Jocelyn Tolliver has been hiding behind her false identity her entire adult life.  Having taken over the Crimson Belle when her mother died, she’s never had a life of her own.  So while she knows all there is to know about seduction and satisfaction between men and women, she’s never experienced it first hand.   

When Alex Randall met Jocelyn in A LADY’S PLEASURE, he knew instantly that he wanted her.  But in keeping with her private, mysterious life, Jocelyn turned him away.  He couldn’t stay away, and soon the two indulge in a one-season affair that can only end in heart-break.  It takes the serial murder of London’s ‘fallen ladies’ to make them both realize that one season isn’t going to be enough. 

MADAME’S DECEPTION was a sexy return to this new author’s world.  It was a gentler romance than A LADY’S PLEASURE, with Alex and Jocelyn as softer, more thoughtful characters than previous, but they weren’t any less imaginative.  Jocelyn had more back story than Alex, but we had more history of Alex in the first book.  You don’t need to read both, but it’s a nice re-visit to two important characters from A LADY’S PLEASURE if you do, and it helps to put some secondaries from this book into perspective. 

The murder mystery that pulled Alex and Jocelyn apart was quite a distant storyline, not one to really put this book in the romance suspense genre.  It came to a rather sudden and unsatisfying conclusion in the end.  But other than that, the story was really well done and it’s quite obvious that the author is a natural story-teller.  

Reviewed for The Road to Romance by Sue Waldeck

September 30, 2007