The Revenge of Lord Eberlin by Julia London

Grade: B+

passion rating: hot

Dear Ms. London—

I really enjoyed your latest novel, The Revenge of Lord Eberlin. Recently, thanks to the many thoughtful and well-written reviews here at Dear Author, I’ve been reading books out of what I think of as my comfort zone. And it’s been great. I loved Heat, disliked Beautiful Disaster, and am reading my first M/M romance. But my first love in romance is the historical and this entry into your The Secrets of Hadley Green series was a great reading date. It’s completely traditional, uses tropes common to historical romance, and even has an epilogue, a currently en vogue plot device I usually deplore. It’s set in one of those common and oft annoying British small towns full of judgmental old women and lavish estates kept running smoothly by a servant class completely satisfied with their lowered status in life. I loved it.

I’ve read the first book in the series, The Year of Living Scandalously, and thought it pretty good. That book begins when the heroine of this book, Lily Boudine, is eight. Lily, an orphan, lives with her uncle and aunt, at Ashwood, a palatial estate in the small West Sussex town of Hadley Green. It is the summer of 1793 and the night of the annual Ashwood gala. Lily sees two things that night that change the lives of many. The first is a couple whom she can’t quite make out embracing in the shadows on the stairs. The second, which she sees just a few minutes later, is a horse trotting away into the night. Lily recognizes the horse; it’s that of Mr. Scott, the woodcarver who has spent many an hour at Ashwood carving the detailed dual staircase that dominates the mansion’s main entry. She wonders why he would have been at Ashwood—the gala is for the Quality and Joseph Scott is certainly not that.

In the morning, Lily awakes to commotion. A dreadful theft has happened. Sometime during the night, someone pilfered the Ashwood jewels, a set of large priceless rubies given to the first Lord Ashwood by Edward the IV for the former’s loyalty during the War of the Roses. As Lily watches her beloved governess be questioned unsympathetically, she blurts out, “I think I know who took them.” She tells of seeing Mr. Scott riding away and, within days, Mr. Scott is hanged for the crime.

The Revenge of Lord Eberlin also begins in a summer, this one in 1808. For the first time in fifteen years, Tobin Scott, now 28, the eldest son of Joseph Scott, has returned to Hadley Green. The past years were harsh ones for the Scotts. His father’s execution destroyed his family; his mother and youngest brother died within a year of his father’s death, ruined by filth and poverty in the slums of London. Unable to provide for his younger sister Charity, Tobin took her to a church run poorhouse where she found work as a chamber maid. Tobin himself was impressed into service on a ship as a cook’s helper and, for ten years, sailed the world, never knowing whether or not his sister lived.

Tobin, though, like all heroes, is a survivor and now has all the trappings of success. He’s Lord Eberlin—he bought the title from a beleaguered Dane—and has unlimited wealth earned as an arms trader. He’s rescued Charity (and her illegitimate daughter) from a life of cleaning the refuse of others. He has everything he’s ever wanted except for the one thing he desires most: revenge on the house of Ashwood, currently headed by Lily Boudine....

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She Tempts the Duke by Lorraine Heath

Grade: C

passion rating: hot

The beautiful and unexpectedly brainy — in the early 1940’s, she designed and patented a sophisticated weapons system, technology is still in use today - actress Hedy Lamarr once said, “I can excuse everything but boredom.” Ms. Lamarr would not have excused Ms. Heath’s latest, the dull She Tempts the Duke. The novel, the first of a series of books entitled The Lost Lords of Pembrook, introduces three brothers who reappear in society after being “lost” for twelve years. Lord, I wish they’d stayed lost.

As the book begins, fourteen year-old Sebastian Easton is imprisoned in a tower with his two brothers: his twin Tristan and their younger sibling Rafe. They’ve been locked away by their homicidal uncle, Lord David, who Sebastian is sure has just killed the boys’ father and plans next to murder the three lads so he, Lord David, may become the eighth duke of Keswick. Sebastian believes — and this is the tale’s opening line - “Tonight was the night they would die.” Instead, they are rescued by the girl next door, Sebastian’s best friend, Lady Mary Wynne-Jones, in an entirely improbable scene. Mary pleads with Sebastian to seek safety in her father’s home but he, sure nowhere is safe from his uncle’s machinations, tell her he and his brothers must flee. He promises he’ll return when he’s grown, determined even as a lad to reclaim his title and his estate Pembrook.

