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Rating: 
Summary: Not Worth The Effort
Review: I often find that the negative reviews are as helpful as the positive ones, and sometimes more so. Both English reviewers of this book were dead on in their assessment of it. The plot was tissue thin. The characters were shallow, their actions were not credible, and their development was nonexistent. How the marquess came to the conclusion he loved Lucinda seemed driven simply by the fact that it was the end of the book, and therefore time to wrap things up. As a minor note, a lot of the regencies I've read have fairly dense, small type, which is necessary to get a fully fleshed out story into the usual number of pages. The type in this book is rather large, and there is a lot more unoccupied space on a page than I'm accustomed to seeing in other regencies, which I think is rather telling. I've come to enjoy regencies as pleasant entertainment, but some are definitely better than others. This is the first one by Ms. Chesney that I've read, and she seems to have a decent reputation so perhaps I'll seek out another one and give it a try. However, with better books out there, I cannot recommend this one.
Rating: 
Summary: A Keeper
Review: I'm not much of a regency reader, but I really enjoyed The Savage Marquess. The countess and her daughter were two especially nasty characters. If I had to be a companion to the daughter, I would have slapped that spoiled miss silly.
Rating:
Summary: Truly dreadful, unconvincing, appalling
Review: Is Chesney simply a lousy writer, or is she trying to play a joke on lovers of Regency romances? This book is so bad, its plot so farcical, its characterisation so thin and unrealistic that I can't help wondering whether someone's passing off a spoof here.*No-one* in Regency times behaved as Chesney's characters do. Lucinda's actions are completely out of place for a young lady of quality of that time. The idea that she would ask a Marquess to marry her, let alone that she would speak to his mother as she did, is completely unbelievable. And as for the Marquess himself, he seems totally irredeemable - so how could she possibly fall in love with him? There is no motivation, either, for his sudden chage of character. And the other elements to the plot - the servant, the jewellery theft, the attempted murder... I was rolling my eyes in disbelief. Chesney also needs to take some lessons in technical writing skills: her sentence structure and grammar need a lot of attention. Finally, I'd suggest that if she's going to write any more, she needs to take a sabbatical first and go and read some English social and political history, brush up on her grammar and period language, and read some books by much better writers such as Balogh, Kelly, Oliver and so on. Publishers: please be more choosy in what you publish!
Rating:
Summary: The first Chesney to have a certain amount of SIZZLE!
Review: Marion Chesney has always written novels that were cute and humorous. The Savage Marquess is a novel that impressed upon me a change of heart. The actual Marquess in the book is a dashing rake just waiting for our darling Lucinda to reform him. She doesn't do it subtly, she literally goes for the lived-in effect. The poor marquess will never know what hit him. A definite favorite of mine with lots of added pizaz that has never before been seen in a Chesney romance novel.
Rating:
Summary: Appalling
Review: This is a very poorly-written book, in a number of ways. To take the plot first, Chesney has created a set of completely unbelievable characters: caricatures, especially the secondary characters who are portrayed in a one-dimensional manner with not one redeeming feature between them. The hero and heroine aren't particularly credible either, and as a reader I had little sympathy for them. As for the events depicted, I find it hard to believe that they are remotely credible within the Regency setting. The heroine, in particular, speaks and behaves in a way no lady of the period would have done whatever the provocation; and the Marquess's mother is similarly incredible. Leaving aside the thin and barely believable plot, the author seems to me to have little skill at her craft. Her writing style: sentence structure, command of vocabulary and so on, is immature and distracts from the content of the book. While she tries to provide some history for the hero to explain his motivations, her attempts at doing this are very poorly done; in this respect, she has not one-hundredth of the skill of Patricia Oliver, for example. Finally, there are numerous inaccuracies, both to the period and to the language and vocabulary; a British-born writer such as Chesney should certainly be able to do better at avoiding Americanisms in the dialogue of English Regency characters. And young unmarried ladies in that period would know little or nothing about mistresses or sex. I have already disposed of my copy, and I cannot recommend this book to any other reader.
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