Seducing An Angel by Mary Balogh ***

Seducing an Angel by Mary Balogh

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Listening to Flosnik read Balogh about the Huxtables is getting on my last nerve. Between the plodding, metronome-timed-sounding narration and the (author's) characters' annoying habit of waaaaay-too much introspection in the form of multiple questions in a row and over-analyzing what-ifs, I've had it up to here [imagine my holding my hand at top of head level] with this combination!

This, the 4th in the 5-book series, is Stephen's story, and he is the angel in question, and the seductress is an alleged axe murderess. He's rather goody-two-shoes and wishy-washy, all in all; she's a widow (remember the axe murder part?) who needs a protector. She sets her sights on him as the one...

Balogh describes the heroine's seductress voice as her "velvet voice" and Flosnik developed an even more annoying tone for that, if you can believe it. But Stephen (hero) and Cassandra (heroine) seem to be fated to be together. Her alleged murder-by-axe is really the most ton-shocking behavior of the 4 siblings, out-doing even the fellow who jilted his bride on the wedding day by running away with her sister-in-law. But things are never quite what they seem, are they?


I think Flosnik has either improved some since book 1, and even there she was not quite as annoying as her Lowell and Garwood medievals, or I am getting slightly accustomed to her plodding, metronome speaking tempo. However, there were still long portions that I talked out loud to her and Balogh: Stop it!

I'm still wondering if it's because I have to listen to Flosnik read it or if Balogh has got a very overdone, tiring way of using character's inner monologue to really beat a dead horse every several pages or so. The character thinks: perhaps I should have worn the red dress. If I had worn the red dress, then he would have seen me and I wouldn't have had to search him out. But perhaps it would have been better for him not to see me, so wearing the gray dress was the better way. Unless wearing the gray dress was what caused her to run into me, so perhaps I shouldn't have worn the gray dress, and should have worn the red dress instead. But perhaps the green dress....

(no, it was never about a dress, but it does go on and on and ON AND ON ad nauseum .)

And questions: Did he think of me? Was it just me imagining him thinking of me? Or was he just looking out the window? And if he was just looking out the window, does he ever think of me? Or could I be fooling myself that he thinks of me?

AD NAUSEUM

I did, I spoke outloud to the audiobook: "NO NOT AGAIN!" I would say when this happened for the umpteenth time. The ending was ok - it almost made me give it a half star more.

At Last Comes Love by Mary Balogh ***

At Last Comes Love by Mary Balogh

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Book 3 of the Huxtable Quintet series, on audio, all narrated by Anne Flosnik. What did I think?

I think Flosnik has picked up a little speed in her narration, which makes it eminently more listenable, and there weren't as many scenes for her to be overly emotional (excepting Duncan's mama, who was always emotional). Without the breathy emotional scenes, it wasn't as irritating as Book 2 where she embarrassed me by..., well, read my review.

I think Flosnik's narration has not enhanced the experience of this series, and I wonder if I had read it, if I might have enjoyed it more. But it's too late - now I have her voice in my head.

I think the introduction of domestic violence and sexual depravity into the story might have given it more depth and emotion except I felt inured, and I think that's associated with hearing Flosnik read it. Jo Goodman uses these in pretty much every story, and she still manages to evoke an emotional response in me every time.

I think the gossip-forced-marriage conceit has run its course in this series - surely not everyone in the family will be forced to marry someone they just met and do not even particularly like. Or maybe they will. The 5th book is about cousin Con, where there's apparently a mystery to solve (I think it's Why Does Elliott hate Con?), which I hope makes it a different and potentially better story.

I think I'd rather hear Barbara Rosenblat or Davina Porter read the last 2. Alas, it is not to be. 3 stars all around - not awful but not great.


BELOW IS MY ORIGINAL REVIEW before I went over to Goodreads and wrote my smaller review:

I'm still wondering if Flosnik's funny accent thing she does might be coloring my experience in this series. I have liked other Balogh stories but in this one - well, if the heroines don't stop going on and on and on and ON about the same damn things over and over, I'm just gonna have to whoop one of them! This time it's Margaret, the oldest Huxtable, who keeps thinking and saying "But it's all my fault because I was the one who lied...", over and OVER AND O V E R . grrrr. So many times I found myself actually talking out loud to the characters!

