Fever
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4.0 • 9 Ratings
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
From "one of the most powerful voices in the romantic genre" (Romantic Times) comes a tale set in the steamy bayous of the American South. Steeped in sensuality and lavish prose, it is Katherine Sutcliffe's Þnest novel to date.
Fever
Orphaned and penniless, Juliette Broussard is overjoyed when her godfather, Max Hollinsworth, plucks her from an isolated French convent. Then she discovers his plan for her to marry his shiftless son Tylor so that he can acquire her family's dilapidated sugar cane plantation, Belle Jarod. Juliette's dreams are of rebuilding her once-glorious home and she wants nothing to do with marriage -- until she comes face-to-face with a blue-eyed temptation who unleashes the same passions that drove her mother, Louisiana's most beautiful and notorious prostitute, to destroy every man who loved her.
Chantz Boudreaux, Max's bastard first-born, has one desire: for his father to acknowledge him. But the moment he drags Juliette's naked body from the flood-driven Mississippi, he is swept into a liaison that unsettles his priorities and threatens his life. Soon their forbidden passion burns like a fever. As they struggle to revive Belle Jarod, betrayal and a deadly plague threaten everything they hold dear.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sutcliffe (Notorious) provides plenty of plot twists but little chemistry in this predictable romance, set in antebellum Louisiana. Juliette Brussard is an orphaned heiress who returns home after years in France only to discover that she's at the mercy of her godfather, Max Hollinsworth, and his lascivious son Tylor. Although Max hopes to make Juliette his daughter-in-law, and thus gain control of her long-abandoned plantation, Belle Jarod, she has eyes only for his handsome overseer, Chantz Boudreaux. Chantz is respected for his farming skills, but he is socially shunned because of his history as a "mud dauber," one of the poor whites who eke out a living in the bayou. Despite Juliette and Chantz's protestations of desire for one another, they are repeatedly torn apart; when societal strictures don't intervene, a gator attack does. Chantz and Juliette eventually unite, but as if poverty and alligators aren't enough, they must also overcome an assault by Tylor and the spread of yellow fever. Sutcliffe loads her story with period detail, but the novel's depiction of slavery complete with mammies, clich d dialect and a miscegenation subplot will disconcert the modern reader. Ultimately, despite the numerous obstacles tossed at Chantz and Juliette, it's their essential blandness that is insurmountable.
