Shana Galen’s Unmask Me if You Can reminded me of The Phantom of the Opera – minus the stalker-ish behavior of the hero, and plus a whole lot of tender romance and tropes I adore. Jasper Grantham, third son of the Marques of Strathern, had once been the most handsome man in all of England,…
Sailing Master Able Six’s odd name reflects his dismal origins: the sixth child abandoned that month at a workhouse orphanage, and too durable to die. His uncanny brain (he remembers absolutely everything he’s ever seen) allows him to become a Royal Navy sailing master, a position never previously attained by a bastard. Now ashore as…
No Earls Allowed is book two in Shana Galen’s Survivors series, and like the first book, Third Son’s a Charm, features one of the men who had belonged to a specialist ‘suicide troop’ formed during the Napoleonic wars. The group consisted originally of thirty, all of them single men, some of them younger sons, some…
In Third Son’s a Charm, Shana Galen introduces us to some of the gentlemen who will feature in stories of their own as her new Survivors series progresses. These men are closer than brothers; they served together during the Napoleonic Wars under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Draven in a unit that was given the…
I’m always interested to see how older titles bear up over time and Lady Cat has a premise I rather like, so it was an easy choice. That premise is one that is also featured in one of my favourite historical romances, Lorraine Heath’s Waking up with the Duke; that of a man who needs…
Beauty Like the Night, the eagerly awaited sixth book in Joanna Bourne’s widely acclaimed Spymaster series, tells the story of Séverine de Cabrillac, whom we first met as a very young child caught up in the revolutionary terror of late eighteenth century Paris in The Forbidden Rose. Ten years after being brought to England by…
Carla Kelly’s The Wedding Journey is the story of a marriage of convenience made during wartime in order to protect the heroine from the threat of being sold off in marriage to pay her father’s debts. In the hands of this author, however, the story is so much more than the story of two people thrust…
Sally Kent’s brother Richard lets the family tradition down when instead of joining the Navy, he escapes to the clergy. So it’s Sally, who’s got the family saltwater blood, who dons midshipman’s blues and sets sail on the Audacious just before Trafalgar. She finds herself under the supervision of Lieutenant David Colyear, an outstanding officer…
Suzanne Enoch has a long line of successful Scottish romances behind her, and this book is a delightful addition to her long backlist. She takes us back to the highlands in her latest set of Scottish-set romances, No Ordinary Hero, the first of which, Hero in the Highlands, features career soldier Gabriel Forrester and land…
Carla Kelly is an auto-buy author for me. She reminds me a little bit of a modern day Jane Austen but with a tad more bite; sweet but with a dose of pepper. I am not sure there is even a mediocre book among her backlist much less a poor one. Her latest novel is…