Читать книгу How to Ruin a Reputation - Bronwyn Scott - Страница 5

AUTHOR NOTE

The Rakes Beyond Redemption trilogy is a chance to look at three gentlemen of the ton who are transformed for the better by crisis. In Book One, HOW TO DISGRACE A LADY, Merrick faces personal financial ruination and a test of his long-dormant sense of honour when he’s placed at the heart of a sinister wager to transform the retiring Alixe Burke into the Toast of the Season. In Book Two, HOW TO RUIN A REPUTATION, Ashe has to cope with the aftershocks of a death in the family. And in Book Three, HOW TO SIN SUCCESSFULLY, Riordan grapples with becoming an instant father when he inherits his brother’s two young wards.

These are three Regency-style crises that often served to shape families and destinies in nineteenth-century England, but their situations find echoes in modern society: economic hardship, loss and changing family structures in which more and more extended family are stepping in to raise children while parents work, often far from home, to make ends meet.

I thought this was a fitting theme, given the current economic situations around the world and what they mean to regular people like you and me. In the past few years my family, like so many others, has had to decide what’s really important to us about where our money and time are spent. What will we give up and how will we change our living habits to accommodate our needs?

In HOW TO RUIN A REPUTATION Ashe is faced with that same decision. What is he willing to change in order to keep the things and the people that are important to him? Up until now he’d envisaged and lived a fairly self-centred life. He’d never imagined a time when his father was dead and his brother no longer a bulwark of respectability to shoulder the mantle of the earldom. Now the earldom is his—if he dares to claim it. Ashe is not an ideal hero. His father, worried that Ashe might be the heir after all, has made some provisions in his will in order to protect the estate and the earldom’s legacy from the prodigal second son. Death does not make Ashe perfect—he’s not suddenly transformed into a bulwark of familial stability. He is filled with regret, and he does set out to make things right, but it’s not an easy road for him—especially with the nominally perfect Cousin Henry waiting in the wings to take over the estate should Ashe fail.

There are secrets revealed and tests to pass along the way for Ashe in his journey to recognise his true potential. Fortunately, as on any good journey, there is someone to help. For Ashe that mentor comes in the form of Genevra Ralston, an American heiress who understands his trials and failures better than he thinks because she has secrets of her own—secrets Ashe will delight in uncovering as he faces the greatest trial of all…a rake falling in love.

Happy reading—I’ll see you out there!

Drop by my blog at www.bronwynswriting.blogspot.com for updates on new titles and sneak peeks.