This was another of those "there's a scandal that forces them to marry" conceits, just like the last one in the series. In addition, Margaret's own true love from 12 years ago returned, widowed, and was interested in her and she even admits she might still be in love with him. But does she give him a chance? NO! Really! We are to be led to the conclusion that he was never the right one for her, but meanwhile I kept thinking, she could at least talk to him. She decides to lie to him, which is really where the "over and over" stuff starts - she keeps reminding everyone and his dog that because she lied to Crispin, it was all her fault that Lord Sheringford ended up the focus of gossip that forced them to marry.

Once again, Flosnik's voice comes into question, because then Sheringford and Margaret get into these long-winded preachy conversations that seemed so unrealistic that I let my mind wander so I didn't keep talking to them - out loud, fer chrissake. Would I have felt differently about the prose if I just let the words go in through my eyes to my brain, instead of filtering them through Flosnik's odd voice into my ears?

Ah, a plot: Margaret lies to Crispin to keep from looking pathetic, saying she has a fiance. She actually thinks she'll accept old whatshisname's proposal this year, except guess what: whatshisname got tired of waiting for her, and nabbed another eligible woman. Now Margaret, truly on the shelf at 30, is desperate for a fiance. She runs from the ballroom and smacks right into Duncan, Earl of Sheringford, who is also desperate to marry so he can keep from getting cut off from his funds. He jokingly/seriously says to her: shall we dance, and then get married and live happily ever after? And she accepts.

Oh, wait, then she finds out about his past: 5 years ago he jilted a woman and ran off with that woman's sister-in-law the day of the wedding, living with her in sin until she died 4 months ago. Then, blah blah blah, yada yada yada, we have to have several dozen pages of conflict where Margaret can't decide if she will actually marry Duncan, stringing him along. Of course, there's a perfectly plausible reason why he did what he did - but it would be a spoiler to tell it.

They get married (as you knew they would), there's more conflict, then HEA. 3 stars.

Then Comes Seduction by Mary Balogh ***

Then Comes Seduction by Mary Balogh

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm conflicted about this book. I wrote a longer review on my blog. Basically, narrator Anne Flosnik is finally starting to read at a normal pace (yay!) but also showed signs of being too involved. She embarrassed me during the wedding night consummation scene!! And not because it was that hot, mind you - it was because she got as involved as our heroine supposedly did! I don't mind hearing a hot love scene narrated well, but I do mind feeling like I'm eavesdropping on a private moment.

Beyond the narration, though, the storyline had me confused and frustrated. I kept waiting for our lovely heroine to develop some backbone and stand up to the hero for his rakehell ways, and when she finally (sort of) did, it was too little, too late, and the narrator got so emotional I felt the need to pass her a tissue.

My basic conflict about the series is this: would I have enjoyed it more if I had read it? I just can't decide if Flosnik's narration changes the way the story unfolds or not. I never felt the development of love between the protagonists.

And yet, I didn't hate it, so it gets stuck in 3 star hell - mediocre, ok, liked it well enough, yawn.

(what follows is my first pass on reviewing it, only in this blog:)

I'm just not sure what to make of this book. Let me make a list...

Good: Flosnik read faster. She wasn't nearly as plodding and, well, obnoxious, as in other books I've heard her narrate. That made for a much, much better listen.

Bad: She really got into the emotions of the characters. Frankly, I thought she was going to fake an orgasm during the wedding night consummation scene. And I wanted to pass her a handkerchief when Katherine started wailing in the woods, she seemed so upset herself.

That leads me to the next part of my review. Was this plot hard to follow or what? First, we have the drunken rake, making a completely ridiculous wager about our heroine, Katherine. Second, we have Katherine, a completely green naif, just wandering into the dark woods alone with him and letting him almost slide into home base in a matter of minutes. She thinks maybe she has missed out on love because she hasn't allowed herself to feel danger. This makes me think she goes willingly into the dark with said rake (our hero, Jasper). Nope, she was just too naive and stupid to make sense of what she was doing. He decides at the last minute, completely out of character and for no reason that I can make any sense of at all, to throw the wager and lose, leaving her gasping for release and practically begging him to keep going.

