CBR17 Book 33: "These Summer Storms" by Sarah Maclean

Page count: 400 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

CBR17 Book Bingo: Family

Thanks to Random House and Netgalley for this ARC. My opinions are my own. 

Alice Storm hasn't had any contact with her family for five years, since she went public with some unsavoury company secrets and her father disowned her. Now her larger-than-life father, Franklin Storm, is dead, and she has to return to the family's private island off Rhode Island to pay her respects. She isn't planning on staying past the funeral, but it seems even in death, Franklin is determined to control his family.

He has left his widow and Alice's three siblings letters with specific instructions. They all have to stay on the island for a week, performing the various tasks and challenges, or neither of them will inherit anything at all. Alice doesn't get a letter and is quite happy not to inherit a cent, but is told in no uncertain terms that if she leaves before the week is over, neither of her siblings (or her mother) will inherit anything at all. Now, she has no choice but to stay on Storm Island with what remains of her deeply dysfunctional family, with the stern and worryingly attractive Jack Dean, her father's right-hand man (who she had a one-night stand with before she discovered who he really was). 

It becomes very obvious that in the five years Alice has been cut off from her family, a lot of things have changed, but far too many things have seemingly stayed the same. Along with Alice, her mother Elizabeth, her brother Sam and her sisters Greta and Emily, there are also Sam's children, his greedy wife (who everyone hates) and Emily's wife (who seems to be everyone's favourite, and the only one who seems entirely unfazed by the terribly family dynamics playing out over the course of the week. 

While Sarah Maclean usually writes historical romance (many of which I have really enjoyed in the past), this seems to be her debut in contemporary fiction. There is a strong romantic subplot in the novel, but while Alice and Jack and their developing relationship is a compelling story, the heft of the novel is about the four Storm siblings, their mother Elizabeth having a final reckoning, grieving their father and eventually revealing deeply buried secrets which will change everything for them going forward.

There are some pretty strong Succession vibes to this story, and I'm sure Franklin Storm and Logan Roy would have gotten on like a house on fire (or tried to kill each other, it could go either way). Neither of the Storm siblings, nor their in-laws (with the exception of Sam's wife, she's odious), are as absolutely deplorable as the Roy siblings (or their spouses). I found Maclean's cast of characters very compelling, however, and while Alice has the main POV in the story, each of her siblings gets their own chapter, giving the reader more insight into each of them.

While there are twists and turns and several long-buried secrets coming to light in the novel, I'm not sure the point is for the reader to view this as a mystery. Knives Out, this ain't. Some of the reveals seem quite obvious, while others were fun surprises. This book may not work for everyone (just as her romances don't), but I really enjoyed Maclean's first foray into contemporary fiction and would love to read more from her in the future (although I really do want the fourth Hell's Belles novel at some point as well). 

Judging a book by its cover: The cover of this book is clearly not that of a traditional romance novel. We see the four Storm siblings walking along a beach, in an image a lot more like a photograph, there is no clinch cover, or even cutesy cartoony people showing our romance protagonists. Alice and Jack aren't the main feature here; Alice and her siblings, on the other hand, are. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR15 Books 92-95: A bunch of romantic books I read this summer and didn't get round to reviewing

Fangirl, the Manga: Volume 3 - Rainbow Rowell and Gabi Nam

Page count: 224 pages

Rating: 4 stars

This August saw the release of the third installment of Rainbow Rowell's manga version of Fangirl, my absolute favourite of her books (did I just buy a fancy tenth-anniversary edition, even though I own it in three other formats, NOT counting the mangas? You betcha). Cath is still struggling at college. Her writing partner Nick steals the story they've been working on together and makes her seem unreasonable for being upset about it. Her father has a mental breakdown and has to be hospitalised, and she has no choice but to ask Levi for a ride to visit him, even though she'd rather avoid him now, considering what she saw in his kitchen during the party. Now she's considering dropping out, so she can go back home and take care of her father. She's also feels betrayed by Wren, who wants to reconnect with their estranged mother.

This is a much more emotional issue to read, because Cath isn't exactly having a great time of it, and there are a lot of emotional stakes for her, what with this coming three-quarters through the story of the novel. She manages to talk things through with Levi, however, and her Dad forbids her from giving up and quitting college to take care of him. Her professor also refuses to let her quit the course and extends her deadline to make sure she can submit something wholly original to her fiction writing class, not just her fan fiction. So things are looking better by the end of the issue - and at least now she knows that Nick is a manipulative, lazy weasel. The interludes with Baz and Simon from this fictional universe's versions of Baz and Simon (not to be confused with Rainbow Rowell's OTHER versions of Baz and Simon) also feel less frustrating than they do in the novel, as they are very cute in the manga illustrations.

Deal with the Devil - Kit Rocha

Page count: 336 pages

Rating: 4 stars

In a post-apocalyptic version of America, Knox, the leader of a group of genetically enhanced supersoldiers has a difficult choice to make. He and his elite strike force went AWOL because they were sick of being used to terrorise and murder innocent civilians, but that also means that the implants they have that give them their enhanced powers can't be adjusted without help from a very talented hacker. If the implants aren't adjusted regularly, the soldiers with eventually die, painfully. Their hacker friend has been kidnapped, and to get her ransomed, Knox needs to deliver Nina, the leader of a group of high-tech librarians.

Nina is a clone who escaped from a secret research facility. As is Nina. All of their clones are dead, due to the experiments carried out on them. Maya is their third partner and a technical wiz with perfect recall of everything she's ever read or heard. The three women act as high-tech librarians, offering free information (music, books, videos) to the population of post-apocalyptic Atlanta, but to pay the bills, they also basically act as archeologists for other groups who want to find hidden vaults, like the lost Library of Congress servers.

This book is a lot of fun and has two groups of really enjoyable characters. The tagline claims it's "Orphan Black meets the post-apocalyptic Avengers" and for once, that's actually a fairly good description. We have two groups of tight-knit found families who start out nominally working towards different objectives, but who then have to join forces and cooperate. The series is a trilogy, and the authors are not really very subtle about hinting about which characters will be paired up in future novels. 

I liked the world-building, and the chemistry between the various characters and the main couple have understandable obstacles to work through since one is luring the other one into a trap to save his teammates. That several of his teammates think this is a dumb idea and they should just let the clever and resourceful women they've met work out a better plan speaks in their favour. 

I own all three novels in the series and look forward to reading more of them in the next year. 

How the Wallflower Was Won - Eva Leigh

Page count: 380 pages

Rating: 2.5 stars

This is another of those historical romances where the hero has to get married in a certain amount of time to not get disinherited/inherit a bunch of money, and from what I can gather, this entire series is about three different men in the same pickle. Finn Ransome has been told he's stupid his entire life (he has dyslexia), but has no problem calculating the odds at the gambling tables, where he makes enough to allow him to live comfortably. He starts the novel planning to set his friend (who also has to get married to inherit money) up with a prim bluestocking, but of course, ends up falling for her himself. 

Tabitha Seaton wants to join the Stirling Society, a snooty group full of influential thinkers (all men, naturally). She needs to be married for them to even consider allowing her into the group, and she much prefers Finn to his brooding friend Dom. They get married, and obviously, it's supposed to be a marriage of convenience only, with them never likely to ever catch warmer feelings for one another. 

I barely remembered this book two months after I read it. Now, nearly six months after I finished it, I could only make a summary after looking at reviews on Goodreads. I have downgraded my rating of it accordingly, because I can't really give 3 stars to a book I have this much trouble remembering the plot of. I seem to recall that the hero kept bringing the heroine to libraries, and making sure their new house had a really nice library - which is an excellent quality in a man. Tabitha kept trying to impress the idiotic white men of the Stirling Society, who were never going to accept her in a million years. In the end, she and Finn create their own, much more inclusive society and live happily ever after. I think. I don't care enough to look up further details. Eva Leigh has written some romances I really enjoyed in the past (I seem to recall there are cameos from some of her previous couples in this one), but this was a very forgettable one.

