After reading Barbarous, I feel as though I need a cup of tea and a lie down. It’s an absolutely rollicking adventure of a historical romance, complete with dastardly relatives, pirates, old blood feuds, desperate secrets and more excitement than any gently bred English lady would have been able to cope with in the early 19th century without taking to her bed in a fit of the vapours. Our heroine Daphne is a widow with a secret - her twin sons didn’t belong to her husband, bu

This is one of those books I absolutely loved despite it not being remotely representative of the title. There is nothing whatsoever scoundrelly about the hero in this story; on the contrary, he may be the nicest, most gentlemanly hero I’ve ever read in a historical romance. With a title like Once A Scoundrel, I was fully anticipating a reformed-rake story, but Gabriel Hawkins doesn’t have even a touch of the rake about him. Indeed, when confronted by the almost-naked heroine

I'm still utterly bemused as to what on earth was going on in this novella. Upon finishing it, I actually went to the author's Amazon page to figure out where it fit in the series... to discover that it's not part of a series at all. It's a standalone. Which is really strange, because it reads like the last 25% of a full historical romance novel, which I thought might have been serialized. The problem is that there is no beginning to this story. It picks up at the resolution