Connie Brockway’s My Dearest Enemy combines two of my favourite things – an enemies-to-lovers romance and a story in which letters play an important part (I do love an epistolary novel!). It’s a gloriously romantic, character-driven story set at the end of the 19th century, in which our hero – a famous explorer – and heroine…
Meredith Duran is one of the finest historical romance authors writing today. Given any storyline or any romance trope, she makes it fresh and new and interesting. The characters’ reactions are never commonplace, the plots are never tired and predictable, and the writing is always to the point and yet lovely at the same time….
K.J. Charles announced a while back that her new Sins of the Cities series of historical romances would feature stories in the mould of Victorian Sensation Fiction: “… channelling my love for Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Dickens in his wilder moods, and the other glorious writers of complicated plots with scandals, secrets and shenanigans…
I find that when we speak of romance, it’s easy to fall into judging a book based on whether or not we think the main characters are nice people with whom we would actually want to spend time. I’ve long admired Meredith Duran’s writing for challenging me on this. She is one of those authors…
The Gentleman’s Madness has an incredibly gripping hook. One of the heroes is in a mental asylum because he’s gay, and the other is an attendant there. I don’t usually read ebooks, but I bought this one (and downloaded the software to access it) because after reading the synopsis, I had to find out what…
Maggie Robinson’s new Cotswold Confidential series is set in the sleepy, picturesque village of Puddling-on-the-Wold which, for the past seventy-odd years, has provided a rather unusual service for the members of the nobility by taking in its wayward sons and daughters and, through a strict and personally tailored régime, rehabilitating them. The hero of Schooling…
Susanne Lord impressed me last year with her début novel, In Search of Scandal, in which she crafted a strongly characterised, well-developed and angsty romance between a couple who were just a bit out of the ordinary. I have therefore been eagerly awaiting her follow-up novel, in which one of the secondary characters picks up…
So, here’s where I make my confession that this is my first book by Ms. Thomas. It’s a literary crime that it took me this long to pick up one of her spellbinding stories, but I’m paying my penance by devouring her back catalogue, I promise. Regarding this work, while I really liked a lot…
This third book in Lillian Marek’s Victorian Adventures series takes place in the small – fictitious – German state of Sigmaringen and is basically a gender-swapped version of Anthony Hope’s classic, The Prisoner of Zenda (which the author acknowledges as her inspiration). In that book, an English gentleman traveller who could be the twin of…
Liam MacKenzie, Lord Ravencroft, is a man of action. When we first meet him, he’s pulling the rotting skeleton of a bawdy woman he once knew out of a bog, a woman the local gossip accuses him of murdering. He has, in response to his father’s cruel teachings, become a soldier for the crown and…