When He Was Wicked, by Julia Quinn

In this novel we belatedly hear about Francesca Bridgerton’s marriage to John Stirling, Earl of Kilmartin. His cousin and heir, Michael Stirling, has been in love with Francesca since the day they met, shortly before her wedding. He has a reputation as a charming rake and he buries himself in that persona to hide his feelings from his cousins and the world. When John dies after only two years of marriage, Michael cannot allow himself to comfort the grieving widow and flees to India. His return to London several years later coincides with Francesca’s reluctant decision to remarry, in order to have a child. Can the new Earl possibly inherit the widow as well as the estate? Well duh! As usual the timeline is all over the place and the dialogue and word usage is, at times, cringeworthy. But the romance storyline is stronger and more credible than the last few efforts, with a return to the steamy scenes that made the first Bridgerton novel so successful. The action takes place almost simultaneously with the last two books, covering Colin’s and Eloise’s stories, which is odd and seems to require some retrofitting that doesn’t quite work. One reason that Francesca’s tale is more successful than the other two is that little of it has been foreshadowed in earlier books. It is a pity then that the extra epilogue contains huge spoilers for the next two books.