The Devil's Heiress (Rogue Series) - Softcover

In the conclusion of Beverley's Three Guys Called George trilogy, Major "Hawk" Hawkinville returns from the horrors of Waterloo to find his father incapacitated by a stroke, the estate coffers nearly emptied by his father's legal maneuverings to gain the title of Lord Deveril, and the villagers looking to him to make necessary, but costly, repairs. Hawk sees no solution but to marry for money, and if he can marry the heiress to the Deveril estates his stricken father believes himself entitled to, so much the better. But when Hawk actually meets the so-called Devil's Heiress, he has a difficult time reconciling the image of the grasping, promiscuous woman his father so vividly painted for him with the slightly mousy, Mary Wollstonecraft-quoting Clarissa Greystone he seeks to seduce and wed. But even an innocent like Clarissa has secrets, deadly secrets that endanger not only her future happiness but also her very life. Can she trust Hawk, a self-proclaimed fortune hunter, to help her? Can Hawk learn to trust--and to love--Clarissa even when he believes she had something to do with the murder of her affianced, the debauched Lord Deveril? It's a case of "Who's on first?" with a violent tug-of-war between Clarissa's powerful allies and the forces that seek to harm her. Jo Beverley continues her string of hits with her trademark complexity and real characters. --Alison Trinkle

The Devil's Heiress is the third and concluding book in my 2001 series about "Three Guys Called George." The other two are still available. The Demon's Mistress is a story in the collection In Praise of Younger Men, and The Dragon's Bride was published in May.

Hawk is in some ways a different kind of regency hero. Though he comes from an ancient family, his family has no title, and their ancestral home is a modest manor house in the village of Hawk in the Vale, Sussex. What's more, though he had an illustrious army career, he was not in the infantry or cavalry, but in the Quartermaster General's Department, concerned with the movement and provisioning of troops, and with investigations.

Home at last from the war, he's not looking for love and marriage, but then, neither is Clarissa Greystone. She's seen the worst of men, and her fortune means she doesn't need to marry. When she meets Hawk, however, she begins to think there might be something to be said for men, but it's when she sees his home that she falls in love. Wicked, surely, to marry a man for his home, but when a person has never really had a home, it's a powerful temptation.

But then a villain pulls the tangled threads into a thorough knot that only violence can sever.