Knockout - Sarah Maclean

Page count: 404 pages

Rating: 4 stars

We have finally reached Lady Imogen's book, and what a delight it was. In her current series, Sarah Maclean writes about four clever young women who have worked to create vast network of women all over London, to help their sisters in need. They save young noblewomen from disastrous marriages, they take down corrupt individuals and they make sure there is justice when the poor and helpless are taken advantage of. The press has dubbed them Hell's Belles. In the previous two books in the series, Lady Sesily Talbot finally persuaded Caleb Calhoun to be her husband, and puzzle-solving Adelaide Frampton, daughter of one of London's most notorious crime bosses, ended up marrying a duke. 

Lady Imogen Loveless is the daughter of an eccentric earl who didn't mind his only daughter learning about science and chemistry. As a result, Imogen is really good with explosives and uses her knowledge to help the Belles. When her father died, her much older brother inherited the title, and he never really knew how to relate to his brainy sister. He wants her to keep out of trouble, and possibly find a husband, and hires detective Thomas Peck to act as her bodyguard and keeper. Of course, Thomas Peck is the last person who should be guarding Imogen's virtue, and he certainly doesn't relish the thought of her finding herself a husband who isn't him. But Thomas is a commoner and could never be good enough for Imogen, could he?

I've enjoyed the majority of Maclean's historical romances, and even consider some of them essential reading for anyone interested in this subgenre, but she's also written some real duds. Thankfully, this series has been very enjoyable, and I think Knockout is my favourite one so far. Maclean is also great at teasing the final book in a series with a heck of a cliffhanger, which she also does here. Thanks to the final lines of this book, I'm now impatiently awaiting the release of Duchess' book, hopefully out in August 2024. 

Speaking of releases - I was lucky enough to find a paperback copy of this in a US bookstore more than two weeks before its actual release date, to much rejoicing. I was visiting my BFF Lydia in Vermont at the time and had time to read half before I sadly forgot the book in the stress of packing and returning home, so had to wait until she had a chance to ship it back to me (which was some time actual the release date). It was probably hubris for being too smug about getting it early. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR14 Book 25: "Heartbreaker" by Sarah Maclean

Page count: 384 pages

Rating: 4 stars

CBR14 Bingo: Heart (it's right there in the title, and this is a romance)

 

Adelaide Frampton was once the unappreciated daughter of one of the East End's most notorious criminals, which led her to acquire a number of illegal skills that now come in handy as she frequents London's high society posing as the unassuming and plain spinster cousin of a duchess. She uses her time on the sidelines of ballrooms and society events to observe and acquire information and can also put her top-notch pickpocketing skills to good use, should it be required. No one knows that the boring Miss Frampton is also The Matchbreaker, a woman who seemingly uses her vast resources to help the rich make sure their offspring don't make unfortunate matches, but in reality making sure unwilling brides are given an avenue of escape.

 

The supercillious and always correct Duke of Clayborn doesn't have time for society gossip, but even he's heard of the Matchbreaker. When the infuriating woman tries to ruin the happiness of his beloved brother, however, he takes notice and unlike the rest of the ton, who don't seem to pay much attention, he knows instantly who the meddling woman is, despite Miss Frampton's disguise. That he recently found the same woman trying to break into the safe of a London gangster (when he himself was rather unsuccessfully trying to steal something back from the criminal) and had to escape with her through alleyways and across roof tops, angry thugs in pursuit, makes him very curious as to what in the world Adelaide is up to.

 

The two set off on a race to make it to Gretna Green to stop the marriage of Clayborn's younger brother to his lady love, and circumstances and complications soon have them joining forces rather than competing. Still pursued by criminal thugs, they have to face danger along the way and achieving their goal of stopping (or ensuring) the match will not be easy.

 

While there is a lot of found family and strong female friendships in the book, the main plot features a Victorian road trip with our main couple in a lot of confined carriages and small rooms (with only one bed), bickering, bantering and flirting. Both have a wealth of secrets they'd rather the other not discover, both will do anything and everything for the people they love and they fall in love over the course of the story (although, spoiler, it's clear that Clayborn has been rather smitten with Adelaide for years before the start of the story - she's just never realised it because they haven't exactly interacted all that much). 

Maclean's romances are absolutely not the best books to read if you want strict and accurate depictions of historical times. There's a lot of anachronisms, her characters tend to be a lot more progressive than was common at the time and her plotting is sometimes a bit all over the place. Nevertheless, I'm a sucker for a road trip, especially one involving carriages and posting inns. So much time for our couple to be stuck in each other's company, learning all sorts of delicious secrets about one another as they travel towards their destination.

I like the whole concept of Maclean's Victorian girl gang, of ladies banding together to help the more unfortunate of their sisters in every way they can. I liked Clayborn and Adelaide's romance more than Sesily and Caleb's in Bombshell. Was it anywhere near as good as One Good Earl Deserves a Lover, my all-time favourite of her romances? Not even slightly, but it was still a fun and diverting read, and I keep hoping that some day, Maclean is going to live up to her earlier potential.

Judging a book by its cover: The cascading red hair, the cheerful yellow of the dress, the nice blue background - it's very striking. But let's not pretend that either the outfit or the long flowing locks are period appropriate to the Victorian era. I wish they'd let her wear her spectacles, or at least have her hold them, rather than that big key on a ribbon. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR13 Book 47: "Bombshell" by Sarah Maclean

Page count: 384 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

CBR13 Bingo: New series

Official book description: 

After years of living as London’s brightest scandal, Lady Sesily Talbot has embraced the reputation and the freedom that comes with the title. No one looks twice when she lures a gentleman into the dark gardens beyond a Mayfair ballroom…and no one realizes those trysts are not what they seem.

No one, that is, but Caleb Calhoun, who has spent years trying not to notice his best friend’s beautiful, brash, brilliant sister. If you ask him, he’s been a saint about it, considering the way she looks at him…and the way she talks to him…and the way she’d felt in his arms during their one ill-advised kiss.

Except someone has to keep Sesily from tumbling into trouble during her dangerous late-night escapades, and maybe close proximity is exactly what Caleb needs to get this infuriating, outrageous woman out of his system. But now Caleb is the one in trouble because he’s fast realizing that Sesily isn’t for forgetting…she’s forever. And forever isn’t something he can risk.

This is another review that will suffer from the fact that I finished the book at the end of August and haven't had the time and/or brain space to write about it until now. I've adjusted down my original rating half a star because it feels like a book as action-packed as this one, I should remember slightly more details about the general plot two months later than I now find myself doing for it to deserve a full four stars.

So what do I remember? Lady Sesily Talbot, who apparently some sections of society anachronistically choose to call Sexily behind her back (I do really like Maclean, at least until a while after I read her books and all my critical faculties kick in again and I start nitpicking - but she's not exactly the most historically accurate in all aspects writer out there) is the last of the scandalous Talbot sisters to remain unmarried. She has a very strong sense of fair play and justice and has allied herself with a group of other ladies to help women in need, from all stratas of society. Sesily herself is able to use society's impression of her as a flirt and as a scandal to cause distractions. Her main allies are the rich noblewoman who can use her wealth to fund the group's endeavours; the "hopeless" spinster wallflower everyone underestimates and the eccentric who cooks up explosives and other useful chemical concoctions to aid the group.

Caleb Calhoun, the charming American who co-owns a pub with Sesily's older sister Sera has been staying away from England for the past two years. He knows that his attraction to Sesily can go nowhere, but thinks about her all the time. Now he's back, and while he wants to keep his distance, the frustrating woman keeps ending up in dangerous situations with no care for her own safety. While he wants to stay out of her business, her (seemingly) impulsive and dangerous actions make it impossible for him to keep away, even at the risk of his own secrets coming to light.

Caleb has some dark secrets that mean that he always feels like he has to be very careful when he leaves the United States and his business there. His attraction to Sesily is not the only tie he has to England, but he's worried that the truth will come out and ruin not just his life, but those of all those near to him. He knows that if he spends too much time with Sesily, his already pretty strong feelings will become irrevocable and he will fall head over heels for her, whether he wants to or not. He's never going to be able to be a worthy match for her, so he has to stay away from her (isn't that always the case with these overly protective heroes). 

