Mary Balogh

Readers will be delighted with Balogh's new series that features the half-dozen members of the Bedwyn family first met in A Summer to Remember. In Slightly Wicked, third son Rannulf picks up a fetching young woman whom he believes is an actress stranded in the rain due to a coach crash. Judith Law, a parson's daughter, is traveling to her aunt's home to live as a poor relation and has decided to have one fling, one chance to not spend the remainder of her sure to be desolate life as a virgin. Pretending to be an actress, she accompanies Rannulf to an inn where they make passionate love before she slips away to take up her duties as an unpaid servant in her aunt's country house. When Rannulf turns up as a likely suitor for her cousin, complications abound. The Bedwyn siblings are the most fascinating romance protagonists to come along since Jude Devereaux's Montgomery brothers in the 1980s, and Balogh's sensuous Regency-era romances set the standard. They are not to be missed.