Twelve years pass and Sebastian and his brothers remain lost — no one has seen or heard of them since the night the three vanished. Mary has spent almost all that time caged in a convent — her father’s punishment for the “mischief” she caused by helping her friends escape — but has finally been allowed to return to society. The first ball she attends is hosted by the ambitious Lord David and his insipid wife. Lord David has petitioned the Court of the Chancery to grant him the official title of Duke of Keswick — his absent nephews have all reached their majorities and thus he may have them declared dead - and his wife is throwing this fete in anticipatory glee. Suddenly, the steward who’s been proclaiming the names of the nobility as they arrive, announces “His Grace, the Duke of Keswick,” “Lord Tristan Easton,” and “Lord Rafe Easton.” Mary, with rest of the chattering, dancing ton, is staggered to see, standing on the landing, “Three towering men with unfashionably long hair as black as midnight.” The legendary lost lords are back.

They have not, however, returned unscathed. Sebastian, who spent the interim years as a soldier, is brutally scarred and missing an eye. He is a hard man, consumed with vengeance (he wants to obliterate his uncle) and fixated on regaining Pembrook and his birthright. The rest of the ton shuns the brothers, but Mary stalwartly defends the three and seeks out Sebastian’s company. Her behavior earns her the ire of her friends and family, and ultimately causes her fickle fiancé to jilt her. Sebastian, feeling responsible for her now precarious social standing, insists they marry. She, despite his assertion he has no heart left to give, accedes to his will. She thinks, “She knew his childish heart had belonged to her. She refused to believe that she couldn’t possess his adult heart as well.”

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Time Out by Jill Shalvis

Grade: B-

passion rating: hot

Dear Ms. Shalvis:

I’ve read much of what you’ve written in the past five years. I’ve found quite a few of your contemporaries irresistible: Animal Attraction and The Sweetest Thing were two of my favorite reads in 2011. I’ve been less enthralled with your Harlequin Blaze books; they seem to me to be more formulaic than your longer novels. But, then again, they should be, right? The Blaze series has a formula—I know this because I went and looked it up on the Blaze website.

The Blaze line of red-hot reads is changing the face of Harlequin and creating a continual buzz with readers. The series features sensuous, highly romantic, innovative stories that are sexy in premise and execution. The tone of the books can run from fun and flirtatious to dark and sensual. Writers can push the boundaries in terms of characterization, plot and explicitness. Submissions should have a very contemporary feel — what it’s like to be young and single today. Heroes and heroines should be in their early 20s and up. We want to see an emphasis on the physical relationship developing between the couple: fully described love scenes along with a high level of fantasy, playfulness and eroticism are needed. And don’t forget, secondary characters and subplots contribute to the richness of story and plot action we look for in a successful Blaze novel.

Are you a Cosmo girl at heart? A fan of Sex and the City or Red Shoe Diaries? Or maybe you just have an adventurous spirit. If so, then Blaze is the series for you!

I am not a Cosmo girl at heart—I’m more of a Slate.com adult—and I think that’s why your book, though well-executed and entertaining, left me feeling unsatisfied.

In Time Out, the very masculine, absolutely gorgeous hero with “silky, dark” attractively tousled hair is Mark Diego, the “youngest, baddest, sexiest” head coach in the NHL—he coaches a fictional team, the Sacramento Mammoths. Mark is a typical Harlequin leading man: wealthy, in superb physical shape, authoritative, and utterly self-assured. He’s the kind of guy who only needs to level “a long, hard look” at anyone who challenges him in order for the person to fall quavering back in fear. The Mammoths, who just lost the Stanley Cup finals on a controversial call to their archrivals the (real) Anaheim Ducks, are currently all over the news for a “seedy bar fight”–are there any other kinds of bar fights?–a few of their players instigated against the Ducks. The fight came to an abrupt end when Mark “strode up out of nowhere,” shoved his behaving badly boys out of the bar and into his big black SUV. Mark and the Ducks’ coach have managed to keep their players from being suspended by proposing “a solution that would involve giving back to the fans who’d supported the two teams”: the brawlers will spend their summer doing volunteer labor in their home communities. The Mammoth players will be working in Santa Rey, a working class town devastated by wildfires the previous summer. Mark grew up in Santa Rey and left it as soon as he could, determined to “do something big, something to lift him out of the poverty of his upbringing.”

