Ladies in Hating
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4.1 • 11 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER!
A Lambda Literary Award Winner and named Best Romance of 2025 by Amazon, Kirkus, Chicago Public Library, and more . . .
A pair of Gothic novelists trade rivalry for love in this swoony, steamy, sapphic Regency
by USA Today bestselling author Alexandra Vasti.
Celebrated authoress Lady Georgiana Cleeve has achieved fame and fortune. Unfortunately, she’s
also acquired an enemy: the enigmatic Lady Darling, whose spine-tingling plots appear to be pulled
straight from Georgiana’s own manuscripts. What’s a stubborn, steely writer to do? Unmask her
rival, of course.
But unmasking doesn’t go according to plan—because Lady Darling is actually Cat Lacey, the
butler’s daughter and object of Georgiana’s very secret, very embarrassing teenage infatuation.
Cat Lacey has spent a decade clawing her family out of poverty. The last thing she needs is to be
distracted by the stunning(ly pretentious) Lady Georgiana Cleeve. But Cat can’t seem to escape her
infuriatingly beautiful rival—including at the eerie manor where they both plan to set their next books.
The plot unexpectedly thickens, however, when the novelists find themselves trapped in the manor
together. In between ghostly moans and spectral staff, Cat and Georgiana come face-to-face with
real danger: the scorching passion that’s been haunting their rivalry all along.
“I’m obsessed with this book.” – Ashley Herring Blake, USA Today bestselling author of
Delilah Green Doesn’t Care
“Alexandra Vasti’s Ladies in Hating . . . marks her as a star of historical romance.” – Shelf
Awareness
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vasti concludes her Belvoir's Library trilogy (after Earl Crush) with this clever Regency. Lady Georgiana Cleeve was disowned by her late father when she outed herself as the scandalous gothic romance author Geneva Desrosiers six years before the start of the book. Now she suspects fellow author Lady Darling of plagiarism and sets out to confront her—only to discover that Lady Darling is the pseudonym of Cat Lacy, her father's butler's daughter and Georgiana's teenage crush. Their overlapping history explains the similarities in their work, but the women's hostile encounter only fans the flames of their rivalry. Neither is pleased to bump into the other again at Renwick House, a purportedly haunted Gothic mansion that both are researching as a setting for forthcoming novels. Their animosity quickly fades, however, in the face of the manor's spookiness and their intensifying mutual attraction. When an assailant traps them inside the building only to be killed by the house's crumbling infrastructure, the women work together to escape—and to figure out who's coming after them and why. Though this mystery meanders a bit, the plot engages deeply with gothic literary tradition while retaining a fun, frothy tone. Vasti also showcases her knack for sweeping love declarations and steamy sex scenes that feel firmly grounded in character. This sends the series out on a high note.
Customer Reviews
Watered-down Waters
The setting and plot both seem on par for the genre, and the writing itself is fairly good on the sentence level, but the syntax and diction are too modern for the time period. It’s like a short S. Waters novel without the same command of the language of the time.