"Enjoyable Regency romance"

With both her parents dead and having inherited a coveted fortune, twenty-three year old Maeve Irvine decides to leave her home in Boston to escape the fortune hunters. She travels by sea to London to stay with her Aunt Eleanor Blaine. She plans to hide her wealth, never marry, and earn a living as a portrait artist.

At the embankment in England, Duke Adrian Ashton tells Maeve she looks familiar. Both flirt outrageously before she has to leave. At Eleanor's home, Adrian arrives to take his visiting mother and his daughter home when he recognizes Maeve, who he learns, is cousin to his deceased wife Belinda. He wonders if Maeve is just like Belinda, a cheating spouse who even said she could not be sure that he sired their child that he loves. As Maeve and Adrian fall in love, he runs hot and cold as to whether man eating runs in her family especially when she starts serendipitously visiting a man engaged to someone else.

Though clearly by the book, Regency romance readers will immensely enjoy THE ARTFUL MISS IRVINE, a charming tale made warm and entertaining by the lead duet. Maeve is a brave soul who never expected to find love, but now that it arrives she wants to cherish and enjoy it. However, Adrian, burned once, has problems reconciling his love for Maeve with his previous relationship. Jennifer Malin makes reading fun.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted August 10, 2003

Summary

Hurt by a fortune-hunting suitor, artist Maeve Irvine believes her fulfillment in life must come from painting rather than marriage and a family. She moves from Boston to London to live with an aunt and keep her wealth a secret. Her impersonation of a poor relation is so convincing that Adrian, Duke of Ashton, her late cousin's widower, suspects she's after an inheritance currently willed to his daughter. He's charmed by her lively, unconventional manners, but he needs to know whether they're the mark of an adventuress or simply the quirks of an artist. For her part, Maeve can't decide if he's the cold husband she has heard her cousin endured or the feeling man she glimpses when he's with his daughter...and sometimes with her!