The longest 384 pages of my life. What more is there to say? We start with Lady Elizabeth Hutton, a newly orphaned heiress changing places with her equally beautiful lady’s maid in order to give Elizabeth free roam of her castle while her maid is locked away by the evil Viscount Bannaster. Bannaster covets Elizabeth’s…
Sometimes a love story is so beautifully written that it makes book a pleasure to read; at other times an author draws a setting so vividly and uses secondary characters and plots to create a book that is enjoyable even if the love story has its flaws. The Defiant Mistress, first in the City of…
There will be two types of people reading this book – those who immediately recognize the American theater standard being parodied by the author and get a few chuckles from it, and those who don’t catch the send-up, take everything at face value, and wind up mightily horrified. While the romance contained here is not…
Beloved Stranger is a wonderful cabin romance featuring a hero and heroine who are both thoroughly decent, upstanding people. I’m not the biggest fan of Scots romances (with the exception of the Outlander series), but I love books where the characters are good people trying to do the right thing. Lachlan Maclean is not a…
The Silver Rose is the last book in Susan Carroll’s Sisters of Faire Isle trilogy. It beautifully weaves all the threads left dangling from the first two books into a rich tapestry of magic, history, passion, intrigue, and impossible love. Faire Isle has undergone a drastic change from when we first discovered it. It was…
I turned the last of the 560 pages in the second book of Susan Carroll’s “sweeping” historical trilogy and heaved a big sigh of pleasure. Finally! I thought. Then I debated whether to go back to the beginning and start all over again. I was tempted, but didn’t do it – not right that minute…
If you look carefully at the cover of this book, you’ll notice that the couple in the ridiculous clinch have more vacuous expressions than most. Normally, you can’t judge a book by its cover, but in this case, the vapid pair on the front show you exactly what to expect within. Tarr of Hellewyk is…
Readers in recent years have complained that the rich, interesting historicals of the past are vanishing. As a reader, I certainly have found myself buying fewer books overall as the meaty historicals I loved started to be replaced by and large with homogenized wallpaper comedies. Fortunately, there are still some good and interesting historicals out…
I have one good thing to say about Caitlin Scott-Turner: she does not write wallpaper history. The Queen’s Fencer takes place in the England of Queen Elizabeth I, and Turner has obviously done a great deal of research on that period. So have I, and I find no fault in her portrayal, either in the…
Having never read Donna Fletcher, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Of most interest to me about Dark Warrior was its setting, along with an outside obstacle to the romance: the Church. These draws all too quickly became drawbacks. Church persecution of supposed heretics is much discussed but rarely seen and the setting comes across…