So when BN.com Romantic Reads boards moderator Melanie Murray yesterday posted a comment on my Unabashedly Bookish column about romances featuring PTSD in characters, I knew I had today's H2H column in the bag.
"All of the heroes in Elizabeth Hoyt's Legend of the Four Soldiers series are damaged by their wartime experiences in the Colonies," Murray writes. "Alistair in 'To Beguile a Beast ' is physically scarred, but it's Samuel in 'To Taste Temptation' who bears the emotional scars that force him to run through the town to escape his horrible memories."
You may remember Sir Alistair Munroe from a column about "beastly" heroes I wrote a while back. In fact, read on as I repurpose a tad of it and inform you that, working as a naturalist, Monroe was taken captive and tortured during the French and Indian War, then returned to Scotland to hide away where his burned, mutilated face - missing an eye! - won't frighten children and missish chits. It takes the earnest, yet lusty love of a courtesan hiding her beloved children from her keeper, their father, to get Munroe to believe, not that he has a future, but that he may be able to give her a future and love.
Anywayz, Vale's jilted on his wedding day, but luckily Melisande, the kind-of-hot spinster pal of his un-betrothed, steps in to fill the bill. In that most scrumptious romance construct, she'll not give the happily cynical Vale her heart - but will offer her body. In the process, Vale has trouble hiding from Melisande the effects of his experiencing the nearly wholesale slaughter of his comrades on Colonial soil during an ambush - a raid which Vale's sure was set up by a traitor.
Vale and his fellow Hoyt heroes are struggling most with survivors' guilt, a part of their PTSD; they watched their fellow soldiers murdered and a friend tortured and burned alive by their Indian captors.
Or did they. For that man, Reynaud St. Aubyn was tortured brutally and marked to be burned alive by his captors, but wasn't the man Vale and the others saw immolated. Instead, St. Aubyn spent 7 years as a slave within an American Indian family.
After escaping and returning to England to reclaim his ancestral title, he's stricken with periods of dissociation and flashbacks in which footmen become foot soldiers and Mayfair streets become bloody American frontier battlefields. Soon his hyper vigilance becomes necessary when the one lovely English miss not cowed by his periodic ravings is threatened, and along with her his hold on what has become a hopeful, and sensual, link to what we'd call "recovery."
Hoyt's Legend of the Four Soldiers series is very cool, not just because it's really entertaining and sexy, but also because she uses a nifty little device of telling the actual soldiers' ‘legend' at the head of each chapter in each book. It adds a fairy tale-like flavor to the novels that enchants the struggles for hope and happiness within.
What do you like about Elizabeth Hoyt's novels? What did you dig about her Prince series; which are your faves? Should more historicals be written with some or all action set in America?
I LOVE LOVE LOVE Elizabeth Hoyt, and believe she's one of the freshest voices in the historical genre today. She's not afraid to push the envelope and try new things, which makes her books stand out, but what I love best is her voice. Her prose just pulls you in on page one and has a very historical feel to it. I always tell people that her books are for the sophisticated reader of romance 
As for settings, I would really like to see more colonial period historicals, set around the revolution. I loved the miniseries John Adams, so anything in that vein would pop my cork.
And oh, how I used to love cowboys in romances. In the 90's, those were my favorites. I remember Johanna Lyndsey's ANGEL, and how I gobbled that one up. Where have they all gone? And why? Is it something in the mindset of women today that we want dukes and earls and lots of servants? I think we're all working so hard in our regular lives as superwomen, juggling careers and families, that the last thing we want is to be transported to a place where we have to pee outside and wash dirty laundry in a bucket with a washboard, and haul water from the creek. Far preferable to have a maid knock on your door in the morning with a tray of hot tea and scones, and pull your curtains open for you while you stretch and yawn.
But still, there's something about a rugged, dusty cowboy who can twirl a pistol around his finger .
