A Rogue by Any Other Name
He lost everything he owned on one hand of cards at twenty one. Nine years later the last of his land turns up in the dowry of the girl next door, the one who used to be his best friend, and he decides the fastest way to get it back is to ruin her.
Book bio
What this book actually is
Title: A Rogue by Any Other Name
Author: Sarah MacLean
Series: Yes. Book 1 of Rules of Scoundrels, four books, 2012 to 2014. Also called the Fallen Angel series.
Setting: London and the Surrey countryside, Regency. Mostly a gaming hell called The Fallen Angel.
Couple: Michael, Marquess of Bourne, and Lady Penelope Marbury.
Tropes: Childhood friends to enemies to lovers, forced marriage, compromise and ruin, revenge, spinster heroine, hero with a plan he should not have.
Awards: Won the 2013 RITA Award for Best Historical Romance.
Read it if: you want a hero who does something genuinely unforgivable in chapter four and a book that refuses to pretend otherwise.
The whole series runs on one location, which is the smartest structural decision MacLean made here. The Fallen Angel is a gaming hell owned by four people, and each book hands one of them their story while the other three keep circling in the background. It gives the series a spine that most historical romance series do not have, where the connective tissue is usually just a family surname and the occasional cameo.
The other thing worth knowing before you start is the device. Chapters open with letters, all of them from Penelope to Michael, beginning “Dear M—” and running from childhood forward. They are affectionate, then puzzled, then increasingly unanswered. You get the friendship the novel is actually about in fragments above the chapter headings, which means you understand exactly what he is destroying while he destroys it.
Premise
The concept, without spoiling it
London, winter 1821. Michael was twenty one, newly orphaned, and holding an inheritance he had no idea how to manage. It did not take a night of cards to strip him of it. It took one hand of vingt-et-un. He wagered everything that was not entailed on twenty one, and the card that came across the baize was the eight of diamonds, which made twenty two. The novel’s first line is “The eight of diamonds ruined him,” and the whole book is downstream of that sentence.
Viscount Langford took it all except Falconwell itself, which was entailed and could not be gambled away, leaving Michael with a manor and none of the land that made it worth anything. What happened next is the part most summaries leave out: he did not claw his way back alone. Chase found him, took him in, cleaned him up and gave him work. His place at The Fallen Angel is a rescue he never asked for, not a partnership he negotiated, and that debt sits under everything he does.
Then the Falconwell land surfaces in a dowry. Penelope Marbury’s father won it at cards and attached it to his eldest daughter, who is twenty eight, unmarried, and has been quietly written off. She had a fiancé once, the Duke of Leighton, and a scandal caused her father to end that engagement. Since then there have been years of polite courtships that went nowhere and a general social agreement that Penelope is finished.
Penelope was also, before any of this, Michael’s neighbor and his closest friend in the world, until his parents died and he disappeared. That is the part that makes the book work and the part that makes what he does next so bad. He does not persuade her. He does not court her. He arranges to be alone with her where they will be found, because a ruined woman has exactly one option, and he needs the land.
Plotline
What happens, start to finish
The spoiler free version: the compromise works exactly as designed, they marry, and Penelope arrives in London as the wife of a man everyone in society considers dangerous. What she does with that is the surprise, because she is not interested in being rescued and she has spent nine years being bored. Bourne’s revenge campaign against Langford continues underneath the marriage, and the collision between the two is the back half of the book.
Arcs
How the book is built
Characters
Who you need to know
Michael, Marquess of BourneHeroLost everything at twenty one and spent the next decade becoming someone who could not be taken from again. Cold, calculating, and entirely aware that he is the villain of his own love story.
Lady Penelope MarburyHeroineTwenty eight, eldest daughter of the House of Needham and Dolby. Six years past the broken engagement her father still calls “The Leighton Debacle,” and not idle since: she has turned down three proposals. Written off by everyone, which turns out to be their mistake.
CrossPartner · the numbersThe bookkeeper whose mathematics keep The Fallen Angel alive. Ascetic to the point of self-punishment. Gets book two.
TemplePartner · the Killer DukeEnormous, fights bare knuckle in the club’s ring, and has been called a murderer by all of London since a woman vanished the night before her wedding. Gets book three.
The fourth owner is Chase, who founded the place and runs it from behind everything. Chase gets book four, and that book is the reason people recommend this series.
Also: Penelope’s sisters Olivia and Philippa. Pippa is the heroine of book two.
Reacts
Scene reactions
Review
Loves, hates, and the honest verdict
What works
MacLean does not soften the compromise, apologize for it, or reframe it as a misunderstanding. Bourne does a terrible thing for a selfish reason and the book makes him live inside that for three hundred pages. Penelope is the real find though: a woman written off at twenty eight who turns out to have been quietly furious the entire time. And The Fallen Angel as a series spine genuinely works.
What does not
The revenge plot is the least interesting thing in the book and it takes up a lot of room. Langford never becomes a person, just a target. And the grovel at the end has to carry an enormous amount of weight for what Bourne did, which depending on the reader either lands or very much does not.
A full review is coming. This hub carries the short version.
Series
Rules of Scoundrels, in order
Four owners, four books, one gaming hell. All four are on the shelf, which is why this series got built first.
Bourne · 2012
Cross · 2013
Temple · 2013
Chase · 2014
Cover images are the publishers’ official covers, used to identify the editions discussed. All other artwork is original CVM Sekai fan art. Passages of this novel were read in NOOK for Web via Barnes & Noble’s reader. That route is the “sample” endpoint, and although it served continuous text well into the late chapters, it later stopped at an “End of Sample” marker, so it cannot be described as the complete book. Every specific claim here comes from text actually read on screen; the surrounding plot and series details were checked against the publisher description and series bibliography.