Review: Brazen by Margo Maguire

Publisher: Avon, Harper Collins

The young and beautiful Lady Fairhaven is Brazen…which is why she is willing to resort to blackmail to coerce a brave, if troubled, captain into helping her rescue her endangered brother.

Captain Gavin Briggs has been looking for the lost granddaughters of the Duke of Windmere who claims he wants to see them before he dies. He’s found one of the sisters and now he’s finally located the second. When he gets to her home, however, she shoots him! Not on purpose but it doesn’t exactly put him into a good mood. What Gavin expected to find, he wasn’t sure but it certainly wasn’t a woman practicing her shooting.

Christina Warner, Lady Fairhaven is practicing her shooting because she plans to head to London and take care of the person who is blackmailing her. She’s shocked to find out about a sister – a twin even! – but it can’t currently stop her from her mission. She has to take care of the man who is blackmailing her and then she can take the time to get to know this sister she never knew she had. Gavin tries everything he can think of but instead of getting Christina to head to Windmere she talks him into helping her with her blackmailer. They head off to London but on the way they discover that maybe they don’t dislike each other as much as they thought.

I really liked book one (my review of book 1 here) but I kind of felt that it was supposed to have more. I thought that maybe the two books were one book cut in two but this book didn’t have that feeling at all. Yes, it continued the story but it was pretty self-contained and a good stand-alone novel.

Gavein Briggs was a great hero. He was exasperated at Christina but not willing to lose her now that he’d found her. When he gets her to her grandfather he will get ten thousand pounds and he needs that money to buy a home for him, his sister and her daughter. He wants a quiet life and Christina is standing in his way. But he’s also kind of curious to see exactly what is up with the blackmailing. Christina’s adoptive brother died in an explosion 3 months earlier but the blackmailer says that he knows where the brother is and what he did. Does that mean he’s alive? Gavin is sure that Christina is being set up for even more heartache when finds out Lang is indeed dead but when Gavin discovers that he can’t quite let her go he admits that he wants to know what’s up as well.

The bulk of the story if the travels between Christina’s home and London and while I love romances with road trips in them I admit this one did get a bit tiring at times. The budding relationship and the wonderful sex between the hero and heroine was wonderful and I loved that part, but there was so much inner struggle for both Christina and Gavin and that struggle was repetitive. I think I just got a bit tired of them wondering what would happen in London once they got there – and the same thoughts.

Once the couple got to London the story really picked up with the blackmail issues as well as Windmere’s heir who was not happy about having to share his inheritance with the granddaughters. Gavin was wonderful in his strength and I just loved him! Christina was emotionally strong but she was kind of stuck in her house as people were after her and I didn’t like that part as much. I think it diminished the strength she’d shown us throughout the book. At least she didn’t pull a TSTL and tried to fix it all herself! Lol

There was also a small part of the story that involved Gavin and Christina saving a small boy along their travels from his vicious uncle. Theo was adorable and I loved seeing the softer side of both Gavin and Christina when they were with him.

In the end it was a very good story with a lovely romance and a pretty darned good suspense story. I like Maguire’s writing and will look forward to more from her in the future.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Margo Maguire
Avon

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