Now he’s back, driving that big black SUV, and pretty pissed about the whole thing. He’s been working his ass off for the past seven months and really should be on vacation. But no, rather than lounging on a Caribbean beach, a scantily-clad babe on one arm and a drink in the other, he’s stuck babysitting his two youngest players in a low-rent town. There’s an upside, however. The minute he pulls into town, headed to the community center his brother Rick runs—his players are going to coach summer league ball there in the evenings—he runs into Rainey Saunders (she’s the junior sports coordinator of the center), she of the “perfect body,” with whom he shares—big surprise here—a past.

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A Lady Never Surrenders by Sabrina Jeffries

Grade: C-

passion rating: hot

Dear Ms. Jeffries—

I was ambivalent about investing my time in the last of your Hellions of Halstead Hall series. I’ve read the first four with varying levels of satisfaction.  I found The Truth about Lord Stoneville, the first book, that of Oliver, the eldest Sharpe child, to be a contrived and insubstantial tale. I enjoyed the second, A Hellion in her Bed, Jarret’s tale—you did a nice job of explaining the ins and outs of making ale in the 19th century. I loved the third, How to Woo a Reluctant Lady, Minerva’s story—it was one of the better romances I read in 2010. (Giles was a dream hero: sexy, smart, and completely encouraging of his love’s dreams for herself.) The fourth, To Wed a Wild Lord, was a chore to read and, at its end, I didn’t give a damn about who killed the Sharpes’ parents—a mystery woven throughout all the books—or whether or not their busybody of a grandmother would release her fortune—all the books are based on her threat that the five siblings must marry within a year or else she will disinherit them. But, I did read the first four and, after contemplating the final book for several weeks, I decided I’d see how the series concluded.

My verdict is: not especially well. A Lady Never Surrenders, the story of Celia, the youngest Sharpe sister, isn’t the worst historical I’ve read lately. (That would be Susan Johnson’s Seductive as Flame.) But as I read it, I wondered at its mediocrity. Actually, that’s a lie. As I read it, I was vexed the book was phlegmatic and prosaic. I’ve enjoyed a number of your other books:  How to Woo a Reluctant Lady is a jewel of a love story; the 1999 book The Forbidden Lord is an excellent tale, full of steam and wit. I’d hoped for better here and was thwarted.

This novel’s pairing was inevitable—anyone who has read even one of the Hellion books knows Celia Sharpe and Jackson Pinter, the Bow Street Runner hired by Oliver to investigate any number of things, are destined to have hot sex and realize the other is their soul mate.  So, I began this book—after skimming the preface, an artificial sounding letter from the meddlesome grandmother, an annoying plot device used in all the  Hellion books—wondering what Celia’s and Jackson’s story would be. What would restrain their romp toward romance? After reading almost 400 pages—the lyric “the long and winding road” kept popping into my head and not in a good way–I was disgruntled to see their story is nothing more than a wisp of a conflict explained by the overused axiom: “we can’t be together because we come from different worlds.”

This plot already appeared in The Truth about Lord Stoneville. Yes, the sex roles were reversed. In that tome, Oliver’s of the nobility, Maria’s from the commercial class. Readers know the Sharpes have already dealt successfully with this challenge. It makes no sense to devote hundreds of pages of prose to surmounting an obstacle this family has already overcome. The Sharpes themselves point this out several times. It’s clear to Celia’s brothers and sister that Jackson’s a good guy and Celia has the hots for him as does he for her. Everyone can see they should be together. So why aren’t they?  Because, in a character conversion I found baffling, Celia’s grandmother, a woman who has been pushy in the other books but still pleasant, becomes an officious harridan. Hetty Plumtree goes from likeable—I was excited, in the last book, she acquired a lover; old people never get laid enough in historical romance—to horrid. She’s like the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio; Hetty makes up random rules Celia must follow to succeed and then threatens to ignore or alter those same rules all in the name of protecting Celia.

