Seriously, K.J. Charles is always a good time, but this one didn’t hit me in my swooners like some of her other stuff has. Maybe one swooner, a couple times. But it was still really good! Just probably won’t be on my re-read rotation. This is apparently the book she wrote to get her creative juices flowing again when she was stuck on the third Will Darling book. I’ve been saving it for a day when I needed something joyful and that I knew would be a good read. Busted it out the other day, and it served its purpose well.
Our main characters are Robin Loxleigh and Sir John “Hart” Hartlebury. Robin and his sister Marianne are fortune-hunters in London for the first time to find wealthy spouses on the basis of nothing but charm and good looks. They are both succeeding . . . at first. Enter Hart, whose niece Alice is Robin’s target, and who he is extremely protective over. Hart senses something is wrong with the picture Robin and Marianne present, and determines to get it out of them. This leads to some delightfully tropetastic encounters between Robin and Hart, who are both secretly gay.
As always, Charles’s handling of class differences is masterful, and she weaves that conflict seamlessly and without embarrassment into her plots. The characters here didn’t burrow all the way into my heart, but they are lovable and endearing, and three dimensional.
And so I say to you again, if you are looking for great historical fiction/romance (this one is lighter on the historical fiction part of that balance than is usual for Charles) you can never go wrong with a K.J. Charles book. This is her version of a straight Regency Romance, and it is good.
