The Silver Lion

Rating:
Summary: Passionate, rich and complex characters!
Review: In 1823 India, Derek "The Archangel" Leighton tries to stop Michael "The Tiger" Keynes from stealing from the East India Consortium. Derek sets a trap, but fails at his mission. Instead Michael breaks Derek's hand before fleeing into the night.

A year later in London, Helena Pryce applies for the job of personal secretary to Derek, an earl because she feels he will not reject a candidate due to gender as the lord grew up in a home of females. He offers her a deal if she purchases a castle for him, he will hire her. Using her connections, Helena succeeds. Adhering to his agreement, Derek hires Helena, but is also curious about her. As he investigates his new personal secretary, he and she fall in love. However, his inquiries into Helena's life lead him to the man who broke his hand on the Asian subcontinent and to the woman from his past that he once believed he loved and one day would marry. Derek must decide between vengeance and love.

SILVER LION, Lynn Kerstan's third and final feline tale (see THE GOLDEN LEOPARD and HEART OF THE TIGER) is a terrific historical romance starring strong lead protagonists and a powerful support cast including return engagements. The story line has plenty of action, but is more of a deep character study as the heroine redeems the hero filling him with love, hope and honor, traits he felt lost forever. As with the previous two graceful tales, this is a winner that will lead to sub-genre fans hoping for more early nineteenth century cat lives to come.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: terrific historical romance
Review: In 1823 India, Derek "The Archangel" Leighton tries to stop Michael "The Tiger" Keynes from stealing from the East India Consortium. Derek sets a trap, but fails at his mission. Instead Michael breaks Derek's hand before fleeing into the night.

A year later in London, Helena Pryce applies for the job of personal secretary to Derek, an earl because she feels he will not reject a candidate due to gender as the lord grew up in a home of females. He offers her a deal if she purchases a castle for him, he will hire her. Using her connections, Helena succeeds. Adhering to his agreement, Derek hires Helena, but is also curious about her. As he investigates his new personal secretary, he and she fall in love. However, his inquiries into Helena's life lead him to the man who broke his hand on the Asian subcontinent and to the woman from his past that he once believed he loved and one day would marry. Derek must decide between vengeance and love.

SILVER LION, Lynn Kerstan's third and final feline tale (see THE GOLDEN LEOPARD and HEART OF THE TIGER) is a terrific historical romance starring strong lead protagonists and a powerful support cast including return engagements. The story line has plenty of action, but is more of a deep character study as the heroine redeems the hero filling him with love, hope and honor, traits he felt lost forever. As with the previous two graceful tales, this is a winner that will lead to sub-genre fans hoping for more early nineteenth century cat lives to come.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Passionate, rich and complex characters!
Review: This is the kind of historical romance that is getting harder and harder to find. The characters are complex people who draw you into their lives. The plot is well-crafted and the twists and turns are not obvious beforehand. At the end of the book you feel like you know these people and you don't want to see them go.

And the heros! Dark and Dangerous, Light and Tormented. Lymond's descendents, every one of them. Yum! These are not just guys you'd run into in Wal-mart dressed up in period garb but the real thing.

I loved this whole series. Kerstan is on the very short list of authors who are on my auto-buy list, along with Laura Kinsale, Judith Ivory, and Mary Balogh.

Please, please, please, publishers! Give us more authors who write this kind of book instead of the vapid fluff that has taken over the Regency Historical niche these last few years!

Rating:
Summary: Less than glittering third book
Review: This one really cranked it out, but with about as much romantic/erotic tension as a wooden Indian.

The heroine is a bluestocking interested in social welfare and so virtuous it is hard to believe she would just say, "Ok, come to my bedroom and I'll be ready for you in half an hour." Which she does. We get more detail of her birth control practices than we do of her passionate interest for the hero. Ugh.

Our hero may be known as the Archangel and fabulously handsome and eligible, but he is thoroughly unlikable in my opinion. He is rude, patronizing, and above all, in love with another woman (another man's wife) in the book throughout nearly the whole of it, whilst still deciding to put himself on the Marriage Mart with the help of his female secretary, who he is trying to make into his mistress. Ugh again. He also has a ex-mistress he spends more time with than the heroine, and is so patronizing towards her it is a wonder she doesn't kill him with her bare hands!

I don't see anything passionate or sensual in this book at all. The ONLY love scene in the whole book happens on page 71. Any of the usual conventional ways of getting them romantically linked again are totally forfeited. The unchaperoned trip into the countryside, old deserted inn, all of them in peril...Sound familiar? But it is all to try to discover who has tried to murder him. They never even so much as kiss!! Or hold hands or touch!

The book drags on way too long. The title is based on the costume she wears in the last 10 pages of the book, when he finally sees how she really is through her startling family resemblance to all the males in her family. Silly, really.

The fact that the heroine is supposed to have been in so much danger all these years that she walks around in dark glasses to hide her eyes, which only call attention to her appearance, and a terrible wig which also calls attention to her, is all the more absurd. Anyone else would have just sent her to America or India if it were that risky for her to be found.

All of this absurdity might have been overlooked if there had been some heat between the couple, but anything there was in the wooden, totally in the dark love scene which lasts a page or two without any sensuality, dies totally after page 72.

The so-called mystery is preditable, and not worth the time or effort to plow through the book.