RITA Award winner Caroline Linden opens a new Regency series with the light and humorous Love and Other Scandals. Joan Bennett is a hair's breadth from spinsterhood, having gone through four seasons without a single suitor. Her sardonic wit and unusual height seem to put off the gentlemen. With a love affair of her own growing more improbably every day, Joan indulges her curiosity by surreptitiously reading a scandalous series of pamphlets called 50 Ways to Sin.
Although her indomitable mother isn't disinterested in Joan, her current priority is finding a suitable wife for Joan's brother, heir to the family title. When Joan accosts her brother at his townhouse to deliver their mother's summons to a ball, she runs into his lifelong friend and drinking mate, Viscount Burke.
Even if Tristan were in market for a betrothed, Joan is the last woman he would ever choose. Not only is she his best friend's sister, making courtship awkward to the point of impossibility, she has the most impertinent tongue and wears the most unflattering clothes imaginable. If only her scathing wit didn't have him thinking about stopping her mouth with kisses, and if only her hideously frilly garments didn't have him thinking about how she would look without them!
While Linden's sweet love story doesn't cover new ground, it nonetheless hits all the traditional right notes of the reformed rake storyline, and readers will smile as prim, but perhaps not so proper, Joan wins the love of London's most notorious heartbreaker. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services manager at Latah County Library District and blogger at Infinite Reads