These Old Shades
One of Georgette Heyer’s best-loved novels, this 1926 romance revives the villain of her debut and recasts him as a hero. Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon, jaded and dangerous enough to be nicknamed Satanas, buys a red-headed urchin off a Paris street to serve as his page, then discovers the boy is a girl, Leonie. He grooms her toward an elaborate revenge on an old enemy, the Comte de Saint-Vire, only to find his cold heart engaged in spite of himself. Moving between the salons of Paris and the drawing rooms of London, Heyer delivers elegance, wit, and a thoroughly satisfying reckoning. It opens the Alastair family saga. Free to read as a PDF and EPUB edition.
About the Author
Invented the Regency romance as a genre, researched it obsessively from period letters and newspapers, and kept notebooks of slang so exact that later writers simply borrowed from her. Heyer wrote around fifty novels, refused nearly every interview, and once said the public had no…
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