Book Review: Torch In The Forest

Author: Marcie Kremer
Title: Torch In The Forest
Publish Date: Feb 16, 2013
Publisher: Entangled Scandalous
Buy: Amazon

Review Copy Provided By: The publisher in exchange for an honest review

Book Blurb: 

Eighteen-year-old widow Eleanor of Strathcombe is stunned to realize she has a powerful attraction to Hugh of Wykeham, the arrogant, neighboring lord returned from the Crusade. But he wants to marry her sister, and when he learns that poachers are running rampant he blames her and feuds with her over the control of their forest boundaries.

As she struggles to keep control of her forests and find the poachers, unsettling feelings confront her when she deals with Hugh, feelings she never felt in her brief, loveless marriage -- feelings she tries to fight, because she knows Hugh to be a cold, harsh man who may have murdered his faithless wife in revenge -- and who trusts no woman.

When she finds herself in the midst of a net of intrigue and lies, how will she find the courage to capture the conspirators, save herself and her sister, and overcome her feelings for Hugh?

Review: I have to start out saying, OMG the guy on this cover looks like Simon Le Bon. I'm glad this was an ebook, or I would never have been able to finish reading it, because I'd be too busy drooling on the cover.

Beautiful as the cover is, the story needed something. It was a little too short for a medieval romance and the romance never really took off. In fact, the fact that Eleanor and Hugh got together in the end is a huge surprise, because there was no sign of affection between them throughout most of the novel, except in their heads.

That's not to say that the story is a bad one, because it isn't. It is a good quick read filled with politics and intrigue and a woman's struggle to keep what is hers.

Eleanor is a strong heroine. She is trustworthy and loyal and didn't have a good time of it with her first marriage. She's only 18.

Yikes!

And she has the care of her sister Mary who is 14. She's doing her best to see that Mary isn't married off to  an old man in a far off country.

I found I liked Eleanor. She's the kind of person you'd want as a friend. She was intensely loyal to all of her people.

I just couldn't warm up to Hugh in the same way. He was too much the alpha male. He was right and everyone else was wrong. Plus there was also the way he planned on marrying Mary, while lusting after Eleanor. It seemed like the classic case of the virgin and the whore, at least in his mind. That is until he realized that Eleanor had never consummated her marriage to Edgar.

It was his attitude that made me not like him, yet he was the typical man of that age and he wasn't as smarmy as William.

Overall a great read and a good historical though the romance is very light here.

Rating:  3 flowers