Now, I thought, she will become the clever heroine and make him want her. Nope. They are separate for 3 years.

OK, NOW there will be a reason for them to actually fall in love. They flirt a little, and just when you think they will start to fall in love BAM! Spoiler? A ninny of a character somehow creates a scandal which brings about their having to marry, even though now she hates him. Or something.

Was this meandering storyline because of the narration, or was it actually a meandering storyline?

Now they are married, and on the wedding night - where the poor narrator got so involved I was almost embarrassed - another wager creeps in, and they agree to remain celibate after The First Consummation as part of the wager. (WTF?) I just want to mention that, considering she was still (technically) a virgin, not much was made of it - like, uh, the stuff you think of with virgins. And despite his love-making technique of a couple of kisses then The Main Course, she got quite involved (or at least the narrator did). The next time they make love - her second time, 3 or 4 weeks later - she is a practiced rider, if you get my drift. (shakes head) Again, not much in the way of foreplay for this rakehell. Just git 'er done. Yee haw.

Plot: rake almost ravishes innocent heroine, but doesn't; 3 years go by, and they meet again; no one, including either of them, knows why they continue to be seen together but dang if that doesn't make a scandal, which produces a forced marriage; heroine spouts a lot of long winded psychobabble about why he is like he is; there's some whiny, mean distant relatives involved that create additional conflict; the book ends without any real resolution of that storyline, but the hero and heroine have each professed love (and are already married). The End.

In spite of my snarky review, I didn't hate it. I just didn't really love it, and when it ended, I thought: wait a minute, what about CHARLOTTE? (maybe I fell asleep and missed that resolution) So, 3 stars, and it has occurred to me that maybe I should speed up the player for the next book to really get Flosnik's storytelling going at a clip.

First Comes Marriage by Mary Balogh ***

First Comes Marriage by Mary Balogh

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm listening to the Huxtable Quintet series in order, so that I can do an actual review of the new release of #5. I've liked the handful of Baloghs I've read to date, but have mixed feelings about narrator Anne Flosnik, so I approached this task with not a little trepidation.

As a setup for a series, there was a lot of introduction to do - meet all of the Huxtables, and probably some of their future mates, although the first book deals with Vanessa, the widowed middle daughter, and Elliott, Viscount something-or-other in line for a dukedom. We learn that the 4 Huxtable siblings have been living in near poverty in a small village, and that the youngest, Stephen, has become an earl much to the surprise of everyone. Apparently the Huxtable grandfather was estranged from his family and no one ever thought Stephen might be in line for the title. Elliott is the guardian of the Stephen as the new earl.

Flosnik's narration wasn't nearly as off-putting as some of her Julie Garwood and Elizabeth Lowell medievals, thank gawd, but somehow I kept wondering if I might have enjoyed reading in print more. She has a sort of plodding way of narrating, almost as if someone has asked her to slow down, or read by metronome. She did use different voices for the characters, with her Margaret/eldest daughter voice being the low gravelly voice of a much older woman, and even Vanessa's voice pitched too low for being all of 24. The story itself, in the midst of changing the Huxtable way of life and meeting everyone, had very little in the way of actual conflict - it's a marriage of convenience that takes a long time to develop into a HEA, and not a particularly convincing one at that.

At least Flosnik didn't do that awful, dramatic dragging out of final syllables like she does in Garwood and Lowell - whew! Still, 3 stars - ok, not great, that's for both the story and the narration.

One Night For Love by Mary Balogh ****

As I started this story, as I read the first 100 pages, I was sure this was going to be a keeper. What a unique story! Of course, I've read the "jilted at the altar" plot line before, but this one had so many unique twists...

Neville and Lauren had been promised to each other practically from birth - but when Neville decided to rebel against his fate, his parents, his life, he joined the army and told her not to wait for him. But she did wait, and now it was their wedding day. Lauren couldn't believe anyone could be this happy - and she didn't realize how badly it would end for her, in just a few hours.

While Neville was in the army, he had been wed briefly - one night only - to Lily, before she was shot in the heart and he was also wounded. He spent one month in the hospital recovering, where he was told Lily died on the field. They had had to leave the dead and keep moving. But Lily hadn't died - she had been captured and was held prisoner for several months before being released. And now she was making her way back to Neville, and she entered the church just before Lauren.

