Jennifer St. Giles, His Dark Desires

His Dark Desires

Jennifer St. Giles

Pocket, Nov 2005, $6.99, 336 pp.

ISBN: 0743486269

In 1874, widow Juliet Boucheron and her two sisters Ginette and Mignon, operate a B&B at their family home, La Belle du Temps in New Orleans. Juliet has heard rumors that her spouse actually lives in Europe, but though she assumes he died trying to run a Union blockade a decade ago, she has hired an investigator, Goodson, to look into this. Goodson warns her to trust no one as her life is danger, at the same time attorney Mr. Latour pressures her to sell her home to the Packert Investment Company.

Writer Stephen Trevelyan rents a room from Juliet, insisting he is a writer who needs quiet. He hides his true agenda from his hostess, which is to find stolen gold that he assumes her late spouse buried in the house. However, he soon changes his objective when he falls in love with Juliet; now his goal is to keep the three sisters safe from an unknown assailant who wants them dead, and has already poisoned Ginette.

HIS DARK DESIRES is a wonderful American romantic suspense thriller that is driven by the three sisters and Stephen, who appeared as a key support character in the gothic delight THE MISTRESS OF TREVELYAN, where he learned a lesson in life. Juliet is a courageous person, as she not only takes charge of the B&B, her sisters and her son; she bravely, perhaps stupidly, refuses to be bullied into a sale she feels is wrong, though she is unsure how much longer heritage can hold out in a southern world turned upside down in the past decade. Jennifer St. Giles provides a fabulous Reconstruction Era tale.

Harriet Klausner