cover image So Wild a Kiss

So Wild a Kiss

Nancy Richards-Akers. Avon Books, $5.99 (384pp) ISBN 978-0-380-78947-4

Richards-Akers continues her string of popular Irish historicals (Wild Irish Skies; The Heart and the Holly) with this enchanting romance set in 1653 between English lord Sir Garrett Neville and aristocratic Irish beauty Eleanor Archebold. Oliver Cromwell's army holds Ireland in cruel thralldom, and magnificent estates belonging to disenfranchised Irish gentry are seized and sold off daily to English Puritan sympathizers. Neville has come to Ireland to buy the Archebolds' estate, Laragh, not realizing the family still resides there. Complicating matters further, he finds himself in the middle of a civil rebellion involving the outlaw Archebold brothers, and unexpectedly confronts the mysterious woman with whom he'd had a too-brief passionate encounter late one night in Dublin--the Lady Eleanor. Richards-Akers's newest is a lovely, poetic and sensual story, written with great empathy for the beleaguered Irish people. (Nov.)