My Forever Love
On Crusade with the Lionheart, Templar Knight Tamberlane refuses to commit war atrocities. Defrocked, excommunicated and disowned, he lives the life of a monk without benefit of church sanction. Amaranth has had her kinship to the king (but on the wrong side of the sheets) sold to one unsavory husband after another. Abused and having now attempted murder on the last one, she is on the run. It’s a match made in heaven.
Canham has a marvelous skill at evoking the medieval world in one telling detail after another, down to the crack of an acorn under a spy’s boot. In her hands, the simple tale of wounded stranger brought to health in the castle of one who has sworn off love pushes the right buttons. Marak, the albino alchemist, is wonderfully drawn. I felt cheated we didn’t get more of him. And though I balked at the thought of how to get a woman-hating Templar to be a believable romance hero, this author managed it for me.
In a work otherwise so competent, however, the few errors are even more glaring, and I cannot resist mentioning them. A woman from the Levant wears a sari? Our heroine knows that word? Chickens die from being too stupid to close their mouths in a rain storm? That’s turkeys, modern turkey bred for breast meat rather than brains.
And finally, on every page, our hero’s name. Tamberlane? I could not handle a Crusader named for the fourteenth-century Mongol scourge of Asia, Timur the Lame.