Book - The Scottish Bride by Catherine Coulter

In which we ring in the New Year with a trashy novel...I wrapped up 2005 reading what felt like a slew of "airport books", plus a bona fide work of literature, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. In my first visit to the library of the New Year (overdue books hanging over my head), I picked up three cat behavior books (still trying to understand the non-dog I am sharing my space with), an anticipatory Caribbean tour guide, and The Scottish Bride by Catherine Coulter. I think I was craving a satisfying trashy novel, the kind that would make me feel happy instead of slimed. Scottish Bride did the trick. It's the Regency-set story of an English vicar of noble family who inherits a castle in Scotland from a distant cousin. I think his brothers all have prior books written about them, but I didn't feel encumbered by my ignorance of them. Anyway, early in his initial visit he rescues a woman who says she's being assaulted by a suitor. Turns out the vicar's a widower and the woman is a bastard, which apparently puts her in the goods and chattel category. Naturally the forces of good triumph over the forces of evil, and sex turns out to be great for both of them, including new horizons in pleasure for the widower vicar. See, that's satisfying! No nasty trail of bodies needed for reader happiness.