I realize that the next book in Mary Balogh’s Huxtable series came out on Tuesday, May 19, but I won’t be reviewing it for today’s column. Instead, I will be reviewing To Beguile a Beast by Elizabeth Hoyt, who is one of the few historical romance novelists whose novels I enjoy for the writing itself (as opposed to just for the story). It is in the way she tells the story, the words she uses, the formatting she employs, as well as the direction the story progresses, that allows me to put her in a higher class than the typical romance novelist.

To Beguile a Beast is the third book in Hoyt’s Legend of the Four Soldiers series. The background to the series is the story of four men who have returned to England from fighting the French in the American Colonies. However, these four men are bonded together in that they all were of the few survivors of a massacre and capture by Indians allied with the French that occurred while they were there. They come to an understanding that one of their own men sold their location to the French, and they are attempting to discover who it was. Each novel is a story of how the heroine helps the hero overcome the stress that still plagues him from all he witnessed during the massacre and while they were held by the Indians as prisoners of war, while at the same time the hero attempts to identify the traitor.

To Beguile a Beast has a stereotypical “beauty and the beast” story line, where Helen Fitzwilliam, the beauty, and her two children, Abigail and Jamie, seek refuge with Sir Alistair Munroe (our beast) in his crumbling Scottish castle. Helen is the former mistress of the Duke of Lister, the villain here, and her children are his. However, she no longer wants to raise her children and waste her life at the Duke’s beck and call, seen only as his property. She enlists the help of a friend (the heroine from book two of the series, To Seduce a Sinner), who suggests she seek refuge with Sir Alistair since his home in Scotland is far from London, where the Duke resides. The first meeting of Helen and Alistair is a classic introduction of beauty and beast, but in a way that Hoyt makes the story her own:

She stepped back, nearly falling down the steps. At first the opening seemed eerily black, as if a ghostly hand had opened the door. But then something moved, and she discerned a shape within. A man stood there, tall, lean, and very, very intimidating. He held a single candle, its light entirely inadequate. By his side was a great four-legged beast, far too tall to be any sort of dog that she knew of.

“What do you want?” he rasped, his voice low and husky as if from disuse or strain. His accent was cultured, but the tone was far from welcoming.

Helen opened her mouth, scrambling for words. He was not at all what she’d expected. Dear God, what was that thing by his side?

At that moment, lightning forked across the sky, close and amazingly bright. It lit the man and his familiar as if he was on a stage. The beast was tall and gray and lean, with gleaming black eyes. The man was even worse. Black, lank hair fell in tangles to his shoulders. He wore old breeches, gaiters, and a rough coat better suited for the rubbish heap. One side of his face was twisted with angry red scars. A single light brown eye reflected the lightning at them diabolically.

Most horrible of all, there was only a sunken pit where his left eye should have been.

Abigail screamed.

I love that Alistair’s voice is “low and husky,” though not from sexual desire, which a romance novel reader would normally associate with a husky voice, but from “disuse.” I can hear him rasping out “What do you want?” in my head, and immediately know that he is a lonely man, and used to managing on his own. The beginnings of tension between Alistair and Helen begin there, at that moment. Hoyt’s description of Alistair is both precise and vague, giving me just enough to create the image of my own “beast” in my head. Hoyt also indirectly compares “the man” with “the beast,” though it is difficult not to combine the two descriptions to see “the man” as a beast, which is precisely what Hoyt wants the reader to do.

As To Beguile a Beast progresses, the conflict between Helen and Alistair builds to an odd relationship, where he does not want to love her because he does not see how she can love him, what with the way he looks. Helen, on the other hand, does not want to love Alistair because she does not want to be answerable and the property of any man. Each must overcome their pasts before they are capable of forming a true bond. Luckily, the Duke of Lister kidnaps Helen’s children, throwing her and Alistair together in an attempt to see them returned to her permanently, and Helen to be absolved of her responsibility of the Duke’s mistress.

To Beguile a Beast is a wonderful read, as are the previous two in the series if you want to get them. The background story of the massacre will be better understood if one has read the previous two novels. It is hard to not be taken in by Hoyt’s writing. She has a way of magically transporting her reader into the story, a part of the action. Book four, To Desire a Devil, and the conclusion of the backstory, comes out November 1, 2009, and I will be patiently awaiting its arrival.

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