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The Danger of Desire by Elizabeth Essex

Grade: B+

passion rating: hot

I can tell you what’s in a book, what I think works, and what doesn’t. It’s much harder to convey the experience of reading that same book. So let me say Elizabeth Essex’s The Danger of Desire has its strengths and flaws. It is also a transcendently pleasurable book to read. There is something distinctive and gorgeous about Ms. Essex’s writing — I really can’t think of any other writer whose prose is as languorously specific as hers. She’s become one of my very favorite writers; I’d looked forward to The Danger of Desire and it did not disappoint.

Ms. Essex has thus far published three loosely linked books. In the first, The Pursuit of Pleasure, she investigates the way secrets compromise love. In the second, A Sense of Sin, she illuminates how passion transforms its lovers. In The Danger of Desire, she plaits those two leitmotifs. This passionate love story between Meggs, a woman who trusts no one, and Hugh, the man who wants to know all of her - heart, body, and soul - is touching, riveting, and well-crafted.

Meggs is, as she says, “a prime filching mort.” She hates being a thief, hates “the insidious cold, the incessant rain, the petty larceny — but hunger had a way of sorting out priorities.” Meggs steals because it was the only option for her — other than whoring - when she and her younger brother Timmy found themselves abandoned on the streets of London years ago. Meggs and Timmy are very good at what they do, and early one morning, they strip a watch and purse from an unsuspecting toff. Although the oblivious mark has no idea the pretty housemaid who bowls him over on Cockspur Street has just relieved him of his “portable chattels,” Naval Captain Hugh McAlden watches Meggs’s “smartly done” theft with "appreciation.”

Hugh, currently recovering from a bad leg wound, wants nothing more than to regain his command of his ship, Dangerous. Hugh went to sea at age twelve; sixteen years later, it’s the life he craves. Vexingly, his injury has made him currently “not fit for command.” On the morning he sees Meggs, he’s just come from the Admiralty where his mentor, Admiral Middleton, offered him a job which, if successfully rendered, will lead to a knighthood for Hugh. The Admiralty Board has a traitor somewhere in its highest level, a treasonous spy sharing highly secret information with the French. The Admiral wants Hugh, within the space of two weeks, to “rout out this traitor and serve him up… trussed and ready for hanging.”

Hugh leaves the meeting, catches Meggs in her act of deft larceny, and decides she is exactly what he needs — he’ll use a thief to catch a thief. He chases her through the London streets, and when he finally has her trapped in a dead-end lane, makes her an offer he thinks she can’t refuse. He tells her he’ll pay her a hundred pounds to steal for him. If she declines, he’ll turn her in to the law. She, suspicious, wary, and afraid, tosses her laundry basket at Hugh, kicks him hard in his wounded thigh, and runs away from him — and, as she does, steals his gold watch. As she escapes, however, she badly injures her hand vaulting over a wall topped with shards of broken glass. When her wound turns septic, she, unable to thieve and thus feed herself and Timmy, seeks out Hugh and agrees to take him up on his offer...for 750 pounds. Hugh, persuaded she’s perfect for his professional needs, agrees to her price. Meggs and Timmy move into Hugh’s home and she and Hugh begin to work together to identify and entrap the traitor.

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The 2012 Annual AAR Readers Poll is here!

Each year, All About Romance takes a reader poll and asks readers to pick their favorite romances and favorite characters and, today, it's up! Check it out! It's a fun way to see what books others felt were stellar reads. 