Of course, he couldn't be married to two women, so the wedding was called off, and Lily was now the Countess - Lily, who had been the daughter of an enlisted man, who was illiterate, who had never lived in England and knew nothing of peers and the ton and titles and wealth.

I was so touched by their predicament, and by the way they were now reacting to being reunited. They didn't have the joyful reunion dream that had kept Lily alive. There was now the specter of her life as a prisoner, being raped and used, between them. There was her pride and her humiliation, thinking that Lauren was a better match, more suited to the life as a countess.

And there was the fact that the priest who had married them had been killed before registering their marriage license, and that her own copies of the papers were destroyed when she was captured - rendering their marriage null in the eyes of the state. Neville was prepared to keep it a secret between them, and get a special license to be married again, but Lily's pride won out, and she refused. And left.

I really did love the story and it's unique twists, even Lily's unwillingness to stay with Neville for love, thinking that it would eventually be destroyed by her inabilities. Maybe she was right about that.

But it dropped to a 4 star read for me towards the end when Lily still wouldn't give in to love, still made Neville wait and wait and wait and wait. Please! I finally tired of her toying with his affections, even when he remained steadfast. And the plot twist of her true parentage seemed like a little too much sugar and sweetness - I could have loved her as the base-born sergeant's daughter, even though that twist also brought the suspense into the plot.

Ah, but it fits in my A to Z challenge, my AAR Top 100 of 2007 Quest (I was wrong about that one), the Serial Reader's Challenge AND as my second round of books in the Winter 2008 Challenge!

A Summer To Remember by Mary Balogh ***

A Summer To Remember is the first I MEAN SECOND in the Slightly series, a sort of prelude as it were. Somehow the magic wasn't there for me with this book - too wordy, or something.

The heroine is Lauren - she was left at the altar by her fiance Neville when it was revealed, while she waited in the back of the church to enter, that he had been married and his wife whom he thought had died was alive - and there! (apparently this is the plot of the first book) He apparently had never even told anyone in his family about this marriage, which was confusing since Lauren had been raised in his family since she was 3. I kept trying to figure out how she could not have known - it was something about his having married her while away, in the military or something. (after I read the FIRST book I guess I'll understand better - ETA I have now read the first book, and since he thought her dead, and they had only been married 1 day, and it wasn't anyone the family knew, he never talked about it to anyone. Whew. It made more sense reading it.)

Anyway, she's very prim and proper and has decided it is her lot in life to be a spinster, and is planning the very same when she witnesses the very roguish rakish Kit fighting off 3 local yokels who made some unwelcome overtures to a milk maid. He defended the milk maid's honor, bare-chested and brawling and then took as his prize a lusty kiss - all observed by Lauren, who is horrified.

Then Kit reveals to his friends that he is being called home, after having been banished for 3 years, to marry his dead brother's fiancee. It seems he thought he was in love with this young woman when his brother announced their betrothal, and he fought the brother - and was sent away. The brother died, leaving Freyja alone, and now the parents think they will make it up to him by signing a marriage contract for the 2 of them. Only now he doesn't want her.

He's also suffering from guilt about his younger brother, who went to war with him and managed to lose an arm and an eye to torture while accompanying Kit on some spy mission.

The upshot of all this is Kit wants to find a young woman to marry before going home so he can spoil the parents' plans - and the friends decide Lauren is just the one.

They set up instead a Counterfeit Betrothal - oooops, Ms Balogh already used that title and conceit... - and went together to his parents to thwart them. Actually, what Lauren has in mind is to help poor Kit get back in his family's good graces, and hopefully also marry Freyja after she (Lauren) jilts him, on purpose, so she can go live that spinster life she sooo craves. She thinks he's still secretly in love with Freyja.

Blah blah blah, yada yada, they manage to both fall in love along the way and both help the other get over their phobias and problems, but - ah, the honor - they cannot betray their original deal, so she leaves and breaks it off. Guess what happens. Hint, it's a romance and the main characters always get their HEA.

