Beware of Virtuous Women (Romney Marsh Series #3) by Kasey Michaels

Product Details

Synopsis

The perfect daughter...secrets within secrets, lies within lies.

Adopted daughter Eleanor Becket is dedicated to her family and its welfare. She is also a commendable commander, and a keeper of secrets, most especially her own. Who would ever expect this fragile beauty, with her quiet ways and her unfortunate limp, to be capable of anything more than her accomplishments at embroidery and her mastery of musical instruments?

Only Jack Eastwood feels the need to look more deeply at this self-proclaimed spinster, and what he sees--and the long-ago crime he suspects--lead both Jack and Eleanor to the very edge of desire and danger. As the Beckets feel the outside world looking ever more closely at the nocturnal activities taking place in Romney Marsh, as the Black Ghost rides yet again, Eleanor Becket is forced to risk her family, her chance at love, even her life, in one desperate gamble.

Publishers Weekly

Smuggling flourishes along England's southern coastline in 1813, setting the scene for bestselling Michaels's fast-paced new series chronicling the sprawling Becket family of Romney Marsh, continued in this third volume. When the Beckets' smuggling ring, an operation that helps their fellow villagers, is threatened by the notorious Red Men Gang, family friend Jack Eastwood offers to infiltrate London society to root out the gang's leader. Although adopted daughter Eleanor has always been reserved and self-sufficient, quietly running the boisterous Becket household, she shocks everyone by volunteering to play Eastwood's pretend wife in London. Jack quickly discovers that Eleanor's fragile looks hide a sharp mind and steely will, making her a valuable ally, but he suspects she is keeping secrets from him about her past. These secrets become a liability when Jack discovers that Rowley Maddox, the Earl of Chelfham and quite possibly the leader of the Red Men, knows who Eleanor is and what she's hiding. As the cat-and-mouse game intensifies, Jack and Eleanor realize they are destined to do more together than sleuthing-just in time for Jack to face losing Eleanor at the hands of Maddox. Lively dialogue and characters make the plot's suspense and pathos resonate; anticipation for the series' next volume, due in 2007, should be high. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Biography

The hallmarks of New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Kasey Michaels' writing are humor, romance and happy endings. The importance of upbeat, entertaining fiction was brought home to Kasey when her eldest son became very ill. During the long months while he was in the hospital after his kidneys failed, she noticed that the nurses who cared for the sick children and the mothers who spent long hours at their bedsides often had a romance novel in their back pockets. She began carrying her own romances to the hospital in a small suitcase, reading and then sharing and trading them with the other moms.

"We were living in a world too real in that hospital," Kasey says today. "We all functioned at the highest level—there was no choice but to function, to persevere—and we all occasionally escaped that world into the hope and happy endings of romance novels."

Kasey had actually written her first book just before her son's illness. She penned her second book during those long months in the hospital, and it became The Tenacious Miss Tamerlane.

Since then, Kasey has gone on to write about 100 more books, and to receive a trio of coveted Starred Reviews from Publishers Weekly. The third was for her first HQN title, The Butler Did It, which was also a 2005 nominee for the Romance Writers of America's (RWA) highest award, the RITA Award and Publishers Weekly's Quills Award. She is already a recipient of the RITA Award, a Waldenbooks and BookRak Bestseller Award, and many awards from Romantic Times magazine, including a Career Achievement Award for her Regency-erahistoricalromances.

Kasey has also appeared on the Today Show, and was the subject of the Lifetime Cable-TV show A Better Way, in conjunction with Good Housekeeping magazine, a program devoted to women and how they have achieved career success in the midst of motherhood (short version: "with great difficulty").

Kasey has written Regency romances, Regency historicals, category books including novellas and continuities and a few series "launch" books, and single-title contemporaries. Hers is also the twisted mind behind her ongoing Maggie Kelly mystery series that stars a former romance writer turned historical mystery writer. She is also the author of the highly praised nonfiction book, written as Kathryn Seidick, Or You Can Let Him Go, which details the story of Kasey and her family during the time of her eldest son's first kidney transplant.

Kasey and her husband of more than 40 years live in Pennsylvania with their two neurotic Persians, Princess and Peaches. They are proud parents of four and grandparents of two. Each summer the entire family volunteers to help out with the golf tournament her grown son founded to benefit the Gift of Life Donor Program of Philadelphia. Monies raised contribute to the costs of transporting the youngest members of Team Philadelphia to the annual Transplant Olympics.