I reviewed several of these books this year:


What I Did for a Duke by Julie Anne Long 
Breaking Point by Pamela Clare 
The Other Guy's Bride by Connie Brockway 
When Beauty Tamed the Beast by Eloisa James 


 My pick for book of the year came in second: What I Did for a Duke. That said, the book that won, The Black Hawk, is a fabulous read and if you haven't read Joanna Bourne's four books, do. They are the kind of books I always think of when people demean romance.

Still Hot for You by Diane Escalera

Grade: C
passion rating: hot

Dear Ms. Escalera,

In the teaser for your book, Still Hot for You, your publisher Lyrical Press, describes it thusly:

Want to get your man talking?  Give him booty!

Desperate times call for desperate measures. And Shay LaCosta is pretty desperate. She’s wrecked her blissful marriage of five years by demanding she and her husband Dylan have a baby. What the hell was she thinking? She knows she was wrong and she’s ready to set things right, if only Dylan will let her. Bet he can’t shun her Booty Camp offer: delicious, white-hot sex in exchange for what’s going on inside his brain.

My curiosity was peaked. I wondered if perhaps you’d offer up an interesting tale of a couple dealing with the stress of trying to have a baby or with the stress that comes when, in a committed relationship, one person’s vision for a shared future isn’t the same as the other’s. I should have paid more attention to the fact that your blurb used the word “booty” twice in less than two paragraphs. Your book is mostly about the varied ways Shay and Dylan have sex in their upscale house. It wasn’t very interesting or, to me, erotic.

I, like you (according to your biography), am married with kids. Like your heroine, Shay, I was once twenty-nine and hell-bent on having a baby. I mention my own experience because I found Shay’s desire to have a baby pretty normal. I think many couples, after several years together, do begin to think about having kids. (About 75% of American women have had at least one child.)  And let’s be honest, the older a woman is, the less easy it is for her to conceive. (Fertility starts to decline for women from about the age of 30, dropping down more steeply from the age of 35.)  So, to me, Shay’s desire seemed pretty sane.

That’s not to say I didn’t empathize with Dylan’s lack of interest in a baby. He’s dug himself out of poverty, works really hard, and isn’t sure he’s financially ready to take on the responsibility of a child. Kids are expensive—in 2011, the average cost for raising a kid in the USA from birth to 18 (this excludes college) was just under $200,000. Having a baby is a life changer.

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An Affair with Mr. Kennedy by Jillian Stone

Grade: C

passion rating: hot

I realized I wasn’t enjoying this Victorian romance when, for the tenth night in a row, I avoided the book. I turned on my Kindle and, instead of opening the aptly named “Review These Books Now!” collection in which this book was stored; I yet again clicked on my “Ballin’ Bodice Rippers” list and happily re-read bits and pieces of other historicals I love. I found An Affair with Mr. Kennedy a chore to read
.
The novel takes place in London in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Our hero, the thoroughly modern Zeno “Zak” Kennedy is a detective for Scotland Yard. The brilliant, clever, dedicated, athletic Zeno has a skill set so prodigious that, by the time he turned out to be a hell of a tenor with a facility for Italian opera, I abandoned any idea of seeing him as a plausible character. Zeno is a man with a mission; three years ago, a deadly bombing at King’s Cross left him missing a lover and unwaveringly determined to rid London of explosive-oriented anarchists. Currently, he’s got his eagle eye on a group of secretly seditious lords — he calls them the Bloody Four - who, Zeno believes, plan to explode a series of bombs in order to spark a violent Irish revolt which would then cause the House of Lords to vote against Irish Home Rule and thus create a possible path towards ultimate Irish independence.

One of these aristocrats, Gerald St. Clair, happens to be the brother-in-law of an impossibly gorgeous young widow, Cassandra St. Clare. The Yard wonders if Cassandra, who is also connected to another of the possible Bloody Four, the odious Lord Delamere, could be a part of the Fenian plot. Cassandra, conveniently, just moved into a townhouse in Belgravia owned by Zak which is (sigh) adjacent to his. Super sexy Cassandra, after a brief and constraining marriage, is living a rather outré life. She is an (extraordinarily talented) artist (her uber-progressive parents sent her to Paris to study when she was just seventeen where she drank, painted, and got a tattoo), rides a bicycle, lives on her own, and once she sees her fine-looking landlord, takes a lover with ease.


