Set on Crete during the days of the Roman Republic, A Noble Captive by Michelle Styles was definitely an unusual historical and largely an enjoyable one as well. Tribune Marcus Livius Tullio is captured on the high seas with his men and brought by pirates to Crete. When the pirates come to pay tribute, Marcus…
A book set in Britain during the time of the Roman Empire, hooray! Widow Livia Valeria’s brother has sold her in marriage yet again. This time, it’s to a young man named Lucius Scaevola, whose gaming debts to her brother are to be forgiven in exchange for his excellent, high-status family connections. When half-Briton Livia…
I picked up Slave Girl, set in the Roman Empire, as part of my ongoing quest to try new settings. The setting was adequately developed, mixing authentic Roman elements with some supernatural Celtic fantasy. The characters were acceptable but not great, and the writing is technically sound. The problem, though, was really in the erotica…
The ancient world could be a pretty brutal place, a reality that gets glossed over only slightly in Surrender to the Roman. While that might put some readers off, I was curious to see what an author would do with a captor/captive romance set in the harsh world of the Roman Empire. I’m glad I…
Since I like to try historicals with unusual settings or characters, Mask of the Gladiator caught my eye as soon as I spied it on the publisher’s website. The dramatic historical events and tensions of Caligula’s Rome could make for quite a story or, as here, it could make for a rather cursory outline of…
I love lots of variety not only in romance, but in historical fiction in general. Lily of the Nile originally caught my eye because of its Egyptian heroine and Roman setting, but the author’s vision of a very faraway time and place kept me reading. Cleopatra Selene is an intelligent narrator and watching her grow…
Sometimes when I read a book, I figure out right away that I’m in for something good. This was the exact feeling I had when I picked up The Gladiator by Carla Capshaw. I found this story of a former gladiator and his Christian slave very well-done; one would never guess it’s a debut novel….
Despite the bare male torso adorning the cover of Sword of Rome, readers will find themselves treated to other than the burning hot wallpaper historical the cover copy would lead one to expect. Indeed, though savvy readers will pick out at least one glaring historical error (and several more minor ones), the author treats readers…
When I first laid eyes on The Roman’s Virgin Mistress, I thought surely the folks at Harlequin Presents had played some kind of practical joke on the Harlequin Historicals line. What’s next? Banging the Baron? Still, I’ve read enough romance to know that the covers and titles are often vastly inferior to the contents of…
Roman Britannia is not an historical period in which I usually dabble, but I so enjoyed Joy Nash’s last two books with that setting that I thought I’d give Liberty a try. I am sorry that I did, for, while historical detail abounds and I learned more about gladiators than I really wanted to know,…