Sesily is nowhere near as outrageous or scandalous as she portrays herself to be, and she needs to toe the line with her rescue operations so her family members don't become too worried about her. She loves spending time with her sisters and their increasing brood of children, but being the exciting and fun aunt has also confirmed for her that she never wants children of her own. What man could really want to spend their life without having children? She's quite happy being a spinster forever, but every time she clashes with Caleb, she starts questioning whether they might have a future together. 

If you asked me what the details of the plot were, barring Sesily and the ladies trying to bring some unscrupulous and probably murderous nobleman to justice, and him having something to do with Caleb's past, I will have to disappoint you. All the finer details of the book have completely slipped my mind. 

Sesily's three co-conspirators are clearly going to have books of their own, and there is some pretty obvious sequel bait set up over the course of the story. As always, I had fun while reading this, but the substance of the book has failed to stay with me. Maclean remains on my "buy while on sale" list. 

Judging a book by its cover: While I love the bold red colour of the dress, yet again this is a historical romance cover with a wildly anachronistic costume choice for the cover model. Then again, Sesily is frequently described as flouting all polite conventions of society, so possibly she'd have her dressmakers make something completely unique for her to wear. I do like the pose and the facial expression on the woman, she certainly looks determined and confident.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

 

#CBR12 Book 57: "Daring and the Duke" by Sarah Maclean

Page count: 384 pages
Rating: 3 stars

Official book description:

Grace Condry has spent a lifetime running from her past. Betrayed as a child by her only love and raised on the streets, she now hides in plain sight as queen of London’s darkest corners. Grace has a sharp mind and a powerful right hook and has never met an enemy she could not best, until the man she once loved returns.

Single-minded and ruthless, Ewan, Duke of Marwick, has spent a decade searching for the woman he never stopped loving. A long-ago gamble may have lost her forever, but Ewan will go to any lengths to win Grace back… and make her his duchess.

Reconciliation is the last thing Grace desires. Unable to forgive the past, she vows to take her revenge. But revenge requires keeping Ewan close, and soon her enemy seems to be something else altogether—something she can’t resist, even as he threatens the world she's built, the life she's claimed…and the heart she swore he'd never steal again.

Spoiler warning! I don't think I'll be able to properly review this book without going into quite some detail about what I think worked, and in what ways the story just didn't deliver for me. So if you haven't read the book and would prefer to remain unspoiled about plot specifics, probably best if you skip this review.

Still here? Cool cool. Daring and the Duke is the concluding volume in Sarah Maclean's Bareknuckle Bastards trilogy. The man the rest of world knows as Robert Matthew Carrick, the Duke of Marwick and his half-brothers and the woman he loves knows as Ewan, has been the villain in the preceding two novels in the series, trying his very best to ruin his two half-brothers both financially and personally while trying to track down the woman they consider their sister and he, Ewan, loves obsessively. When told in Wicked and the Wallflower that she had died, Ewan's shattering grief turned to rage and he became unhinged and deeply destructive. By the end of Brazen and the Beast, Ewan's quest for revenge against the two men with whom he shared a father, who he had trusted to keep his beloved safe and then was fooled into thinking had failed at that task, had ended up costing six people their lives and his half-brothers a considerable amount of money.

But of course, Grace, the illegitimate daughter of the former Duchess of Marwick (presented as a baby the world as Marwick's son and heir and her true identity hidden) never died. Along with the two men she's chosen to consider her brothers, she rules Covent Garden as Dahlia, the owner of an extremely profitable pleasure house catering to women. She's observed Ewan's increasingly more out of control attempt to find her and later to avenge her apparent death, and she's unimpressed. She intends to show him once and for all how little he means to her, crush his spirit and send him packing. But first, she personally nurses him back to health after the explosion he caused on the docks, which nearly killed Grace's brother's fiancée. Once he's strong enough, she stages a public boxing match, where he refuses to fight back as she beats him up. 

She believes him to be gone for good and tells herself that this is fine. Of course, about a year later, he's back in London, claiming to be looking for a wife. He arranges a grand ball, with the sole intention of luring Grace into his presence once again. She lies to herself that as long as she's masked and disguised, hooking up with him won't be a problem. He shows up in Covent Garden with a big chest full of money to pay reparations to the families of the men he killed and starts doing manual labour on the docks for Whit's wife, to show that he's a changed man now and wants to make amends for all the damage he did.

This is the second of Maclean's romance trilogies where a really shitty duke needs to make amends and grovel on an epic scale to be a satisfying hero in the final volume. While the duke of Haven in Day of the Duchess caused less death and destruction overall, I still found him even more loathsome than Ewan (who is at least super messed up because of the continual torture he was subjected to by his father throughout his life). I did not, however, feel that Ewan's grovelling and atttempts to make up for his former actions were enough to redeem him. I also found Grace's plan of first tenderly nursing him back to health only to beat him up publically to be deeply unsatisfactory. I will say that Ewan's final plan for getting rid of the family legacy he so detested to get his happy ending with Grace was pretty hardcore. 

The reason this book is three stars is that I really enjoyed the presence of Devil, Beast and their interaction with the families they've now established. Otherwise, it's unlikely it would have gotten more than two and a half stars. Once upon a time, Maclean was an auto-buy and pre-order author for me. Now she's on "buy on sale", which makes me sad. I still like her championing the romance genre publically as much as she does, but it's been a long time since she wrote a book I loved as much as One Good Earl Deserves a Lover. 

Judging a book by its cover: I know some people really like these covers, I find them way too anachronistic. On this one, I love the cover model's stunning red hair (like our heroine Grace/Dahlia sports), but the dress is simply all wrong. First of all, I would have loved to see a cover model wearing what Grace/Dahlia wears for most of the book, tight breeches, leather boots, elaborate silk corsets with a fancy overcoat. If Avon felt they had to put the cover model in a dress, they could have at least tried to find something that didn't look like a prom dress made from a rain slicker. Grace/Dahlia does wear a GOLDEN gown at one point in the book, but it looks nothing like the dress portrayed on the cover, nor is it bright canary yellow. Yellow and gold are NOT the same colour!

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR11 Book 60: "Brazen and the Beast" by Sarah Maclean

Page count: 400 pages
Rating: 4 stars

#CBR11 Bingo: History Schmistory (set in the Victorian era)

On the eve of her twenty-ninth birthday, Lady Henrietta "Hattie" Sedly, aided by her best friend Lady Eleonora (Nora), the daughter of a duke, is planning on going to an exclusive brothel in Covent Garden catering to women. She needs to lose her virginity, so her father will stop trying to pressure her into marriage. Firmly on the shelf, Hattie has discovered that despite a generous dowry, no one actually wants to marry her. She's too tall, too voluptuous, her face is too plain, she's too smart, too opinionated, too interested in running a business - really, there are a number of stumbling blocks. Hattie has worked her ass off trying to prove to her father (an Earl, a lifetime peer) that she's the right person to take over his shipping business. Her younger brother is a complete idiot and a wastrel, but he does have that important y-chromosome (and a penis), which means he doesn't need to work hard to be first in line to take over.

Hattie and Nora are rather taken aback to find a big, strong and exceedingly attractive man unconscious and tied up in the carriage they intend to use to get Hattie to Covent Garden. Hattie persuades Nora to drive the coach anyway and does a bit of flirting with the angry, clearly dangerous man when she wakes him up. Then she impulsively kisses him, cuts the ropes that tie him and throws him out on a street corner.

Whit, brother and partner in crime (literally) of Devil from Wicked and the Wallflower is trying to find out who keeps stealing the shipments of contraband that the Bareknuckle Bastards are transporting. Having lost three valuable lots of goods (as well as several loyal men) already, he's none too pleased to find a fourth shipment snatched. Not to mention finding himself knocked out and tied up (although he managed to throw a knife at one of the thieves before they got him). He tries to question the opinionated woman in the carriage, convinced she's somehow connected to one or several of the thieves (he's not wrong). She frustrates him by refusing to answer any of his questions, but luckily dumps him out on a corner of his own turf, where his many spies easily can tell him where her carriage ends up.

