Rachel Reads & Reviews

Just like Tessa Dare’s Girl Meet Duke series, this trilogy was all 5 stars for me so the ranking was very hard to do. Just minor things edged one out of the number two spot since they were all so good.

1. The Marquess Makes His Move: Now this book has almost everything. Rose Fleming hires an insolent new footman, Alex, who doesn’t seem know to how to do his duties but his frank nature is refreshing and offers her companionship in her dull marriage. Unbeknowst to her, Alex is actually Alexander, the Marquess of Brandon who is going in disguise to prove that Rose’s husband conspired to use his mapmaking skills to cheat Alex out of his land. What he doesn’t know is that Rose is the true brains of the mapmaking enterprise while her husband takes all the credit. So readers get to enjoy a steamy employer-employee tryst combined with secret identities which is quickly put on his head when Mr. Fleming’s secret threatens Rose’s reputation and she blurts out that she’s betrothed to Alex! And he accepts! And she still doesn’t know his true identity as the Marquess. So now, it’s a marriage of convenience with a good helping of pining and amends for the secrets and betrayal. So the plot is just amazingly fastpaced and engaging in that sense as it engages a lot of well-loved tropes and couple dynamics but Quincy also balances it with their character development as Rose fights to stand on her own against duplicituous men so she can embrace her career as a mapmaker. While Brandon learns to appreciate the working class and comes to accept his half-Arab heritage and how it has shaped his bitter and cynical view of love and reputation. Plus the steamy scenes are just hot! This book has it all and is undisputably number one for me in this trilogy.

2. Her Night with the Duke: During one stormy night at the Black Swan inn, two strangers give in to an uncharacteristic night of passion with a stranger. For Hunt, it is a first as he holds himself to the strictest sense of decorum as to not further impunge on the familial reputation of which his wastrel brother ran to the ground before his death (it’s a family curse). But he gives in to his impulses because he is fascinated by the dark-skinned woman who wields a dagger like an Amazonian goddess. Delilah is a widow, returning from visiting family in the Levant for the first time and sees this handsome stranger as another chance to assert her freedom and womanhood. It’s just a one night stand and even though both are immediately taken with each other and believe they’ll never forget the other, they don’t think they’ll see each other ever again.

They see each other the next day because Hunt is vying for the hand of Leela’s step-daughter, Victoria.

Both are completely thrown and a mortified by the turn of events and while they try to do what is right and deny meeting each other, much less give in to the undeniable heat between them, the attraction is too strong to ignore. At least for Hunt who finds his focus on maintaining pure reputation comes second to the woman he gazed in the moonlight. Leela is tougher to crack as her love for her stepdaughter holds above Leela’s own feelings. Besides, she has other problems to deal with like her stepson’s continued disrespect towards her rights as a dowger and her frustration with the sexist pubishing industry who balk at paying her rightful value when they learn her travelogues are written by her, an Arab, unchaperoned female.

Just as above, Quincy continues to delve into the rights and obstacles, female minorities face in regency England to hold onto reputation and independence alongside the beloved trope of the hero learning where his true priorties lie when it comes to denying feelings in the midst of societal restraints. The added drama of the stepfamily element is a new one that I hadn’t seen before which made it even more interesting as it is clear the familial bonds are strong (in love and in hatred) in regards to Leela’s feelings with her stepchildren.

3. The Viscount Made Me Do It: Hanna is London’s best and only bonesetter, learning the art at her father’s knee and helps all who come to her despite her family’s protestations that it is not proper and she needs to marry a nice Arab boy. Plus the additional prejudice that comes with the color of her skin and the general belief that bonesetting is a fraudicious practice. Griff is another one of those skeptics but he seeks her services when he spots her wearing the necklace that belonged to his mother. The one that went missing the night his parents were murdered, and he is still considered the main suspect by the ton, jumpstarting his reclusive nature. But in his search for answers, he falls for the strong-minded, independent woman and becomes a full believer in her craft when she helps heal his war injury, one that none of the medical professionals could fix. Hanna cannot hold back her feelings for the mysterious stranger that believes wholehartedly in her work and defends her even as it makes her the target of the suspicious medical community at large. The underlying mystery of Hunt’s parents combined with Hanna’s fight for her bonesetting lisence creates a compelling narrative and I enjoyed how dimensional the characters were, alone and together. Plus bonesetting is just fascinating and I enjoyed Hanna holding Griff to task about his helpful “actions” are hurting her more than helping. The only reason that this is set in the bottom is that I felt like the thread with Even and Hanna’s presumably shaky business partnership after she rejected his advances was dropped quickly. Same with Rafi and Lady Seline’s presumed romance which Hanna doesn’t see but seems so obvious. I was hoping that it would come up again in the third book but it didn’t, which was a shame since Rafi’s charm and Seline’s surprisingly tolerant independence would have been interesting.

If anyone is itching for some regency romance with real life diversity and new subversions on old tropes, Quincy is for you.