Uncovering the Merchant’s Secret is a lot more tough-minded than the last two Hobbes novels I’ve read – and a lot darker. It’s also very entertaining, with the most fascinating heroine I’ve read about recently, and is set in a period I’ve not often come across in historical romance. While I didn’t quite feel the…
Powerhouse authors Beatriz Williams, Karen White, and Lauren Willig have teamed up for their third collaboration, a triple timeline story about three women whose lives are inexplicably bound up in the somewhat tragic history of Paris’ Ritz Hotel. The sweeping tale spans fifty years, introducing readers to Aurelie, Daisy, and Babs as they discover who…
I discovered author Delaney Diamond last year with Do Over from her Brooks Family series, a delightful romance between a billionaire heiress and a police officer that garnered Desert Isle Keeper status. While Two Nights in Paris doesn’t rise to that level, it’s another enjoyable look at the wealthy fashion empire run by matriarch Sylvie…
After a few recent forays into contemporary romance, Joanna Chambers returns to historicals and to the city of Edinburgh for her latest novel, Gentleman Wolf, the first in her Capital Wolves Duet. As the title suggests, this is a story with a touch of the paranormal, although the paranormal elements are fairly low-key, so if…
Take magic and romance, mix in the tumult of Paris on the eve of revolution, and you’ll get the historical fiction delight that is Enchantée. Gita Trelease’s début young adult novel is an enchanting romp through the streets of Paris in 1789 in which magic literally winds through the city and through the story. When…
How about a fairy tale where the heroine is the fairy godmother and the prince needs a beautiful gown? Prince Sebastian of Belgium is hiding a secret: he loves wearing gowns, and dreams of donning something more bold and glamorous than his mother’s old castoffs. When he sees a ballgown by seamstress Frances, he immediately…
Shana Galen continues her Scarlet Chronicles series of novels set in the early days of the French Revolution with Taken by the Rake, in which a young Englishwoman – who happens to be a talented forger – working with the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel in order to provide suitably ‘authentic’ documentation for the aristocrats…
All warfare is based on deception. That is what Sun Tzu said in The Art of War. In The Lost Girls of Paris, we learn that deception can carry a high price. New York, 1946. When an accident blocks her usual route to work one morning, Grace Healey is forced to cut through the bustling concourse…
In 2017, Shana Galen published Traitor in Her Arms, part of the Scarlet Chronicles, a series of historical romantic adventures set during the turbulent years of the French Revolution. Now she’s following up with another book in the series – a novella – which precedes Traitor, but which can be read independently and which is…
The Nightingale is a book I’ll hold on to because I enjoyed quite a lot of it. On the other hand, I don’t plan on rereading it very often, because a certain major aspect of the story was fingernails-on-a-chalkboard grating. Too bad I couldn’t have the one without the other. The novel starts with Vianne…