Whit shows up in Hattie's room at the brothel and tries to continue his questioning. She's figured out exactly who is stupid enough to knock out one of the kings of Covent Garden, and promises Whit that his missing property will be returned to him, but she refuses to give up the name of the guilty party (spoiler - it's her moron brother and his manservant). In return, Whit promises to divest Hattie of her unwanted virginity and try to help her achieve the rest of her plan for the Year of Hattie.

Of course, Hattie hasn't realised that her brother is responsible for four valuable shipments having been stolen from the Bareknuckle Bastards, nor does she know who's ultimately responsible or just how dangerously unhinged this individual is. Whit, on the other hand, is pretty sure who is stealing his wares and killing his men, and he cannot take the chance of getting too attached to Hattie, for fear that she get injured as collateral damage in his rather complex family rivalries.

The books in the Scandal & Scoundrel series went from middling to bad, and so I was very relieved to see that Sarah Maclean appears to be back on more familiar ground with the second book in her Bareknuckle Bastards trilogy. Whit may call himself Beast, but in reality, he's a big softie, desperate to protect all those he cares about, always trying to make up for being the smallest and weakest during his super shitty childhood (the details of the Duke of Marwick's "child rearing" attempts continue to be appalling, and I'm sure the next book is really going to delve into the depths of depravity the guy was capable of in order to get himself a "worthy" heir).

Even before the book's release, I'd seen several write-ups of how great Hattie was as a heroine, and she's pretty awesome. Like so many larger women, she has a ton of hang-ups about her body and her looks, not that Whit seems to be bothered by any of them. As is only right and proper in a romance hero, he adores every part of her, from her brain to her larger than average body.

If there's a weak part of this novel, it's the villains of the piece. Hattie's brother is a complete imbecile and the actual power behind him is going to come as no surprise to anyone who's read the first book in the series. His motivations now seem to be that he's gone pretty much completely crazy after the events towards the end of the previous book, which begs the question why Hattie escaped completely unscathed after a direct conversation with him. Maclean is also going to have to do some serious heavy lifting to make this guy a believable and satisfying hero in the concluding volume of the trilogy, out next year.

What I'd REALLY want, though, is a novella about Annika (Nik), the Bareknuckle Bastards' capable lieutenant, and Hattie's BFF Nora (Nik and Nora, see what she did there). There's clearly something brewing there, and I want the whole story.

Judging a book by its cover: Us larger ladies don't often find ourselves represented in the pages of romance fiction, so it's nice to see a plus size model on the cover of this, in a beautiful (if not entirely period appropriate gown - these books are Victorian, not Regency). The colour is even the same as of the dress our heroine is wearing in the opening chapters, which is always a nice detail when they manage to swing it. This cover really is tons better than the one for Wicked and the Wallflower. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR10 Book 106: "Wicked and the Wallflower" by Sarah Maclean

Page count: 416 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Felicity Faircloth may be the daughter of an Earl, but she is now on the fringes of society and her family desperately need her to land a rich husband, sooner rather than later, please. She's not at all happy to discover just how dire the family's finances are (and that they've kept the truth from her for over a year), but she may have just doomed them all, but telling a very inconvenient lie at a ball held by the reclusive Duke of Marwick. The lie - that she's in fact already betrothed to marry him.

Imagine her surprise when a scoundrel shows up in her bedroom after the ball, promising her that she can, in fact, land the Duke if she makes a deal with the Devil of Whitechapel. Felicity misses the time when she was part of the popular crowd and wants to save her family's reputation, so she agrees, but she also wonders how in the world this Devil will convince the Duke to agree to marry a woman he's not even met, and what this mystery man's motives are for "helping" her.

Said Devil of Whitechapel is in fact one of three bastard sons, born to the former Duke of Marwick on the exact same day, to three different women (this is the sort of implausible coincidence you just have to roll with). There is in fact a fourth child sharing the same birthday, the Duke's daughter Grace (who ironically is NOT his legitimate child either). The three boys were brought to his estate as children and forced to compete in horrific challenges to see who would become the Duke's heir. They swore a pact that there would never be any actual heirs - and since Ewan (now the Duke) seems to be breaking that promise, by trying to find a wife and possibly sire children, his half-brothers Devil (real name Devon) and Beast (Whit) are determined to stop him.

Devil/Devon plans to help Felicity snag him, get publicly engaged, then seduce her, so she can't marry the Duke because of the ensuing scandal. Beast/Whit thinks this is a rubbish plan, and can clearly see that his brother is far too besotted with Felicity to ever use her to gain revenge over their other brother. As it becomes very obvious from early on that Felicity returns Devon's attraction, and doesn't really care one whit for the Duke, the plan goes awry pretty quickly. Yet she's unlikely to regain her position in society if she spurns a handsome and eligible duke in favour of a shady underworld smuggler.

I really don't like revenge plots where some dude is going to get back at another dude by using a woman. Thankfully, Sarah Maclean has Felicity be a heroine who refuses to be used in anyone's game, and who is far more interested in the supposedly dangerous and double-dealing underworld crime boss than the handsome Duke she initially lies and says she is to marry. She's far too good for Devon/Devil (such a dumb nickname), but not really because she's the daughter of an earl and from high society, while he's illegitimate and fought for most of his life to establish a criminal empire with his brother and foster sister. He wants to use Felicity to thwart Ewan, the bastard who became the Duke's heir. Ewan, in turn, wants to use Felicity to get to Devon, because he desperately wants to find Grace, the Duke of Marwick's actual heir (although the Duchess of Marwick had been just as unfaithful as her husband), whom he is obsessed with.

Felicity wants adventure and to be loved, she wants the Duke, but only if he'll fall passionately for her. At the start of the book, she longs to return to the centre of the ton and be popular, but as the sordid scheme progresses, she realises that she wants something else, and she just needs to make the stubborn ice smuggler understand it. She also discovers that while she loves her family, she's sick of being used by them, and is done trying to appease them and sacrifice herself to bail them out.

As with Tessa Dare's novels, Sarah Maclean's romances need to be read with a healthy suspension of disbelief. Really, throw your disbelief out the window. At the same time, there is an almost fairytale like feel to this new series. You have the four children, born on the exact same day, all connected to a very wicked man who made their childhoods hell. There is Felicity Faircloth, with a name like a fairytale heroine (and Devon keeps referring to her by her full name, which starts out sort of charming, gets annoying and kind of goes back into charming again because of the repetition), who ends up not just saving herself, but the stubborn man she falls for. While Whit (the hero of the next book) is clearly the strong, silent type), the two most intriguing supporting characters are probably Ewan (who is sort of nominally the villain of the piece) and Grace/Dahlia. Ewan is clearly unhealthily obsessed with his foster sister - it is said that he loved her once, but Devon and Whit are clearly willing to risk their lives to keep her from him, and because her very existence threatens Ewan's title and wealth, his need to find her at all costs is definitely cast in a sinister light.

None of the books of the Scandal and Scoundrel series really worked all that well for me (and the whole Kardashian thing in the Victorian era didn't really stick the landing), so I was reluctant to start this one. I waited nearly six months to start it (after I got it on sale) and was really very pleasantly surprised at how much fun it was. Maclean is still not back at "buy at full price", but then, so very few authors are nowadays, but she has earned herself a reprieve, and I'm more excited to read the next book in the series now than I was before I finished this one.

