Then Came You
By Lisa Kleypas

     Lily Lawson delights in shocking people, and men look upon her as a good sport who is reckless and wild…but not marrying material. When a friend tells her that he is desperately in love with her sister, but meek Penelope is instead betrothed to the grim and cold-hearted Lord Raiford, she acts at once. Although estranged from her family she will descend upon them while they stay at Raiford’s house before the impending nuptials and do everything she can to stop the marriage. But as a person with a dark secret of her own, she finds it is highly unwise to tangle with somebody like Lord Raiford.

     This is a well-plotted Regency romance that put me in mind of P G Wodehouse regarding the story and certainly none the worse for that. By turns funny, gripping and inventive, this story ought to appeal to anybody who finds most Regency novels a little thin and wants a bit more. Character-wise, it features a sprightly heroine and the obligatory brooding hero (nothing new there), but perhaps more interestingly the wistful but tough self-made man Derek Craven. So there is nothing new here, but the trick of writing this sort of thing isn’t to add new material but to take the conventions of the sub-genre and do something interesting with them, and this is what Kleypas does with wit and gusto. I’d certainly read another, and am not surprised that Avon blew the dust off this 1993 book and reprinted it, for it is more akin to the spirit of Georgette Heyer than most Regencies.