UPDATE: Daring and Decorum is available now! Details here.
Twenty-year-old Elizabeth Collington, the proper and obedient daughter of a Devonshire clergyman, believes herself beyond girlish romances. But when a highwayman steals a kiss, along with her departed mother’s necklace, Elizabeth experiences feelings of which her father would never approve. Soon after this unsettling event, a young widow arrives in the village, catching Elizabeth by surprise as their friendship advances quickly to the deepest intimacy she has ever known. Yet the highwayman will not leave her alone, filling her mind with ideas of revolution and her body with sensations of the greatest impropriety. Amidst this swirl of conflicting feelings, Elizabeth hardly has time to consider Anthony, son of the neighboring Earl, whose halting courtship holds out her one slim chance at an establishment in life. Will Elizabeth choose the conventional path, honoring her duty to her father and safeguarding her reputation? Or will she follow the demands of her heart, pursuing a love even less proper than that for a highwayman?
A comedy of manners wrapped around a Gothic tale — and a mashup of Jane Austen, Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman,” Ellen Kushner’s Riverside series and Robin Hood — Daring and Decorum: A Highwayman Novel makes a passionate case for the freedom to love whom one chooses. You might call it, “Racier than Jane Austen, better-written than Fifty Shades of Grey.” Or maybe, “Regency Romance, minus the hunky, shirtless lords.” (What’s left, you ask?)
You can read the first few chapters here. A series of posts on the background material for this historical romance/suspense novel is here. I’m also busily at work on the second novel in the Highwayman series, Silence and Secrecy, and hope to post an excerpt soon.
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