FROM THE PUBLISHER

His Power Matched her Pride

Fallen from grace and sheltered in a convent, Lady Edlyn is a skilled herbalist forced to secretly tend the wounds of Hugh de Florisoun. A knight renowned for his prowess on the battlefield and in the bedchamber, Hugh is a man who is no stranger to Edlyn's heart.

Using the healing magic of herbs and the power of remembered love, Edlyn saves the warrior life. Now Hugh claims this brazen beauty for his own. But Edlyn, cynical in the ways of men, denies him—even as her flesh burns with unaccustomed fire. Passion becomes their battleground with no mercy given...in a bold age when danger and desire go hand in hand.

FROM THE CRITICS

Kirkus Reviews

Veteran Newsweek editor Cose turns from his distinguished nonfictional studies (Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World, 1997, etc.) to an issues-oriented legal suspenser, with provokingly inconclusive results. Nobody denies that accountant John Wisocki, fired from his job at Computertronics when the company was swallowed up by Infotect, took a gun one Sunday evening to the office of Francisco Garc￯﾿ﾽa, the junior colleague who'd been kept on instead of him, and shot Garc￯﾿ﾽa moments after he arrived. But was the shooting deliberate and premeditated, fueled by hatred and backlash against affirmative action, as Wisocki seemed to indicate in a note he composed on Garc￯﾿ﾽa's own word processor: "I know that some people have suffered unjustly. But America never persecuted Colombians"? Or was the death an accidental interruption of the suicide Wisocki had planned without having any idea that Garc￯﾿ﾽa would come in that night? Even before the trial begins, Wisocki's attorney, rising black star Felicia Fontaine, scurries to make the defense's case in the press, running at every turn into the counterthrusts of her ex-lover, senior trial counsel Mario Santiago. Because Felicia is Cose's heroine, he spends lots of time showing the unlikely bedfellows she courts, or who court her(Wisocki's estranged wife, a loudly approving right-wing radio show host, a lecherous minister, a bevy of TV talking heads), in an attempt to put Wisocki in the best possible light. The real novelty of his presentation, though, isn't the expected ringing debate about affirmative action (which duly appears, but only with a secondary emphasis), but the evenhanded back-and-forth between Felicia and Mario,both by turns worried about their witnesses, depressed about holes in the evidence, and utterly confidentþusually at the end of the same day's testimonyþof victory. The result is that rarity, an unpredictable courtroom drama in which disputed facts take a backseat to the issues they raise, and whose leading questions are still hanging when you turn the final page.