Judging a book by its cover: Oh mercy me, do I hate this cover. I'm pretty sure that it would have been difficult, if not impossible for that colour of lurid fuchsia to be produced in the Victorian era. Then there's the fact that the cut of the dress is wrong for the period, not to mention the horrible mini-skirt effect they're trying to achieve, which makes my eye twitch. I have loathed this cover since I saw it revealed many months ago, and it was a contributing factor to me waiting so long to pick up the book.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR10 Book 25: "The Day of the Duchess" by Sarah Maclean

Page count: 400 pages
Rating: 2.5 stars

Three years ago, Seraphina "Sera" Bevingstoke, Duchess of Haven, miscarried her daughter (seriously this is NOT a spoiler, it happens in like the second or third chapter) and was persuaded by the Dowager Duchess of Haven that maybe it was best if she just disappeared. With financial help from her antagonistic mother-in-law, Sera flees her disaster of a marriage and goes to America, where she finds a business partner and something she enjoys doing enough to dull the pain in her heart. But to fully be the person she needs to become, she requires a divorce. So she walks into the House of Lords and demands one.

Malcolm Bevingstoke, Duke of Haven, has been searching the globe for his lost wife for the past three years. He certainly wasn't expecting her to just wander into Parliament and petition them for a divorce. He has absolutely no intention of granting Sera one, he still loves her and wants a chance to make amends for the utter disaster he turned their marriage into before she left. He claims he will let Sera have her divorce if she spends the summer with him, helping him find her successor. He was not expecting Sera to bring her four opinionated sisters with her.

The start of their marriage was an utter travesty - can Malcolm convince Sera that he truly does love her and is able to make her happy for the rest of their lives together?

I mostly really liked the books in Sarah Maclean's Love by Numbers and The Rules of Scoundrels and considered her an auto-buy author at one point. Sadly, with her newest trilogy of romances, Scandal & Scoundrel, I was initially quite entertained by the first book in the series, but the more I thought about it afterwards, the more problems I found with it. The second book was perfectly ok (but I know barely remember any details about it) and then there is this - a book I have kept putting off for more than six months after its publication, because I sure as heck wasn't going to read it while I was pregnant. I considered not reading it at all, but was also curious about it, as Sarah Maclean has been very open about how she had to rewrite most of it after the 2016 Presidential election results. In addition, I've also read everything else Ms. Maclean has written, including her really not very good at all YA romance The Season, so the completist in me really felt I had to read this eventually. Regretfully, it did not do much to entertain me.

Malcolm and Sera are pretty much love at first sight. He's a sought-after duke, whose parents had an unhappy marriage because his mother pretty much trapped his father and she's the eldest daughter of a man who won his earldom in a card game and a ruthlessly ambitious woman determined to make great matches for all of her daughters. Because of this, when Sera's mother persuades her that the only way to make sure their flirting ends in marriage is by entrapment as well, Malcolm's tentative romantic feelings towards Sera turns to hate, as he feels betrayed and hurt. They have to get married, but he has no wish to see her and they are separated for months.

The next time they see each other is when Sera's younger sister pushes Malcolm into an ornamental pond after she and Sera find him breaking his marriage vows with another woman (he claims this was a horrible moment of weakness, wanting to hurt and forget her). By now, it's obvious that Sera is pregnant. Tragically, she miscarries their daughter and is told by the doctor that she is barren. Malcolm's mother, who never wanted her son married to a vulgar social climber anyways is on hand to persuade Sera to leave for good.

Sera flees to America, where she befriends the owner of a tavern. She's always enjoyed singing and starts rebuilding her life as a singer. Now, three years later, the two of them own a series of taverns in the US and Sera has bought one in Covent Garden. But while she's still the Duchess of Haven she can't really own anything in her own right. She needs a divorce so she can become the owner of the tavern in truth.

Malcolm is full of regret for the many stupid and vicious things he said and did to hurt his wife and has had three years to really wallow in guilt. Because of the charade he has devised to make his wife love him again, he's stuck in the countryside with four eligible ladies and their families, all hoping to make a promising match, no matter how unorthodox the matchmaking is. Sera brings all four of her headstrong and scandalous sisters along as a buffer and has no intention of being seduced back, even if she's still strongly attracted to her husband.

The main problem with this book is that I didn't care at all about Sera or Malcolm. As the mother of a two month old boy, I naturally felt awful reading about Sera's miscarriage (which was why I also avoided this book while still pregnant), but I was wholly indifferent to their inevitable happy ending. Early on in their relationship, stupid decisions were made on both sides. Even with the extensive rewrite that Maclean did, Malcolm isn't exactly a prince of a man. He treats Sera dreadfully during the first few months of their marriage (not that they spend much time together - but flaunting his infidelity in public sort of does a lot of damage in a short space of time) and it's no wonder that she doesn't believe that he loves her or wants to spend the rest of his life with her. Especially since they both believe she is barren (SPOILER - of course she isn't. By the epilogue, it turns out that not only can she have children, they have a whole bunch). Barrenness isn't exactly an attractive trait in a duchess.

Malcolm takes most of the book to actually listen to Sera and start to respect her wishes. I will say that the grand gesture he makes towards the end of the book was good enough that I knocked my rating of this book up from 2 to 2.5 stars, but even then, the best thing about this book was one of the supporting characters, who is going to be the heroine in Maclean's upcoming Wicked and the Wallflower. I just hope desperately that Maclean's writing improves with that series, because this one ended on a total dud.

Judging a book by its cover: Another romance cover where the cover model is wearing nothing but a dress, mostly undone down the back. No chemise, corset or any type of undergarment, and the skirt appears to have yards and yards of fabric. I don't particularly like those covers at the best of times, but here it also appears as if one of the model's arms are on backward. I honestly don't entirely understand how the anatomy of this woman works. It gives me a headache.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR8 Book 101: "A Scot in the Dark" by Sarah Maclean

Page count: 400 pages
Rating: 3 stars

Miss Lillian "Lily" Hargrove, is the orphaned daughter of a land steward and unwilling ward to the Duke of Warnick. Due to an odd and unbelievable series of events, her guardian, and then the next seventeen heirs to the title die in the course of about a fortnight, leaving a very distant claimant to the title, Alec Stuart, a belligerent Scotsman as the new Duke. He doesn't like England, and stays in Scotland for the next five years, not even aware that Lillian exists.

As such, Lily lives a comfortable, if extremely isolated and lonely life in one of the ducal residences in London. She's not of the aristocracy, nor is she a servant. She has no friends or family to support her, and so, when unscrupulous actor and artist Derek Hawkins encounters her walking in the park, woos her and flatters her and makes her feel special, it doesn't take all that much persuasion for him to get her to pose for a nude portrait. Of course, Lily believed no one would see the portrait but them. She also foolishly believed Hawkins would propose marriage to her. Instead, he announces at the opening of the Royal Exhibition that his masterpiece will be displayed to the public on the closing day of the exhibition. Lily, distraught and shocked, makes a very public scene, and what little respectable reputation she may have had, is ruined.

Alec Stuart, reluctant twenty-first Duke of Warnick, known in the gossip pages as "the diluted duke" arrives in London two weeks after his solicitor informs him that 1) he has a young lady as a ward and 2) said lady is the object of a huge scandal. Alec has a number of reasons for disliking England and the English and he also has a massive distrust for all beautiful women. Lily announces that the painting will be unveiled to all the world in ten days' time. She wants the money promised to her by her initial guardian, so she can go far away and reinvent herself, somewhere no one knows who Lillian Hargrove is.

Alec refuses to let her run and hide, and believes the solution is to get her married off to someone respectable, as soon as humanly possible. He bestows a massive dowry on her, and sets about trying to match her up with a suitable gentleman. Of course, he is fiercely jealous of any other man so much as looking in Lillian's general direction. Yet when everyone around him, Lily included, suggests that he may be the best candidate for the job, all his fears and insecurities rise to the surface. Lily may have given herself to an unscrupulous artist and is about to have her naked body displayed for all of London to see, but Alec still believes that he is unworthy of her hand and needs to find her someone better.

