Two of a Kind: An English Trifle

Lady Juliette Devereaux is an unconventional Regency heroine. A horse-loving beauty who manages her estates with skill, she is unaccountably successful as a husband hunter in her first London season. Could it be her mode of dress, outlandishly colorful and overdecorated? Both her best friend and her stet lowercase abigail have trouble adjusting her toilette, but the Marquess of Barham, a daring, attractive rake, is more successful. Sparks, temperamental and romantic, are generated, when the two meet formally (he has earlier accosted her on the bridle pathat a large house party that the hostess had designed to marry off her indolent son to Juliette). Many are the divagations on the path to romancefaltering fortunes, crumbling estates, and Juliette's displacement by a young stepmotherbefore all the characters, major and minor, are suitably and predictably paired off. This is another engagingly irreverent entry in the genre by the author of Turkish Delight. (August)