It's an AAR Top 100 for 2007, and the beginning of a long series. No notable pets, no besotted heroes - just your typical pretend engagement. Sigh. Yawn. 3 stars. OH I cannot believe I read this out of order - it's the SECOND and One Night For Love is the FIRST in the series. Dang. I have got to get my notes in order!

The Notorious Rake by Mary Balogh ****

Ah, so I figured out the connections amongst The Trysting Place, A Counterfeit Betrothal and this book. The hero of this book is Lord Edmond Waite from The Trysting Place - the man who pursued Felicity Wren first as a mistress, then as a bride. The heroine is Mary, Lady Mornington, Marc's "friend" from A Counterfeit Betrothal. At the beginning, Mary is trying to get over her loneliness from the loss of her friendship with Marc, and Edmond is still nursing his wounds from being jilted by Felicity - and suffering from the effects of his jilting of his long-time betrothed, Dorothea.

This is the deepest and darkest of the three books, with the accidental death of Edmond's brother some 15 years before coloring his every action from that day forward. He had even considered suicide, which isn't surprising considering his father, his other brother and even his mother - who died shortly after the accidental death - considered him a murderer. The facts of the death were really so shocking that I found it hard to believe that his father could have been so cruel, considering his father was elemental in the circumstances that surrounded the accident.

Those facts drove Edmond to be the rake, the libertine he was - and his shocking jilting of Dorothea for Felicity (in the previous book) made him persona non grata to the ton which exacerbated his condition. It was just happenstance that he appeared in a party at Vauxhall Gardens where Mary went at the invitation of a friend, hoping to re-start her lonely social life. And it was her phobia of lightning that forced her into his arms when they were trapped out walking the gardens.

This was a shocker of a scene for me - her previous books have never had the hero and heroine in a sexual clinch by page 15 before, especially scandalous since they had just met! Mary is certainly ashamed of her actions - her willingness even - but allows him to take her to the home he maintains for mistresses (none currently in residence) and spend the night.

It seems they are both surprised and confused by the attraction. She is not his type at all - she's a bluestocking, hosting weekly intellectual salons in her home; she's petite, not a striking beauty. He is nothing like what she wants or needs in a man - his roving eye alone puts him beyond the pale. Still, he pursues her, against her wishes, and to the outrage of her friends and acquaintances.

Balogh puts an interesting twist into the story in the form of Lord Goodrich - a widower with grown children who pursues Mary for his next wife. Goodrich also maintains a mistress and her 5 children by him, unbeknownst to Mary, and had even before his first wife died. Mary never did find out, but it made an interesting comparison - was Goodrich really better than Edmond? After all, Edmond wasn't married and had no illegitimate children to support. He just liked to party, and put up a good front drinking and gambling, though actually never to excess.

It's Edmond's meddling Aunt Eleanor who provides the catalysts in the book. After Edmond takes Mary to a garden party there, Eleanor can see that Edmond has fallen in love with her, and goes out of her way to include the 2 of them in invitations. As her 60th birthday approaches, she hosts a week-long house party, and invites both Mary and Lord Goodrich, as well as her nephew. Indeed, the surprise guests include her brother and nephew - Edmond's father and brother from whom he is still estranged. Forcing Edmond to face his past and reconcile with his father and brother eventually brings out his true inner nature.

Well, actually, it's a sort of complicated psychological story about a man who has suppressed his true self, running from it and trying as hard as possible to be the very opposite, to live up to the reputation he gained through gossip and innuendo. The true inner nature is what Mary reacts to, and falls in love with even though he hides it from everyone else.

OK - not sure I've explained it well. To be honest, I liked the previous book quite a lot better, but this one I still really liked, so it's a 4 star read and an AAR Top 100 of 2007 checked off.

A Counterfeit Betrothal by Mary Balogh *****

What a delightful and different story this was! It's listed as the 2nd in the series, between The Trysting Place and A Notorious Rake, which is an AAR Top 100 of 2007 - so I collected the series from eBay to read in order. I don't recall any connected characters from The Trysting Place showing up in this book (perhaps at the wedding?) - but I am so glad I read this!

