cover image What Price Love?: A Cynster Novel

What Price Love?: A Cynster Novel

Stephanie Laurens, . . Morrow, $22.95 (396pp) ISBN 978-0-06-084084-6

Set in 1831, bestseller Laurens's crowd-pleasing hot-blooded romance reintroduces Dillon Caxton, a young rake now reformed, who first appeared in A Rogue's Proposal . Recruited by the Jockey Club to investigate rumors of race fixing in Newmarket, Suffolk, Dillon is startled to discover that a gorgeous young Irishwoman calling herself Priscilla "Pris" Dalling (in reality an earl's daughter) is trying to get a look at the two official tomes on breeding and racing in England, the Breeding Register and the Stud Book . The green-eyed femme fatale is determined to help her twin brother, Lord Russell Dalling, whose dream to train an Irish Derby winner for Lord Cromarty's stables has landed them both in heart-stopping danger. Wanton sparks fly, bodices rip and trousers drop, though the novel's main juice comes from the well-researched horse-racing backdrop, not from the sometimes accidentally funny lust scenes ("Far beyond sanity, her world shook; reality tilted and quaked"). (On sale Mar. 14)