Zak and Cassie begin a passionate affair despite Zak’s lack of transparency about his initial interest in her. The two can’t get enough of each other, which was inopportune; I’d had enough of them as a couple by the hundredth page. Ms. Stone’s sexual prose is clunky; her descriptions of the bawdy shenanigans between Cassie and Zak veer from awkward to icky. Zak has “a brute of a penis.” Cassie, the morning after the two have first made love, as her maid Cecile serves the naked lovers breakfast in bed describes him (in French) to as “frightfully large and as hard as a Bengal tiger.” In one of many overwrought love scenes, Zak makes love to Cassie with his “throbbing shaft” as she murmurs “musical and mysterious female whispers and growls.”

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Her Husband's Harlot by Grace Callway

Grade: B

passion rating: hot

Dear Ms. Callaway,

I was interested to read your debut novel for two reasons. First, I love the title. I’ve always thought being a husband’s harlot is one of the best parts of marriage. (Plus, it reminds me of a classic song, the number one single from 1973, Charlie Rich’s Behind Closed Doors. I’m humming it as I write.) Second, I think it’s impressive you’ve taken your 2010 winning manuscript, (Her Husband’s Harlot was a 2010 Romance Writers of America Golden Heart Finalist) and turned it into a successfully selling novel: It’s currently the 36th most popular Regency romance at Amazon.com and has a five star reader rating.

I enjoyed your book. You utilize a typical regency plot—virginal girl marries sensually experienced and sexually voracious man whose heart she longs to win—and give it an innovative rendering.  I loved the opening scene in which your heroine, the well-bred Lady Helena is wandering the halls of the Nunnery, a high-end London brothel, determined to track down her husband Nicholas and beg him not to consort with whores but to consort with her instead. The two have been married just a month and, after a truly awful experience for both on their wedding night—she practiced “ladylike forbearance” until the moment she screamed in startled pain; he jumped off her, ran out of the room, horrified he’d hurt her—the two barely speak. Helena, though, longs for another chance and so, upon learning Nicholas will be at the bordello this evening, she slips on the clothes of a tart, paints her face, dons a wig and a feathered mask, and goes husband hunting.

She finds him, hidden behind a curtain, watching an exceedingly bawdy threesome. Nicholas has been in sexual hell since his wedding night. He is consumed with lust for his wife, but sees her as too genteel and pure for him. He thinks, after their wedding night, she wants nothing to do with him. But he’s a guy with big needs and even beating off three times a day, while fantasizing about fucking the hell out of Helena, is neither slaking his lust nor assuaging his loneliness. He came to the Nunnery thinking he’d find relief in another woman’s quim, but found, much to his despair, he only wants his wife. 


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The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae by Stephanie Laurens

Grade: D

passion rating: hot

I literarily wended, linguistically traveled, and read with eager purpose, burgeoning desire, and incendiary yearning. Utterly determined — alone and seeking a reviewer’s sweet satiation — engaging my somnolent disbelieving emerald orbs - fraught and needy, laboring to find the pinnacle of completion, desperate beyond measure to finish this book. Done. Basking. Glorying in the magnificent awareness, the enthralling conviction I will no longer - never again - have to read prose like that found in Ms. Laurens’ overwrought and overwritten tome The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae.

The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae is the eighteenth book featuring the Cynsters. Perhaps the only interesting thing about this novel is that, in it, the Cynster males — Devil and his uber-masculine kin — are as boring and unnecessary as a dance number on the Oscars. Sadly, the Cynster women aren’t any more engaging — I found the heroine of this book, Angelica Cynster, annoying, silly, and verbose. She’s yet another Laurens heroine who is practically perfect in every way: A virgin with a harlot’s skill, exquisitely beautiful without a trace of icky vanity, able to handle any challenge thrown her way with clichéd wit and chirpy charm.