In her newest series, Scandal and Scoundrel, Sarah Maclean basically takes contemporary celebrity gossip scandals and interprets them through a historical lens. The first book in the series, The Rogue Not Taken, was seemingly her take on a Kardashian-like family of sisters hugely popular in the scandal press, whilst this book is her response to various leaked nude photos in recent years. Sadly, this isn't as interesting as Ms Maclean seems to think it is. I liked the previous book a lot more than a lot of my romance reading friends on the internet, even though the hero was a complete tool for most of the book. Alec Stuart, the Scotsman hero of this one, appeared briefly towards the end of said book, and both Sophie and her new husband, the Marquess of Eversley, appear in this book, along with Sophie's many Scandalous Talbot-sisters. There are also appearances by Duncan West from Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover, as well as his wife, who becomes one of Lily's new friends. I found most of the Talbot sisters annoying in the first book and didn't really like them all that much here (nor can I tell them apart), although it is nice that Lily finally makes some friends and gets to go out in society.

While the previous book in the series had some issues, this is even more of a hot mess. There are absolutely things I liked, Maclean excels at writing witty banter and the book made me laugh more than once. I genuinely like the title, which is certainly not always the case with Maclean's books. It discusses important feminist themes such as the nature of consent, victim blaming, slut shaming and how men in society are judged by a completely different standard to women. The eventual reveal of why Alec is so damned convinced that he's an uncivilised and uncouth brute, his dislike of the English, his distrust of beautiful women and his sense of unworthiness was an interesting twist on a common trope.

It still didn't make up for the fact that it got boring really quickly that Alec was bullheadedly determined to get Lily married off, yet insanely jealous of any other man so much as breathing in her vicinity. Starting with his mother, he's been told by women his entire life that he is too large, coarse, brutish and uncivilised. His mother eventually ran away from Scotland, and it seems more than one woman has treated Alec mostly like a glorified sex toy, good for nothing but a quick affair, but never anything more lasting. His internal monologue about how precious and exquisite she was, while he was brutish and unworthy still got on my nerves. I'm not really surprised that society at large sees him as a brute, when he literally tears doors of hinges and rampages around like a jealous madman for much of the book.

Lily keeps being described as devastatingly beautiful, but it has clearly not brought her any happiness and living holed up, isolated from polite society, without any chance to experience the world or make friends makes her a far too easy victim for Derek Hawkins. While waiting for the Diluted Duke to acknowledge her existence, she has dreamed of a season, of balls, dancing, marriage and children, and she has no wish to be forced into marriage in less than two weeks just to quell the gossip. Some of the behaviour she exhibits to drive suitors off is just bizarre, though, and the various madcap schemes that she and/or Alec devise to try to stop the painting from being displayed seem strange and out of place.

There is also an aspect of insta-love here, a trope I'm less than fond of. From figuratively hissing and spitting at each other during their first encounter, fewer than ten days pass before Lily and Alec are madly besotted with one another, ready to elope for Scotland to spend the rest of their days together. Would it really have hurt to have the story take place over a slightly longer span of time, say a month? It would have made the romance more believable, certainly.

I think there is only one more book left in this series, which seems to be going for celebrity divorce proceedings, with the eldest Talbot-sister, Seraphina, petitioning the House of Lords for divorce from her husband, the Duke of Haven (I severely doubt they'll end the book divorced). I desperately hope that it is better than the first two in the series, which keep going down in my estimation the more I think about them. Sarah Maclean has been removed from my auto-buy list and is quickly moving into the "only on sale" category, which is a shame, because I really love some of her earlier books.

Judging a book by its cover: Here we have another example of that baffling new romance cover trend, with the dresses with fabric that go on for miles and mile, but still inexplicably show most of the heroine's naked legs. Just in case you didn't figure out from the title of the book that it's about a Scotsman, the cover designer has helpfully added some tartan to the floor. I like the colour of the dress, it's pretty, but it is otherwise in no way period appropriate (for any period, really, this is made up historical clothing). I highly recommend you go to Goodreads to see the splashback cover though, where this exact romance cover is shown (presumably) as the scandalous painting (Worst. Nude. Portrait. Ever) in question, while the hero and heroine sort of smooch. It's hilarious.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR7 Book 156: "The Rogue Not Taken" by Sarah MacLean

Page count: 432 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Lady Sophie Talbot is the youngest daughter of a coal miner who it's rumoured won his Earldom in a card game with the Prince Regent. Sophie was quite happy growing up in a little village in Cumbria, dreaming of marrying the baker's boy and one day running her own bookshop. Moving to London and becoming part of the ton was never her dream, and unlike her sisters, who seem to clamber to outdo each other with regards to being seen and being scandalous, she'd rather stay in the background and read. While she hates that the gossip papers have dubbed them all "the soiled S's" (all their names start with S) and the way they speculate about how her eldest sister landed a duke, she's also fiercely loyal to her family and when she finds her ducal brother-in-law in a compromising situation with a woman most certainly not her pregnant sister, she loses her temper and shoves him in a fish pond. In front of everyone in polite society. Lady Sophie, the quiet one, just caused the biggest scandal of the season.

Wanting to get away as quickly as possible, she tries to persuade the scoundrelly Marquess of Eversley, popularly known as "King" to let her ride along in his carriage back to the city. She believes she may be able to blackmail him, as she caught him climbing out a window and holds his boot hostage, but he just abandons it and her, rushing away. Desperate to be gone, Sophie instead bribes his footman into giving her his livery and stows away on his carriage, only to realise far too late that it's not going back to London, it's going north. Eversley has recieved news that his father may be at death's door and cannot resist a final chance to tell his father he is never getting married and fathering heirs.

Strangely, despite being in ill-fitting livery, barely anyone but King actually recognises that Sophie isn't a boy, despite the fact that she's still wearing silk slippers (the footman's boots didn't fit). He's convinced she's trying to snare herself a husband by being caught in a compromising position with him, but she denies this vehemently and does her best to get far away from him as quickly as possible. Using undeniable cleverness to best Eversley, she manages to get coach fare north, she's decided to go back to her home village of Mossband to realise her dreams, never to return to the capital. But the coach is stopped by highwaymen, Sophie throws herself in front of a pistol shot to rescue a young urchin, and despite telling himself repeatedly that he wants nothing to do with Sophie Talbot, King has to go searching for a doctor so he's not left with a dead earl's daughter on his hands.

Sophie and King (the reveal of his real name is excellent) pretty much loathe each other at first sight. He believes her to be a title-hunting social climber, she thinks he embodies all the things she hates most about the aristocracy. He can seduce soon to be married women and escape half-dressed out a window without anyone raising so much as an eyebrow while she was publically shunned for trying to defend her sister's honour. He's rich, handsome, arrogant and keeps saying exactly the wrong thing, sometimes directly insulting Sophie, but much of the time doing so without even meaning to. They both keep trying to remind themselves how annoying they find the other person, as they are clearly extremely attracted to one another.

In many ways, this book reminded me of A Week to Be Wicked, probably my favourite Tessa Dare novels, and one of my favourite romances ever. There's a road trip element, there is a lot of spirited banter, the couple have sizzling chemistry and they keep having mishap after mishap, while stuck on the road together. Both the heroes are uncomfortable travelling in small, dark, enclosed coaches. Both the heroines are highly intelligent, bookish, overlooked by everone and clearly super awesome. This book has daddy issues, gunshot wounds, occasional plot moppets (who were mostly sweet rather than annoying), assumed names, a pretend engagement, some pretty sexy times in both a carriage and a hedge maze, allusions to Greek mythology and hero, who while incredibly skilled at putting his foot in his mouth, eventually fully acknowledges what a first class idiot he's been and grovels very satisfyingly. He's not wrong about Sophie being far too good for him, but he shows signs of improvement towards the end and he's certainly not selfish in the bedroom department, which is an definite plus in a romance hero.

