A Beginner's Guide to Rakes by Suzanne Enoch

Grade: B+

passion rating: hot

In Ms. Enoch’s latest, The Beginner’s Guide to Rakes, the first paragraph reads: “Very few things in the world could make Oliver Warren, the Marquis of Haybury, flinch. He could count those things on one hand, in fact. The yowling of small children. The squeak of rusted metal. And the mention of that name.”

She had me at yowling.

That name is Diane Benchley. Two years ago, in Vienna, when Diane had just been widowed and made penniless, Oliver and she shared an intensely passionate two weeks which ended when Oliver fled her bed without a word of explanation. Now, Diane, Lady Cameron, has returned to London where she aims to open a gentleman’s club in the only thing her gambling addicted husband left her, a London mansion called Adam House. In order to do so, however, she needs cash: Cash which she plans to borrow — actually demand by blackmail — from Oliver.


Oliver is a man accustomed to getting his own way. When Diane gives him a choice between being banned from every gaming establishment in London (she has a signed statement saying Oliver cheated in a game of cards) or lending her five thousand pounds, Oliver agrees to loan her the money. He does so with two goals in mind. First, he wants to prove to himself he was right to cut and run two years ago. Second, he plans get the proverbial upper hand with Diane. No one, and especially not a woman, is going to tell him what to do.

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