Barbara’s rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
Series: Here Come The Grooms #1
Publication Date: 11/26/24
Period: Regency

This author’s first entry in her new Here Come The Grooms series pits a quickly besotted Earl against a ‘having none of it’ spinster. It is a continuation of the two previous Worthing series and has appearances by those characters. Our two main characters are Miss Oriana Ognon, daughter of a Viscount, and Charles (Charlie) Carpenter, Earl of Stanwood. If you have read the preceding series, you have already met Charlie.

While Oriana doesn’t particularly dislike men, she definitely distrusts them. First her father, and now her cousin have gambled away all of the assets of the Viscountcy. If it weren’t for her maternal aunt, Oriana would be without a home or support. Thankfully, her aunt left her a lovely home and the funds to support herself and her home. That, however, doesn’t stop her wastrel cousin from gambling away the deed to her home and she is besieged by a constant stream of gamblers who show up at her door to lay claim to it. She has to prove, over and over, that the home is hers and that her cousin has no right to gamble away the title. MEN! She’ll never trust one and certainly not one who shows up after having ‘won’ the title to her home.

Charlie never gambles – except playing for pennies with his family. He always wins! So, he doesn’t doubt the outcome when he decides to play cards with Viscount Ognon after hearing he was wagering away one of his holdings – one in which his young female cousin lives. Charlie will win the title and sign it over to the young woman living in the home. Nobody should gamble away assets needed to provide a roof over the family’s head and Charlie will right this one wrong anyway.

The greeting Charlie gets when he shows up at Oriana’s door is not what he expected. She hardly gives him time to speak before booting him out the door. Well, well. Charlie has been looking for THE woman who will pique his interest. It seems he has just met her. So, now, how will he convince her that he is a good, trustworthy man and not an inveterate gambler?

I was really looking forward to seeing Charlie’s HEA, but, for me, it just fell flat. The first 40% or so of the book was pretty good and I could see the story’s potential – then, not so much. For one thing, I never felt that I got to ‘know’ Charlie or Oriana and I didn’t really feel their connection. Some of the page space that was used for deciding who was eating dinner where, which back path they were going to take from one estate to another, what they were going to have for dinner, and the myriad interactions with former series characters could have been used to further flesh out Oriana and Charlie as well as strengthen the almost non-existent plots of the villains.

I voluntarily read an early copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Barbara’s rating: 3.3 out of 5 Stars
Series: The Worthington Brides #3
Publication Date: 6/25/24
Period: Regency
Number of Pages: 352

This is the third (and I believe final) book in this Worthington spinoff series, so you get a nice wrap-up for all of the couples previously featured in the series. You also get a fair amount of redundancy in the beginning because the three books in this series happen concurrently. Therefore, you get some of the same scenes, just told from another person’s perspective.

Lady Alice Carpenter is closer than close with her two sisters and they are now sharing the wonderful experience of their first season together. They’ve made a list of requirements the males in their lives must meet – and her two sisters have found their mates. Alice didn’t realize how lonely she’d be when they were gone or how much she’d miss them. Now, she just wants to marry and have a family of her own. In her anxiety to join her sisters in marital bliss, she might not have been as careful as she should have been in vetting the men wooing her. One gave her disconcerting tingles, but he seemed to be a useless fribble, while the other gave her no tingles, but agreed with everything she asked about from her list.

Gifford (Giff), Marquis of St. Albans, is pretty much a blank slate. I’m not sure how he made it to maturity without having a thought of his own, but he seems to have done so. Whatever his parents decreed, he adhered to. That whole family dynamic just made no sense to me. Perhaps if there were more page time describing the parents and how they came to be and how this strong-willed, demanding duchess allowed her son to be raised to know nothing and have no thoughts, I just didn’t understand. We could have surely done with less ‘Worthington’ page time to allow for a page or two on Giff’s family and the dynamics of it. At any rate, Giff has no thoughts on political or charitable endeavors, no idea of how to run the ducal estate when his father passes, and gives no arguments when his parents tell him it is time to marry. He seems to have no initiative and has never tried to earn money to supplement his meager allowance nor has he bestirred himself to form an opinion of any of the current political and social events/issues of the day. So, I had to wonder how he found the initiative to find a bride for himself. Does that sound like I didn’t like him? That isn’t truly the case. In general, I liked him, I just never understood the need for him to be such a vacuous fribble.

Giff is attracted to Alice as soon as he sees her riding in the park with her sisters. She seems interested in him as well – until she doesn’t. What did he do wrong? When she tells him she doesn’t want him to pursue her any longer, he realizes how much he has gone wrong in his pursuit of her. Is it too late for him? She is being courted by someone else and seems seriously interested. However, Giff doesn’t trust the man who is wooing Alice and endeavors to change his ways to win her back.

I enjoyed the last half of the book – and I absolutely LOVED the part of the book where Miss Greenway visits to respond to the note sent by Alice’s younger sisters. That is one of the best villain punishments I’ve ever seen in any book. I finally came to like Giff after he discovered there was a world outside his own head and I liked Alice all along. As I mentioned earlier, what I would have really liked in this book was less of the Worthington connections and more of Giff’s family – why was there animosity between Giff’s father and Scottish grandfather? Was his parent’s union a love match? I would have thought so, but they didn’t act that way. One thing that perplexed me was how the villain could slip through all those Worthington-world folks without his nefarious intents being detected. The Duchess seemed to get all the pertinent information within hours – or a day at most. Giff was grilled repeatedly, yet the villain was asked a few innocuous questions (by Alice) and let slide. That doesn’t seem like the very protective Worthington bunch I’ve known and loved to date. So, I read the book and I liked it okay, but I wouldn’t read it a second time.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an Advanced Reader Copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.