All About Seduction

Madison’s tissue-thin historical throws plausibility to the wind. Well-born Caroline Broadhurst was forced to marry a brutal but affluent mill owner in return for lavish payments to her family. After 15 dutiful years of childless marriage, her husband learns that he’s sterile. He’s so determined to have a child that he commands Caroline to seduce one of her brother’s aristocratic friends or be disinherited. Caroline is more attracted to an ambitious mill worker, Jack Applegate, than to the loutish guests, and when Jack is injured at the mill, she brings him into her home, nurses him back to health, and sneaks into his bed. Unsurprisingly, a young and virile mill worker is better able to introduce her to passion than a sadistic elderly husband. Caroline is more pitiable than sympathetic, and the stilted language and gaping plot holes keep the reader at a distance. (Nov.)