Newport Summer

Poppen's latest historical romance, first in a new series, features Gannon Maddox, a handsome, broke English nobleman, who needs to marry an American heiress to save the family's ancestral estates. The lavish excesses of late-19th-century Newport, R.I., where every doting mama is looking for a title for her daughter, is the perfect hunting ground, but Gannon is repelled by the scene and escapes to the seashore, where he meets Audrey St. Clair, also an unwilling player in the marriage mart. Defying society's dictates and her dragon of a mother, Audrey's dream is to study music in Vienna. She devises a risky plan in which Gannon will pretend to court her for the summer and she will show him how to invest his money. At summer's end, Gannon can return to England wealthy enough to save Camberly and Audrey can freely leave for Vienna. But love intervenes and Audrey must choose between her dream and her man. While the prose can be overblown, the fun is in the caste system of Newport's summer social season, while the engaging characters fufill the expectations of the genre. (Feb.)