European Historical Romance
She Tempts the Duke
The beautiful and unexpectedly brainy — in the early 1940’s, she designed and patented a sophisticated weapons system, technology is still in use today – actress Hedy Lamarr once said,…
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The Danger of Desire
I can tell you what’s in a book, what I think works, and what doesn’t. It’s much harder to convey the experience of reading that same book. So let me…
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An Affair with Mr. Kennedy
I realized I wasn’t enjoying this Victorian romance when, for the tenth night in a row, I avoided the book. I turned on my Kindle and, instead of opening the…
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The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae
I literarily wended, linguistically traveled, and read with eager purpose, burgeoning desire, and incendiary yearning. Utterly determined — alone and seeking a reviewer’s sweet satiation — engaging my somnolent disbelieving…
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Unraveled
Over a rainy post-holiday weekend, I read – back to back – Courtney Milan’s Turner series. The series comprises three books and a novella and tells the tale, novella excepted,…
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A Lady Awakened
Ms. Grant’s excellent debut should really be titled A Lady and a Gentleman Awakened. Both the heroine, repressed Martha, and the hero, feckless Theo, are, by this novel’s end, alert…
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How the Marquess Was Won
I liked this book. I liked it a lot. And yet…. The truth is, I’ve so loved the last two books in Ms. Long’s Pennyroyal Green series, I Kissed an…
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Desired
At the start of Desired, Tess Darent, the Dowager Marchioness of Darent, in an attempt to elude raiding redcoats searching for radical reformers, ties a sheet about her waist and…
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The Sinner
Alex MacDonald, the Scots hero of Margaret Mallory’s The Sinner, has every attribute one could dream up for the perfect alpha male hero. He’s a “blindingly handsome” golden haired sex…
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A Scottish Love
The beginning of this book is so peculiar, it’s disconcerting. It’s 1859 in Inverness and Shona, the widowed Countess of Morton, so penniless she can barely feed herself, is interviewing…
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To Wed a Wild Lord
Ms. Jeffries’ latest in her Hellions of Halstead Hall series begins inauspiciously with an odd letter to readers from a character in the novel — the grandmother of the hellacious…
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A Beginner’s Guide to Rakes
In Ms. Enoch’s latest, The Beginner’s Guide to Rakes, the first paragraph reads: “Very few things in the world could make Oliver Warren, the Marquis of Haybury, flinch. He could…
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