There are a lot of adjectives that I could attach to Marie
Claremont’s Lady in Red, but I will stick to just riveting. This dark and
intoxicating book gets into the nitty gritty side of Regency England’s elite. This
is the second book in Claremont’s Mad Passion series and it far surpasses the
emotion she brought with her first book The Dark Lady. Although Lady in Red
stands alone and readers can easily grasp the back story, it is strongly
advised to read the Mad Passions books in order.
As the daughter of a Duke, Mary Darrel should be the talk of
the town dancing away her nights in the glittering ballrooms of London, but instead
the world believes that she is dead. The Duke of Duncliffe is violent sort and
when his wife mysteriously tumbles to her death from a staircase he has his
daughter committed to madhouse claiming she was as mad as her mother. When Lady
Mary narrowly escapes the brutal madhouse, the first place she heads to a
brothel and into the arms of a woman who had been friends with her mother prior
to her mother’s marriage to Duncliffe.
Edward Barrons, Duke of Farleigh is fighting his own demons,
including a family scandal that resulted in the death of a young girl. Edward
will do anything to escape his demons including taking in the shell of a girl
he meets at the brothel. Edward sees those same dark demons in Mary that he is
fighting in his own right. In Mary he
spies his own redemption. He has no idea
who Mary truly is, only that the town’s most famous madam has asked him for his
help.
As Mary recovers not only in body, she’s awakening in spirit
to a man whose own soul has been as tormented as her own. The flicker of
revenge towards her father begins to burn and with Edwards help Mary seeks to
grow strong enough to enact that revenge. With bittersweet passion and tenderness,
Mary and Edward come together as they seek to rebuild her into what she should
have been all along. Their quest for revenge leads them to an even bigger test
of the bonds of true love.
Beautifully written, The Lady in Red is very haunting and
will easily leave readers in awe of the strength that these characters have
within them. Its prose will emit every possible emotion a reader has and in
some cases bring readers to tears of both happiness and sorrow. Once more
Claremont has penned a stunner of a historical romance.
