Slightly Wicked

April 14, 2003
Sympathetic characters and scalding sexual tension make the second installment in Balogh's Regency-era Bedwyn family series (after Slightly Married) a truly engrossing read. At the novel's outset, Rannulf Bedwyn, a wealthy, devil-may-care playboy, rescues a beautiful young woman from an overturned stagecoach, and the two share a two-day tryst before she disappears. Not until he arrives at the home of his matchmaking grandmother does he discover the truth: the woman he encountered is the daughter of a poor pastor, not the worldly actress she claimed to be. Judith Law, raised to believe she's plain and undeserving, allowed her true, outgoing nature to surface while she was pretending to be someone else, but now she's in agony as she watches the man she gave herself to court her egocentric cousin. Though the honorable Rannulf dutifully offers marriage to Judith, she stands by her own sense of honor and rejects him. As the socially mismatched protagonists negotiate the perils of snobbery, self-doubt and scandal, they beguile each other (as well as the reader) with their wit and integrity. Though not as sensual as Stephanie Laurens's books or as playful as those by Julia Quinn, Balogh's surefooted story possesses an abundance of character and class.

March 15, 2003
\deflang1033\pard\plain\f3\fs24 Readers will be delighted with Balogh's new series that features the half-dozen members of the Bedwyn family first met in \plain\f3\fs24" A Summer to Remember\plain\f3\fs24 . In \plain\f3\fs24" Slightly Wicked\plain\f3\fs24, 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. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)