Although the backcover blurb leads you to believe this is the story of Lady Sophia Bryant arranging with an old family friend, Lord Francis Sutton, to have a pretend engagement, it's equally the story of the reason behind their deception. Sophia's parents have been estranged for 14 years, and in an attempt - a la Parent Trap - to get them back together, Sophia tries to come up with a plan that will force them to get together. She decides that a completely impossible marriage offer will do the trick - Marc and Olivia will have to get together to convince Sophia not to go through with the relationship.

Who is more impossible than Francis? Practically from birth, he has been teasing her and goading her and getting her into scrapes and trouble as she followed him and his older brothers everywhere. There is no way in the world she would ever consider actually becoming engaged to him, and she knows he is the one person her parents will never allow - so she will throw fits and threaten to elope with him or worse - until she knows they have realized their love for one another and gotten back together. And then, of course, Sophia and Francis will cry off and go their merry ways. She, for one, never intends to actually marry anyone, especially not Francis.

Francis, a few years older and really not much wiser, decides it's an amusing way to spend the next few days - or weeks - or, good God, not years? So he goes along with the plan, a sort of anchor in her madness.

Their dialog scenes are hysterically funny - he continues, as he did when they were children, to goad her into arguments and tease her and... well, they have to kiss every now and then to keep up the charade, do they not?

But the real love story is Marc and Olivia's story. Fourteen years ago, Olivia insisted Marc go to London to a friend's wedding while she stayed home with measle-ridden Sophia, against Marc's wishes to stay home with his family. While out on the town with his friends, they dare him and goad him and he gets drunk and visits a brothel with the them. Unable to keep it secret, the guilt-ridden Marc confesses all to Olivia, who, in her innocence and naivite, cannot find it in her heart to forgive him. Ever. He leaves, but continues to write begging her forgiveness for six months. She finally breaks it off, and they have only exchanged polite letters about Sophia's welfare ever since.

Of course, Sophia's news does bring them together, and her father hosts a house party with Francis' parents and their friends. Trying to convince her not to go through with the betrothal is more difficult than they originally thought, considering they were even younger when they themselves wed, so they agree. Sophia, keeping up the deception, decides it will be best if they go ahead and plan the wedding for right away so that Olivia must stay at her husband's house. Francis laughingly goes along, threatening all along to commit her to Bedlam for the madness of her plan. She even slips from time to time, talking about after they are wed - where will they honeymoon? And perhaps her parents would stay together until the first child is born... Oh, wait, they are not actually going to go through with the wedding! Right! She would sooner wed a toad!

The counterpoint to the farce is the underlying agony of Marc and Olivia - both still in love with the other but unable to close the breach and admit their feelings and forgive each other and themselves for the past 14 years.

Marc and Olivia are really the hero and heroine of the book, in my opinion - it is really their story, of learning to love and trust and forgive against the backdrop of the two young lovers, er, friends, well, enemies, but... It's a delightful romp and a touching love story, braided together.

5 stars.

The Trysting Place by Mary Balogh ****

This is the first of a series of 3 books by Mary Balogh, and the second is A Counterfeit Betrothal, followed by The Notorious Rake, an AAR Top 100 Romance for 2007. Wouldn't you know they would not only be out of print, but also difficult to find? So I ended up getting them on eBay and really spending more than I should for 20+ year old 240 page books!

But I'm glad I did. It was an interesting read, and as I got to the end, I was even thinking it was a 5 star read. However, I re-thought and decided I "really liked it" as a 4 star read.

Lady Felicity Wren is a widow returning for the first time in years to her childhood home. She now has money and social standing and spent the 7 years with her elderly husband traveling and living the high life. Her parents and younger siblings are delighted to see her - well they should be, as her marriage to Lord Wren was done to save them from financial ruin. It was also at the cost of her true love to neighbor Tom Russell, her childhood pal.

She sees Tom again, and decides she has finally put their childhood love aside and sees him only as a friend. Poor Tom - he sees her and realizes that he thought he too had put it aside, but had not. His feelings are engaged again, but he can see that she doesn't return his love.

Her younger twin sisters convince her to take them back with her to London for their first Season, and Tom decides rashly to accompany them. Felicity is also thinking of this being her own coming-out, as it were. She can now look for a younger husband amonst the ton, and she sets her sights on the handsome Lord Edmond Waite.

