Rynn Cameron

This is an older favorite that I just reread. It stands up beautifully, at least if one knew a time before cellphones. An archaeology student goes to Scotland to dig for Picts and ends up among the Erskines and plots for Scottish home rule and Bonnie Prince Charlie. Fun, engaging, suspenseful. Still a favorite.

I love Georgette Heyer Regencies so I picked out this book from the ebooks through my library. It's well-written but not what I was looking for today. It's meaningful, examining PTSD in veterans from the French and Indian Wars of 1757. Our heroine is a widow who can swear like a trooper under deep stress, our heroes are gorgeous and caring. The ingenue is sweetly odd and there's a mystery to solve and people are killed.

I was looking for light romance but this isn't it. If you like your romance with drama, you'll like it, I think.

I wish there were codings for Regencies to give you an idea of the amount of real drama. How can I find more Heyer-styles? Madeleine Robins wrote a few, Jane Aiken Hodge, some Jo Beverly and Stephanie Laurens. But never enough.

I think I'll go read Persuasion.

Wonderful book. Ignore the flap copy that implies more horror than the book contains: it's mere publisher hyperbole.

Our heroine is an archaeologist, who used to work at the British Museum cataloging finds, and has now followed a former boyfriend up into the north to help investigate the lost Ninth Legion of Rome. The book has a detailed account of the small fishing/smuggling town near the dig, just enough technical detail of the work to keep we science types riveted but not so much as to bog down non-geek romance readers, and people. Kearsley does wonderful, well-developed people, from the obsessed rich man who thinks he's located the lost Legion to the young son of the housekeeper who seems to have the Second Sight, and the various family and associates they come in contact with.

If you like rich romances, with plot as well as romance, and like a little mythos thrown in, you'll love this.

(I read Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe when I was a kid so it seems I've always wanted to know more about the Ninth. This book answers some of the questions about what might have happened. Marvelous stuff.)

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/The-Shadowy-Horses-Susanna-Kearsley/9780749007034-item.html?ikwid=shadowy+horses&ikwsec=Home