To Beguile a Beast
Elizabeth HoytHistorical romance
Available from Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 978-0-446-40693-2
May 2009
| As a seventeen year old innocent girl it's easy to believe in love. Helen leaves her home and family to become mistress of the Duke of Lister. Fourteen years later she's had enough of a loveless relationship where she and her children are pampered prisoners of a possessive man. Sir Alistair Munroe is an artist and writer whose thirst for knowledge took him to the colonies to explore. Trapped with British soldiers in what may have been an ambush he was tortured and maimed by Indian captors. Shunned by many in society he‘s sequestered himself in his castle. Can the recluse and the desperate woman find a way to work together?
Elizabeth Hoyt pens another excellent tale of courage in this third of the Legend of the Four Soldiers series. Both Helen and Alistair have to cope with their past to ever have a future. His pains are not necessarily of his choosing. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time but managed to survive. She made a choice when very young that she's living with the best she can. No matter what era of history, past, present or future, people will experience these situations. Few can be as compassionate and as enchanting telling a tale like this as Ms. Hoyt. Humor, sadness, wonderful characters and some colorful dialogue fill the pages. Lady Grey, Alistair's deerhound, is one of the heroines of the tale because she keeps the man from closing his heart to compassion. The children, as they do in their own way everywhere, help him open his heart to people. Helen, unlike many of her female counterparts of the day, isn't averse to standing up for herself and bulling her way through the man's original objections to a housekeeper. This book tells two separate love stories by introducing each chapter with the tale of the Truth Teller, the princess and the sorcerer. This is a marvelous book hard to put down. It captured me on the first page and never let me go. I can't wait to read the next tale in this series.
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Reviewer: Dee Dailey |