However, Waite is all but promised to a childhood friend who is also titled. He pursues Felicity not for marriage but for an affair.

The story is truly entertaining, especially the exploits of the twins and their younger brother. But it's almost painful to follow Felicity's story - she continues to believe that Lord Waite will dump his almost-betrothed for her hand in marriage. To that end, she convinces poor Tom to pretend to be engaged to her to make Waite jealous, even realizing what a burden she is placing on Tom.

Of course, she believes Tom really doesn't wish to ever marry, and that he only feels brotherly towards her. Once she realizes Waite will never have her and starts to think she might actually have feelings for Tom, she decides it would be best for her to leave Tom rather than force him into a loveless marriage with her that he would resent.

Somehow, even though I kept thinking how much I resented Felicity's mistreatment of Tom, Balogh managed to sweep me into the story so that I found it a page-turner at the end: what would Felicity do?? And even then, the ending doesn't really wrap things up neatly (there are things left undone) so I should have been less satisfied. Yet I was satisfied, and would recommend it - but don't spend $20 on eBay. 4 stars.

No Man's Mistress by Mary Balogh ***

This is the sequel to More Than A Mistress and the hero is Tresham's younger brother Ferdinand. While the story is not the usual virginal heroine and rakish hero, it's not entirely unique either, and frankly the heroine annoyed the hell out of me most of the book.

In fact, shocking revelation, Ferdinand is not only not a rake - he's, well, I'll just say inexperienced. However, Miss Viola Thornhill, the pretty young thing he finds living in a country manor he won at cards from the current Earl of Bamber, is quite the opposite, as it turns out. And she's convinced the manor is hers - willed to her by the late Duke of Bamber, even though Ferdinand had his lawyers research the issue and determined that will provision did not exist.

Viola used a conceit I recall from perhaps a Jo Goodman book - she went out of her way to make sure Ferdinand hated living in the country, engaging the servants and the neighbors in her tricks. Unfortunately for Viola, not only does Ferdinand figure it out and take it as a challenge, he decides country squiring might be his true calling. He teaches the local children Latin and cricket, and joins the church choir. Subjects she thought would bore him he finds fascinating - and he joins the ladies' sewing circle meeting and reads them Pride and Prejudice while they sew. Reads it well, I might add.

And Viola's reaction? She hates him for thwarting her. Go figure.

She has a major secret or two - and it enters spoiler territory to reveal them here. Suffice it to say, she challenges Ferdie to a bet with the manor as the prize - and wins. But does she stay there and live in the manor after winning? Nooooo, she's too proud to do that. So off to London she goes, partly because she learns her sister is about to enter into a bargain with the devil and she must stop her.

Oh, whatever. The story was fun, and I myself was totally besotted with Ferdinand, even if Viola was too full of herself to see his charm. It was Viola and her complete wrong-headedness about everything that made this book a chore. Was there ever any heroine so unlovable? Maybe - but keep them out of my books, please!!

3 stars for the agony of putting up with a too-proud-to-live heroine.

More Than A Mistress by Mary Balogh *****

I'm always glad when I finish a book with a smile on my face and some amount of afterglow in the air - and More Than A Mistress did this for me today! It's an AAR Top 100 of 2007 (yay, another 1 checked off) and the first in a series of 2, followed by No Man's Mistress.

In this story, our heroine, Jane, rushes to stop a duel - and in the confusion, our hero, Jocelyn, Duke of Tresham, is sorta accidentally shot in the calf. Jane is subsequently hired on to be Tresham's nurse, and in the 3 weeks of his recovery, they develop a friendship of sorts. Tresham is prickly and quite full of himself, but Jane never lets him get the better of her - she is in all ways his match. At the end of the 3 weeks, not wanting to part from her, he convinces Jane to become his mistress - and she convinces him to create a contract for their "business" arrangement so that she is taken care of financially even after he tires of her company.

Tresham realizes, late, that Jane is not what she has portrayed herself as: she is not the product of a good orphanage where the children are given a good education. Jane is actually Lady Sara, daughter of a deceased earl, being hunted by her cousin, the current earl, as a murderer and a thief, and on the lam. Her service as Tresham's mistress allowed her to hide and still maintain a good life. The fact that a true relationship had grown while she was in his employ didn't diminish the fact that she was keeping secrets from him the entire time.

