As a fan of Georgette Heyer, I have grown extremely particular in my tastes regarding historical romances, and Thea's Marquis was simply not the Regency that I was looking for.

More recently, author Carola Dunn writes an outstanding golden-age mystery series featuring the delightful Daisy Dalrymple. Daisy is one of my favorite recurring characters, and I am extremely fond of the series that features her. I also adore almost all of Georgette Heyer's Regency and Georgian historical novels.

This book seemed to be an attempt to combine both writing styles, yet lacked Daisy's quiet confidence, calm good sense and superior understanding, and all of Heyer's wit and balanced storytelling.

Thea's Marquis seemed very reminiscent of two of Heyer's books, Frederica, and Arabella. Almost as if they had been chopped up, sifted for content, and boiled down unenthusiastically into a formulaic, slightly haughty while still feeling overly-familiar, emotionally vapid tale. Many of the characters, situations, and even the dialogue, seemed to be taken directly from Heyer's books, and only sometimes altered. That made for a very disjointed read.

The things that I did appreciate in this book included
- the fierce loyalty among characters
- Dunn's ever-present optimism peeks through at times during the story
- the characters are all basically likable, excepting the villians

I would recommend that Heyer fans avoid this, and Dunn fans to focus their attention on her more excellent work - the Daisy Dalrymple series. ( )

Sequel to Road to Gretna. Didn't remember this and have read it again. The earlier regencies are not as good as her later ones. This one is OK but not sterling as a lot of the later ones are. ( )