At least until I re-read One Good Earl Deserves a Lover, this is among my favourite Sarah Macleans and Sophie is certainly one of my favourite heroines. I do have niggles about the plot (King could have been slightly less insulting all the time, the conflict with his father could have been very easily solved if they actually just had a CONVERSATION), but they are not enough to ruin the happy glow of such a fun romance. After the most recent Milan was a let-down, I'm glad that I got to end the year on such a high note, making this the book that completed my triple Cannonball.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 132: "Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover" by Sarah Maclean

Page count: 384 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars

Spoiler warning! It is actually IMPOSSIBLE for me to write about this book without spoiling some pretty major developments that involve all three former Rules for Scoundrels books. If you haven't already read No Good Duke Goes Unpunished, PLEASE stay away from this review and return once you're caught up. You'll enjoy this book so much more if you heed my advice.

The previous three books in the Rules for Scoundrels series told the story of the disgraced noblemen who opened The Fallen Angel, an exclusive and scandalous gambling club in the middle of Mayfair. All deferring to the founder, the mysterious and reclusive, Chase, three other notorious aristocrats are the public face of the club. The Marquess of Bourne lost his entire fortune in one card game and swore revenge on the man who cheated him of his inheritance. Cross, the Earl of Harlow (driven to destruction by the death of his brother) and Temple, the Duke of Lamont (accused of murdering his father's fiancee the night before her wedding) were rescued by Chase when about to be beaten and possibly killed by a London gangs for their rigged games. Over the course of the series, all three men have found redemption of a sorts in the eyes of society and are happily married to the women of their dreams.

Frequently, the final book in a romance series is saved for the darkest, most complicated and emotionally messed up characters, more often than not the hero, as romance heroines seem to be less prone to extremely emo behaviour. There are exceptions, of course Chase is certainly the most mysterious, and a fascinating and complex individual. What is revealed at the end of book three in this series, however, is that the founder of The Fallen Angel, the mysterious mastermind who controls three other powerful men, the reclusive genius who possesses all the secrets and blackmail material worth knowing, is in fact a woman. Both the daughter of and sister of a Duke, Lady Georgina Pearson lived a sheltered life, desperate for affection, until she believed herself in love with a handsome stable hand and became a scandal. An unwed mother at sixteen, she became a cautionary tale to others in "polite" society, gossipped about and shunned. Liberated from the strictures of the same society, Georgina didn't particularly mind so much until the gossip started hurting her beloved daughter. Motivated initially by a desire for revenge, she acquired the funds to start the club, recruited partners who had been as unfairly cast out and judged by the aristocracy as herself and over the course of six years, positioned herself to become possibly the most powerful influence in London.

In addition to her secret identity as Chase, Georgiana has a more public persona in the club, as Anna, the courtesan believed to be Chase's mistress, and a prostitute with very exclusive tastes. Hiding in plain sight, wearing bright colours, wigs, flashy makeup and flirting with the patrons, Georgiana is able to move about the club and interact with its members, who all believe her to be Chase's emissary. No one becomes a member of The Fallen Angel except by invitation and the only way to gain membership is with secrets. Georgiana and her partners have files on all the powerful and influential men and women in London and won't hesitate to use their secrets to devastating effects if the debts owed to the club are not paid promptly. They release juicy tidbits to Duncan West, newspaper magnate and self-made man, who increases his circulation because of the choice gossip.

After a malicious cartoon was published in The Scandal Sheet, the gossip magazine owned by West, Georgiana is forced to rethink her priorities. Caroline, her daughter, is nearly ten and Georgiana is worried that her scandalous past is going to keep her child from the life and opportunities that said daughter deserves. Whether it's being raised in the country by relatives or kept locked up in a London Casino, neither situation is ideal for a child. Every time they go out into Society, there is gossip, and people are rarely kind enough to shield the child from snide remarks. Even other children judge and condescend. As a result, Georgina has decided to find a titled husband. One whose influence will shield Caroline and give her the future she deserves. It needs to be a man satisfied with a marriage of convenience, as Georgiana has no intention of letting herself fall under the power of another man, ever again.

At a ball early in the season, after verbally eviscerating a young lady who not only dared insult Georgiana herself, but Caroline, Georgiana runs into Duncan, who apologises for the cartoon and wants to make amends by using his influence and his newspapers to make her a big hit in Society. He promises to help her land the husband she wants, because while he's instantly drawn to her, he knows he could never be a suitable match for her. Duncan West has secrets in his past he cannot reveal, and understands Georgiana's protective instincts because he too possesses them in spades. When he figures out that Georgiana and Anna are in fact the same person, he's convinced that the reason she lives this double life is because Chase must have a hold over her, and he becomes determined to free this fascinating woman from Chase's nefarious influence. If he can't have her, he wants to make sure she is married to a good man who will protect her and Caroline.

Once I finished No Good Duke Goes Unpunished back in November of last year, with what I'm quite sure was an audible gasp and some creative swearing, I went back and pored over the first three book in the Rules for Scoundrels series, checking every single scene where Chase appears, to see if Maclean even once slipped up with her use of pronouns. But cleverly, in every scene with Chase, no pronouns are used at all. There are only a select few characters in all the books that know that Chase is a woman, and as most of Society believe Chase to be male, they obviously use male pronouns. Once I went back and reread the books for clues, it became obvious to me that Anna was also clearly Chase, but it wasn't until the opening pages of this book that it was revealed that she was actually Lady Georgiana, first introduced in Ten Ways to Be Adored When Landing a Lord, as a minor, but rather significant supporting characters in the final two books of the Love by Numbers trilogy. Maclean has clearly been planning this for a long time.

Georgiana, or Chase, is absolutely badass. She realises very quickly that having her reputation effectively demolished by her impulsive tryst is actually more a benefit to her, than a burden. She's not actually particularly bothered by all the malicious and often hypocritical things she overhears about herself. When it comes to her daughter, she's a lioness, however, and shows no mercy when it comes to wreaking her revenge. Chase has files on everyone, is owed favours by everyone worth knowing and knows exactly how to wield her influence to inflict the most damage. Georgiana doesn't actually want a husband, but feels that this is the only possible solution to ensure the appropriate future for her daughter. She never once stops to reflect on how happy she herself was to escape the strictures of being a Duke's coddled but emotionally ignored daughter. Behind the scenes as Chase, Georgiana is the most powerful person in London. She gets to enjoy the everyday life of her gambling club as Anna, protected from too many unpleasant advances both by the belief of most patrons that she "belongs" to Chase and because Bourne, Cross and Temple make very sure that men know that Anna is off limits. Marrying, even purely for convenience and to protect her child means she will have to cut down on the time she spends running her business empire. The thought doesn't sit well with Georgiana.

While she's convinced herself that she has to have a titled husband to secure Caroline's future, her bargain with Duncan West means she suddenly spends a lot more time around a man she's long found dangerously attractive. Having occasionally met with West in the guise of Anna, Georgiana has forced herself to stay professional around him, sometimes flirting, but going no further. Now, as she's set on marrying, she convinces herself that she may be permitted a brief fling before she actually settles down into her new life as an aristocrat's wife.

Duncan, who always found Anna alluring, but Georgiana irresistible is powerless to refuse her advances. He's furious because he believes Chase has a sexual and emotional hold over her, deeply jealous that she intends to marry another, yet his past and the secrets he hides makes it impossible for him to offer for her as he would wish. West is a suitable match for the formidable Georgiana. She's strong, fiercely intelligent, observant, driven and logical. West brings out her irrational, passionate side. He too is extremely smart and known as the "hardest working man in London". He was given a lucky break with his first gossip rag and made himself the most influential newspaper magnate in the city. He attends society functions, but always observes from the sidelines. He's deeply aware that he's not a gentleman and will never become one. He doesn't dance. He's as protective of his eccentric spinster sister as Georgiana is of her daughter. His drive to keep those he loves safe makes him blind to some of the truths he would have realised about Georgiana/Anna and everything she tells him about Chase, if he'd only been able to stay cool and objective. Chase is an alpha heroine, and could never settle for a man that was less than her. West is a very good partner for her, but they both share both admirable and annoying qualities. I'm glad Duncan figured out very early on that Georgiana and Anna were the same, but it takes a frustratingly long time for the full truth about Chase to be revealed to him (against the express advice and wishes of all of Chase's three business partners).

