The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

To Tempt a Troubled Earl (Regency Rossingley 1)
By Fearne Hill
NineStar Press, 2025
Five stars

This is Fearne Hill at her best. I have to say, the leap backwards two centuries from the contemporary Rossingley series to the world of Regency England is a brave move. Historical novels set in this period evoke the huge success of Georgette Heyer (whose work I read as a teenager in the 1960s and 70s). She sets a standard for all modern writers who attempt historical fiction. Hill succeeds at this time travel because she manages the language and the period character of the people and the settings very well.

It’s a marvelous idea to imagine that the earl of Rossingley we know from the contemporary series is part of a legacy of same-sex love going back two centuries—and, if you believe the eleventh earl, even farther back than that. This book, however, focuses on Orlando Duchamps-Avery, known to his few close friends as Lando, in 1821. The eleventh earl lives in near-seclusion, as he has for some three years. Most people don’t understand that he is in mourning over the death of his beloved friend Captain Charles Prosser.

When Christopher Angel bursts into his life, claiming to be Captain Prosser’s nephew and demanding that the earl help him avenge his sister’s dishonor at the hands of a neighboring baronet, Lando’s first reaction is to have him physically thrown out of Rossingley’s front doors.

Kit Angel is a hothead and has lived a less-than-honorable life in London simply to survive. His sister’s disgrace at the hands of an arrogant and heartless nobleman drives him; but it is his connection to the late Charles Prosser that finally gets the aloof and lonely earl to pay attention.

The author moves the plot forward carefully, looking at the aristocracy of Regency England with a sometimes jaundiced eye. It’s fascinating that Hill takes the time to let the reader understand how a great English estate works, even touching on things like diversifying investments as technology begins to emerge in the early 19th century. It is in this context that the author places the mercurial young earl, whose own arrogance hides a generous heart and a sense of duty worthy of his family’s legacy.

The unexpected romance between the London nobody and the reclusive earl is at the center of the story, but Hill sets this relationship against a richly-painted backdrop that allows the reader to step out of the present and into the past.

There are a few little anachronisms here and there; and the notion presented that a South Carolina cotton planter would not use slave labor is completely impossible for the 1820s—an idea rooted in today’s profound discomfort with the economic realities of the United States at the time (and the parallel idea that many English nobleman quietly made lots of money from slavery far away from the British Isles, even though slavery was illegal in the UK itself).

But these are minor considerations in a story that is beautifully written, emotionally engaging, and filled with characters you love from the moment you get to know them. I’ve already ordered the second book in the series.