It’s love at first sight across Almack’s crowded ballroom in this sweetly erotic, Regency-era romance. There’s only one problem: dashing Admiralty spy Lord Maximillian Browning and breathtaking, red-haired Miss Rowan Higbee can’t seem to get introduced to one another! All their plans to meet keep going awry!

Rowan and Max’s love story plays out against the background of the 1804 London Season. Before they can find their happy ending, Rowan and Max will have to contend with a temperamental French modiste, a Venetian Breakfast gone wrong, Rowan’s horse-mad, hot-headed brother and a collection of unlikely villains. Max doesn’t know it, but Rowan’s past may actually present the biggest obstacle of all.

This is the first of an ongoing series, The Edanmore Chronicles, modern Regency Romance novels presented in a classic format.

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What if an alien was stranded on earth and its first contact was with children instead of adults? What if a dead body was found in a room that is locked from the inside and there is no evidence of an intruder? What if there was a world where dragons were real and could fly? What if a young man saw a young woman across a crowded room, knew that she was meant for him, and then couldn’t find her? All genre fiction begins with the question “what if.” The fun of reading genre fiction is following the author’s flights of fancy as the answer is developed and revealed.

My father of blessed memory introduced me to science fiction at a very young age by urging me to read “A Canticle for Leibowitz.” Walter M. Miller Jr.’s great dystopian novel about scholars’ search for meaning in what was Saint Leibowitz’s shopping list is a masterpiece. I was hooked. A few years later, my father introduced me to the Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout. These are low key murder mysteries set in New York City in a somewhat kinder, gentler age. I fell in love with the misogynistic hero and his society-loving side-kick who live together in a house at 922 West 35th street, an address that is somewhere in the Hudson River, quite near New Jersey.

I discovered the romances of Barbara Cartland right after my graduation from rabbinical school. In need of an escape from the writings of hair-splitting 8th century C.E. rabbis, Cartland’s well written fluff suited my needs to a T. Nothing really bad happened in the stories, the situations were simple but told in a compelling way and every story had a happy ending. As I was struggling to establish myself as a congregational rabbi, Cartland’s romances reassured me that there is love in the world and that simple, uncomplicated people dwell here on earth, even if they are difficult to identify in the world of synagogue life.

The romance novels that I write today are set in the English Regency Period, broadly 1780-1840. It was a time when the Western world, under pressure from the Enlightenment, was beginning to change in many dramatic ways. One of those ways had to do with peoples’ understanding of love and marriage. It is true that there are literary works written prior to the Regency era that promote love as an ideal. However, the concept that one might marry for love rather than for status, wealth or financial security doesn’t really begin to slowly infiltrate all levels of English society until the early 1800’s. It is a fertile period in which to set a love story. Anything can happen!

Long live genre fiction! Everyone needs a “what if” once in a while.