The Birthday Present by Alison Richardson

The Birthday Present (novella)
The Countess Trilogy #3

Alison Richardson
Historical Romance/Erotica
Published in 2009

H/h - Countess Anna von Esslin/James McKirnan
Setting: Late 1700s, Munich, Germany.

Read in August, 2013.

My rating:

                                             [spoiler alert]

The third and final installment in The Countess Trilogy, The Birthday Present by Alison Richardson was almost good... I was enjoying it a lot, until I reached the end. I would’ve rated it higher because I enjoyed the dialogue and everything else. But, I felt a bit cheated out of the HEA I was so hoping for.

Before I get into the review of book 3, a little recap of what went on earlier. Keep in mind that this is not a standalone novella. My recommendation is to read this series back to back, or at the least, to read book 1 and 2 before this one.

An Impolite Seduction by Alison Richardson

An Impolite Seduction (novella)
The Countess Trilogy #2

Alison Richardson
Historical Romance/Erotica
Published in 2009

H/h - Countess Anna von Esslin/James McKirnan
Setting: Late 1700s, England.

Read in Aug, 2013.

My rating:

                                                 [spoiler alert]

Hmm, can’t say I enjoyed An Impolite Seduction as much as I did the book 1 of The Countess Trilogy by Alison Richardson. I’ll just get to the review to explain why I ended up feeling this way.

In book 1, The Countess's Client, we meet the young and worldly Prussian countess Anna, to whom sex is basically a ‘healthy exercise’. She has had plenty of lovers in the past. Anna is of highborn and her POVs are quite snobbish. I did enjoy her jaded and uppity POV because I thought she was smart with an interesting personality. I still think she’s mostly smart, if only she could lose quite a bit of her snootiness. Anna had an adventure (or misadventure, depends on how one looks at it) of sort in a brothel where her cousin took her because he thought it’d be... fun. Anna did have fun with a lowborn mechanic who was working for the King, a Scot named James McKirnan. She masqueraded as a whore to ‘service’ this lowborn man whom no other prostitutes liked because of his station (and obvious assumption that he has little money). However, things go wrong when later, James falls for her and asks Anna to become his mistress. There was no HEA surely because Anna finds a way to spurn James’s ‘idiotic’ emotions and proposition. After all, a countess like her would NEVER make her affair to this lowborn man known to the world. For shame!

The Countess's Client by Alison Richardson

The Countess's Client (novella)
The Countess Trilogy #1

Alison Richardson
Historical Romance/Erotica
Published in 2009

H/h - Countess Anna von Esslin/James McKirnan
Setting: Late 1700s, Paris.

Read in August, 2013.

My rating:

                                      [might be spoilerish]

Ok, this was good. I really enjoyed The Countess's Client by Alison Richardson. I’ve been meaning to read this trilogy for sometimes now but kept putting it off thinking I might not like the worldly countess Anna much. But I was wrong. Why? Let me tell you...