Series Hub · Lindsay Randall · Complete run, 3 of 3
To Woo an Heiress
Three sweet Regencies about heiresses with money problems of the opposite kind: too many suitors, too many gullible friends, and one courtship that turns out to be genuinely dangerous.
AuthorLindsay Randall
Length3 books, all owned
SettingRegency England
HeatSweet / closed door
What it is
Money as a problem rather than a solution
Every heroine here has an inheritance, which in this genre normally means her difficulties are over. Randall uses it the other way round. An heiress is a target, and each of these three books is about a woman managing the consequences of being worth pursuing rather than the consequences of being poor.
These are traditional sweet Regencies, shorter than the shelf’s single-title romances, closed door, and built on manners, schemes and misunderstandings rather than on heat. That is a distinct form with its own rules, and it is worth naming, because judged as a Sarah MacLean novel a book like this looks thin. Judged as what it is, it is doing something else entirely.
The books
All three, in order
Book oneLady Lissa’s LiaisonLady Lissa Lovington has just inherited and is being hunted for it. Her solution is to start a rumor that she has already had an affair with the notorious Earl of Wylde, on the theory that a ruined woman is a woman left alone. It works beautifully until Wylde comes back to town and finds out what she has been saying about him. The best premise of the three: a heroine who deliberately spends her own reputation as currency.
Book twoMiss Marcie’s MischiefOn the eve of Saint Valentine’s Day, heiress Marcie Darlington runs from her school, along with the school’s own wicked headmistress, and is nearly run down by the London Mail Coach. The coach is being driven by Cole, Marquis of Sherringham, disguised as the coachman because he is fleeing women with designs on him. Two people escaping the same problem from opposite directions, colliding literally.
Book threeA Dangerous CourtshipVeronica rides out to the Yorkshire moors to investigate the suitor of yet another of her too-trusting friends, is set on by wild dogs, and is rescued by a stranger who appears to be on the edge of madness. The darkest of the three and the one that leans furthest toward the gothic.
The reading
Why the pattern holds
The three heroines share a habit worth pointing at: each of them acts first and deals with the fallout afterwards. Lissa invents a scandal about herself. Marcie escapes a school. Veronica rides into the moors alone to vet a man on somebody else’s behalf. None of them waits to be rescued from her situation, and in each case the plot is set in motion by her decision rather than by a man’s.
Reading order: the three are linked by the shared premise and a circle of friends rather than by a continuing plot. Publication order is the natural order but each stands alone.
Coverage
What is on the shelf
All three, which makes this the third complete run added to the Library this week alongside the Duke’s Men and the Blackwater Brides.
No covers. None could be retrieved for this series. Open Library has no image for two of the three and returns only a blank placeholder for the other; the Google Books service is over its daily quota from this address; the Barnes & Noble image host refuses direct requests. The owner’s own library listing does display covers for all three.
Nothing here has been read directly. Per-book premises come from the author’s own site and retailer listings, summarized rather than quoted. The pattern described above is drawn from those three premises and is offered as a reading, not as authorial intent.
See the whole Library → · Lindsay Randall on this shelf →
Series structure and per-book premises drawn from the author’s official site, retailer listings and standard series bibliographies, summarized rather than quoted. No cover art was retrievable for this series. No part of these novels has been read directly for this page.
