Monday, August 10, 2015

Three Romances - It Happened One Night, A Husband's Wicked Ways, & More than a Mistress

These are not part of my challenge, but sometimes, you just want to read what you want to read.  I found the first two of these recently, and gave them a try.  It Happened One Night is a set of four short stories, each by different authors.  The lead story is a Stephanie Laurens one, an author I've read a lot of.  The other three are new to me.  These were all kind of okay - not great, but not horrible.  Which is nice when horrible quality is pretty common in this genre.  I think the last story might actually be my favorite, because it's the most unusual of the bunch.


I found A Husband's Wicked Ways on the bookshelf at work.  We maintain a borrowing library, more or less, there.  The plot line, involving the Napoleonic Wars and spy work, reminded me of a few of Stephanie Laurens' works so I gave it a shot and ended up enjoying it quite a bit.  It's the third in a trilogy so it would have been better to start at the beginning, but it didn't hurt to read this one first.  My only complaint is that the ... ummm ... more romantic parts of the book are just cold and weird, despite the banter between the two leads normally being snappy, entertaining, and warm.  it's a strange juxtaposition.  And the master spy ends up being not so bright toward the end.      

I have had More than a Mistress for a while now, and decided to polish it off, too. I think I liked this one the most of the three.  A lot of the typical plot points are hit, but the "hero" is a little less annoying than usual, and the pot shots that the two lead characters take at each other are pretty humorous.  

Final call:





Three stars to all.

These are pretty decent if you like Regency-era historical romances.  The plots are all a bit contrived, but how could they not be?  People didn't act like this then!

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