some overheated prose and clunkiness, which means it misses the DIK shelf by a considerable margin. I would gladly read…