I enjoyed the story, and the slow revelation of their secrets. Over time, Jane helps Tresham realize his true inner self and to show more of his artistic side as a musician and painter. When he finally realizes she has gotten him to trust her and reveal his secrets to her while she apparently doesn't trust him enough to reveal her own, he is determined to make her rue the day they met - and the true challenge is on.

It was fun to see the two of them match wits, although I must say I agreed with Tresham that Jane was hypocritical, urging him to show his own true nature while withholding her own. She did plan to tell him, at some point, but she waited too late!

The secondary characters were interesting and fully fleshed out - Tresham's 2 buddies especially - and the villain (the cousin) got his comeuppance in the end, well, as much as an earl can, in any case. Even the Bow Street Runner, who was, after all, only doing his job, was a likeable enough character.

The very end had a little surprise that I found fun and romantic, too. I enjoyed the story - 5 stars.

The Secret Pearl by Mary Balogh *****

This is a new-to-me author, although she's been publishing for over 20 years. She has 5 titles currently in the AAR Top 100 for 2007.

The book starts out with an emotional punch: a man picks up a prostitute outside Drury Lane Theater, and takes her to an inn. We learn, in the course of conduct of business, she's a virgin - and he's apparently a ruthless, heartless and violent cad. It's a shocking scene to observe as the reader.

Then, slowly, their story unfolds as we learn what drove her to sell her virtue, and what drove him to take it the way he did.

Adam is the Duke of Ridgeway - he's a scarred veteran of Waterloo, who returned a sort of war hero after being presumed dead for a year. His younger brother Thomas, no longer the Duke, leaves for parts unknown - and Adam marries Sybil, and they have a child, Pamela. But all is not right with their marriage. Although she was his sweetheart before he left for the war, after his presumed death she took up with Thomas and they had plans to wed. Assuming Adam drove Thomas away, she married Adam, reluctantly, but never forgave him. I'll leave it to your imagination why she felt compelled to marry at all...

Fleur was the daughter of a baron who died when she was 8. She was raised in the family of the next baron, her father's cousin. After that baron's death, his son Matthew is now Fleur's guardian, and in control of her finances, of her life. She wants to marry the local Reverend; Matthew obsessively wants her for himself. In a near-rape scene, she fights back - and Matthew's valet is killed accidentally. Matthew convinces her it was murder and she will hang - and to seal the deal, he claims she also stole family jewels. She flees to London, penniless and homeless, under an assumed name, with only one thing that belongs to her - her body.

We have two tortured souls here who find each other, under the worst possible circumstances. Redemption seems an impossible goal for both of them. In a fit of guilt over taking her virginity, Adam has his secretary locate Fleur and hire her as his daughter's governess, without her knowing it was him - until he shows up, several weeks later.

The story contains some serious hot buttons for romance: adultery, for one, on both Adam's and his wife's parts. For Adam, we learn it was just the once. For Sybil, numerous times, numerous men. Adam continues to try to find some common ground with her, for the sake of their daughter Pamela; for her part, Sybil is a weak, tortured, selfish woman who suffers from melancholy as well as a respiratory illness.

The relationship between Adam and Fleur develops slowly over the course of the book - Fleur is at first traumatized and revolted by him, but not, as he thinks, by his scars, but by their first encounter. His intentions, however, are noble, and he truly wants what is best for her. In her he finds the first true happiness - his "pearl" - that he has felt with a woman. Slowly, excrutiatingly so, their friendship develops into something more solid and lasting.

At one point during the book, I felt let down by the heroine's actions - she seemed to have run away from Matthew without even trying to get any help locally, and as it turns out, she did have people she could have turned to. But as the story went on, I was drawn more and more into the romance, even the utter bleakness of the situation, knowing Adam wouldn't do anything to jeopardize his daughter's or his wife's reputations. The tension, the anguish of the situation make the ending that much sweeter when the HEA finally comes to fruition.

So it went from a 4 star to a 5 star read for me by the end, and I've ticked another Top 100 off my list and have a long backlist of books by Ms Balogh to glom, once I get that TBR pile under control...