This book was very good and I laughed several times while reading it. There were absolutely steamy scenes and I enjoyed that while Georgiana and Duncan both have a wealth of secrets they are keeping from each other and the world, they are generally not all that emotionally messed up. I wasn't a big fan of the villain in this book and the final act of the story got a bit farcical. Parts of the resolution wrapped up a little bit too conveniently without any wider repercussions for the characters, but Maclean's endings are frequently the weakest parts of her stories. This is still a great romance and I suspect I will have to go back and read all six books that involve Georgiana to fully get an idea of how long a game Maclean has been playing. I'm also very much looking forward to her book The Rogue Not Taken, out sometime in the New Year.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 120: "The Season" by Sarah Maclean

Page count: 352 pages
Rating: 2.5 stars

Lady Alexandra Stafford is the only daughter of some nobleman or other (I can't be bothered to go back and check what her exact rank is). She has several tall and attractive brothers who delight in teasing her and generally try their best not to have to accompany her to society events during her first Season. She also has two best friends, Ella and Vivi. They were fairly interchangeable. All three are opinionated, bookish, not really all that interested in marriage and have known each other most of their lives.

Alexandra, annoyingly called Alex a lot of the book, has a mother determined to match make her and her brothers. They need good matches, but especially Alexandra, who finds dress fittings, balls and dinner parties dreary. When her brothers' best friend Gavin, who came into the title of Earl of Blackmoor when his father died suddenly, is convinced that there is foul play afoot and starts investigating his death, Alexandra and her friends insist on helping out. Alexandra also discovers that Gavin looks mighty fine in formal wear, and maybe balls aren't quite so dull if she can dance with him. How has she never noticed how attractive he is? Could it be that she's not as opposed to romantic love and marriage as she thought?

I love Sarah Maclean. I rate most of her historical romances very highly and am waiting with bated breath for the release of the final book in her Rules for Scoundrels series at the end of November. This young adult Regency romance was her first book and the only one I had yet to read. I'm sorry to say that I found it almost painfully dull in places. I'm amazed that only a year after she published The Season, which has uninteresting or plain non-existent characterisation, an incredibly predictable plot, heavy-handed exposition and a deeply uninspiring romance, there was Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, the first volume in the Ralston trilogy, a book which seems as if it was written by a completely different person.

I can only assume that Maclean actually wrote The Season years before her other romances and spent some time honing her craft. I now consider her one of my very favourite historical romance writers and have re-read several of her books multiple times. This is not a book I will be re-reading. Frankly, it's a book I will try my very best to forget. I really wish I hadn't decided to be such a completist now. Still, having read this, her later romances are even more remarkable achievements. If this is what she started with, then I'm even more impressed with the skill she writes now.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR5 Book 142. "No Good Duke Goes Unpunished" by Sarah Maclean

Page count: 384 pages
Rating: 4 stars

This is the third book in a series, and while romance novels are normally fine to read out of sequence, some of the really awesome developments in this book lose a lot if you haven't read the rest of the series. These books are top notch romance, so just do yourself a favour and start at the beginning with A Rogue by Any Other Name. And yes, I know the titles are spectacularly cheesy. I recently discovered in a podcast that these are MacLean's own puns, not anything imposed on her by the publishers. I don't know whether to be impressed or slightly worried about her.

The great hulking brute known as Temple also goes The Killer Duke. He is one of four disgraced members of the aristocracy who own luxury gambling club The Fallen Angel. When the rich and foolish have lost too much, and have no other recourse, they can fight Temple in the Angel's boxing ring. Should they win, all their losses will be restored. Not that anyone ever has, but it never stops them from trying. William Harrow, the Duke of Lamont, shunned by most of polite society because he is suspected of having killed his father's fiancee, is more than happy to take every beating coming, because he's honestly not entirely sure he doesn't deserve his moniker.

Twelve years earlier, he awoke with only the haziest memories of the night before, to discover that the bewitching beauty who'd invited him up to her room was Miss Mara Lowe, his father's sixteen-year-old child bride and soon to be the Duke's third wife. There was no sign of the bride, only him, naked in sheets soaked in blood. Never convicted as there wasn't a body, Temple was nonetheless driven from polite society, and survived in the less prosperous parts of town because of his boxing prowess. After a while, he teamed up with Michael Lawler, the Marquess of Bourne (hero of book one) to run dice games, until the two were nearly killed by street thugs not too happy with their business venture. They were saved by Chase, the mysterious founder of the Fallen Angel, and became part-owners in the club.

Now Christopher Lowe, Mara's brother keeps challenging Temple, wanting to fight him for the chance to reclaim his squandered fortunes. Temple keeps refusing, not wanting anything to do with anyone named Lowe. Walking home one evening, he is approached by a woman revealing herself to be Mara Lowe, who, desperate to escape her wedding, did an incredibly foolish thing twelve years ago, and has been in hiding ever since. She promises to come forward and tell the world that Temple is innocent, as long as he restores her brother's funds. Temple has been tormented for over a decade, because Mara made everyone believe he killed her. He's not going to be satisfied with mere absolution, he wants revenge.

Sarah MacLean keeps amazing me, with each new book, she does something new and exciting. Mara genuinely ruined Temple's life. For twelve years, she hid under an assumed name and let everyone keep on believing that the Marquess of Chapin, later Duke of Lamont, had brutally killed her and disposed of the body. Because she drugged him to carry out her disappearance, Temple has never really had a clear recollection of the evening in question himself, and with his brute strength and capacity for anger, occasionally doubted his own innocence. So he's quite righteously furious when she returns, not even particularly remorseful, trying to negotiate with him. Temple doesn't just want her to clear his name, he wants to humiliate her and make her suffer, as much as possible. We're entirely on Temple's side. Mara is clearly the villain of the piece here.

So how in the world do these two find their happy ending. There was clearly attraction between them, that fateful night twelve years ago, when Mara set her foolish escape plan in motion. Even through the anger Temple feels, he can't help but feel drawn towards her. It's also made clear, over the course of the story, that while Mara doesn't feel like she had a choice, and initially seems quite unconcerned for the immense suffering she's caused, she changes her mind the more time she spends with Temple. The fact that she was sixteen, inexperienced and desperate, and completely unaware of Temple's real identity when she set her plan in motion is also made obvious. In what may seem like a terrible cliche, she now runs an orphanage for young by-blows of the aristocracy, and the reason she needs her brother's debts cleared is because she gave her brother the orphanage's funds to manage, and he carelessly lost them too. If she can't get the money back, the young boys in her care will starve. She can't tell Temple the truth as he makes it very clear that nothing she says or does will sway him from his plan to see her utterly humiliated in the eyes of society.

Temple's business partners and their wives do make cameo appearances in the book, and while they are also deeply furious with Mara to begin with, they start changing their attitudes towards her when they realise that she seems to actually care for Temple, and wants to atone for her past actions. It's more common in romance that the hero is the dislikable scoundrel who needs to win the forgiveness of the heroine and her circle. Here it's the other way around, and it's a brave choice by MacLean. Mara has clearly been sticking her head in the sand, desperately trying not to think about the consequences her actions had. Temple is still a Duke after all, and wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. She's been constantly looking over her shoulder, terrified that someone would find her and unravel her secrets. She has to face ugly facts about herself, and her actions, and show herself to be a worthy partner to Temple. Over the course of the book, she's also able to make him see that while his reputation is not what it used to be, he has a lot of good things in his new life to be thankful for, and maybe polite society isn't all that great to be a welcome part of, after all.

Courtney Milan still has the edge, but Sarah MacLean is now neck and neck with her for the title of best historical romance writer out there right now. It's a well-known tradition that in series of romances, the most interesting character is saved for last. Here it's the founder of the Fallen Angel, Chase, who is left until the end, and after the final two pages of this book (which made my jaw figuratively fall to the floor and swear out loud into an empty living room, I was so blown away), I can honestly say that I will be on tenter-hook. It doesn't look like it'll be out until August of next year, but if the first three books in this series are anything to go by, Courtney Milan may have to kiss her crown good-bye.