She’s also able, with just a glance, to see that a tall, incredibly handsome man she spies at a soiree is destined to be “her hero.” She’s has a magical necklace dangling betwixt her breasts, passed onto her by her sisters, a “talisman that The Lady, a Scottish deity, had gifted to the Cynster girls to assist them in finding their true loves.” Somehow, between wearing this pendant and noticing that “he was undeniably the most gorgeous male she’d ever seen,” she’s determined to marry the man before they’ve ever exchanged a word.

The gentleman in question is Dominic, the eponymous earl of the novel. Dominic is at this party searching for Angelica, whom he’s never met. He is the elusive quasi-villain of the first two books in the Cynster Sisters series; a man who for reasons unknown kidnapped and then released unharmed Angelica’s two older sisters. When Angelica approaches him and makes it clear she’s like to take a walk in the garden with him, he takes her up on her offer, sweeps her into his arms and over his shoulder, gags her, binds her arms and legs, and tosses her into a carriage he has waiting in the mews. Angelica, despite being uncomfortable and miffed, gives some thought to his behavior and decides that, yes, he’s still her true love and yes, she’s still meant to be with him. She tells herself, “Whatever it takes, he will be my hero.”

click here to read the rest of the review at All About Romance

Shadow’s Stand By Sarah McCarty

Grade: C-

passion rating: hot

Dear Ms. McCarty,

In general, with the exception of Deadwood, I have never been a fan of the western. I’ve read good things about your Hell’s Eight series, however, so I thought I’d see if perhaps your book Shadow’s Stand might be the western that changed my mind. After finishing it, I am open to reading another western. That said, I don’t think it will be one of yours.

My struggle with Shadow’s Stand began with the opening scene. The time is the summer of 1859; the place, the West Kansas territory. Fei Yen, a young Chinese American woman, needs a husband and she needs him fast. There’s a new law that forbids Chinese from holding mining claims and Fei has a claim on which she’s found gold. (Were you were referencing the Foreign Miners Tax passed in California in 1850 that taxed any non-citizen—which meant non-white–claim owners at astronomical rates?) There’s also, in your book,—I couldn’t find any mention of such a law after a cursory internet search so I’m taking your word for this—a law that allows a woman to take a condemned man as a husband thus saving him from death and giving her a spouse. This law also states that should the woman become displeased with her convict, she may return him to the gallows where he will be immediately hung.

Fei, who has just locked her literally crazy father in the cellar and has no one to turn to, rides into town and claims the half Mexican, half American Indian Shadow Ochoa just as he’s about to be hung. Shadow, though, despite the noose around his neck, refuses to be claimed by Fei until she actually asks him to marry her. The sheriff, racist asshole that he is, starts to hang Shadow before Fei has a chance to say anything. Fei grabs up a knife conveniently sticking out of a nearby boot, runs up Shadow’s body and, as he is choking to death, saws through the noose around his neck and, in the literal nick of time, cuts him down. Even after she’s saved his life, he still won’t take her up on her offer until she gasps out “Marry me,” to which he replies, “I thought you’d never ask.”

None of this made much sense to me. If Fei needs someone who could legally protect her claim, why pick Shadow, a non-white? Won’t he run up against the same prejudices and laws limiting the Chinese? The men hanging Shadow are violent racist drunks; Fei, a young unmarried attractive “half-breed” Chinese with an out of it dad, lives near them and yet none of these cretins have managed to rape or harm her. Shadow viciously fights the men trying to hang him, despite having his hands tied behind his back, and yet, when offered escape, he refuses it. This seemed unlikely to me. One moment he’s fighting for his life and the next he needs to be wooed?

After the two are (maybe legally, maybe not) married by a drunken “padre,” Fei, who married Shadow so she’d have protection, then asks the same men she’s worried will harm her and steal her claim to put Shadow in shackles and toss him in her wagon.  Fei puts the key to the shackles “into the lace-trimmed pocket above her breast” and Shadow thinks “Of all the things that pissed him off about the last day, it was her drawing attention to her breasts that he resented the most.” REALLY? Being beaten, hung, knifed, and shackled all rankled less than having to notice his new wife has breasts?

click here to read the rest of the review at Dear Author