Who Will Take This Man?
By Jacquie D’Alessandro

     Meredith Chilton-Grizedale has forged her reputation as a matchmaker by years of hard work. The peak of her career to date is the match between Viscount Greybourne and the daughter of the Duke of Hedington. But Lady Sarah leaves her suitor waiting at the altar after hearing of the archaeologist Viscount’s stone tablet, which has put a curse on him, dooming any woman he marries to a swift death. It is up to a desperate Meredith to help Philip find the missing section and thus find out how to break the curse. But he has brought many boxes of artifacts from his ten years of travels, and she also has to find him another suitable bride…

       This is an amusing Regency romance with a hint of fantasy and some likable characters. I always enjoy romances where the hero manages not to act like a domineering alpha male, and Philip is genuinely attractive, being kind, intelligent and romantic. I also enjoyed guessing who was trying to bring the curse down upon him and got it wrong, showing that it wasn’t too easy and not just a thin addition to the main plot. I guess that 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 D’Alessandro has done with her curse tablet (see if you can guess how to break it) and the pairing of two engaging people. A truly enjoyable romance.