Our books today are three new romances hot off the presses, and they quite accidentally nagged at a small corner of my guilty conscience when it comes to my foremost guilty pleasure. In the past, veteran romance readers have accused me of disproportionately favoring historical romances over all other kinds, and although I initially bridled at the thought, the more I thought about it the more I realized it was true. It’s understandable – after all, I make no secret of my love for historical fiction (and in fact make it my sole editorial preoccupation in my other web-lit home, the Historical Novel Review) – but it isn’t exactly fair to or representative of the huge remainder of the romance field, where sizzling-hot quasi-erotica set in the present day easily outsells the bodice-rippers that were once the genre’s mainstay.

The imbalance struck me as I read my way through some of this month’s new romances from the good folks at Berkley, so I moved a few contemporaries to the top of the pile for this little round-up, starting with:

Below the Belt by Jeanette Murray – This one stars athletic trainer Marianne Cook, who has the curious job of training the male members of the Marine Corps boxing team into a well-oiled professional unit. Marianne is pert and sexy, of course, and so she’s invariably the object of unwanted attention from all of those very young and nearly brainless Marines. The book opens with a fun scene in which she’s saved from one such encounter by the book’s hero, First Lieutenant Brad Costa, who Marianne spots right away as a member of the Corps himself:

“Marine? What gave it away?” The taller, older one smiled easily, but his grip on the young man never loosened. Like his younger friend, he wore the same distinctive military markers – medium brown hair in a high and tight, polo tucked into jeans without any designer rips or holes – but it wasn’t so much a definition of who he was as it was just something he wore comfortably. He was probably in his late twenties, early thirties tops, she’d guess. Not old. But old enough to flip a switch from thinking What a silly little infant over to Oh, boy, that’s good to look at.

That pointed mention of Brad Costa’s age is the twinkle in the book’s eye throughout. He’s a bit older than the usual mid-twenties, and nobody in the book mocks that idea more thoroughly than Costa himself. The book is a light-hearted affair, certainly, although nowhere near as fluffy as our next book:

Love After All by Jaci Burton – This author will be familiar to romance readers for, among other things, her “Play-by-Play” novels (in two of which, Melting the Ice and Taking a Shot, she advances the charming idea that professional hockey players are actually a form of humans), and her “Hope” novels ( Hope Flames, Hope Ignites, Hope Burns), of which this is the latest one. It tells the story of high school math teacher Chelsea Gardner (who could “weed out a decent man from a loser in the first fifteen minutes of a date”), who’s worked out a perfect list of the qualities she’s determined to find in her ideal man. He’s got to work a 9 to 5 job; he’s got to be a natty dresser; he’s got to have a great big manly dog; he’s got to have no relationship baggage, and so on. The one person she’s certain doesn’t qualify is Sebastian “Bash” Palmer, the owner of the No Hope at All bar:

Bash was the perfect example of the wrong type of guy. She mentally ticked off all the items on her list that he didn’t fit.

He was divorced. He was a jeans and T-shirt kind of guy. And while he might look super hot in said jeans and T-shirt, it still counted against him.

The list starts getting whittled away in the book’s opening pages, when one of his ex-girlfriends storms into the bar and hands Bash a terrified little dog she claims she only adopted to impress him. Little Lulu almost immediately becomes the cement that bonds Chelsea and Bash together, and the novel that follows is a happy, air-light thing, a perfect diversion for a snowy, sleety Boston April.

But much to my chagrin – and my pleasure – the book I enjoyed most this time around was, you guessed it, a historical novel:

This Gun for Hire by Jo Goodman – I wasn’t very familiar with Goodman’s books until I read her 2013 novel True to the Law, which was very satisfyingly substantial and mighty good. So I went into her new book This Gun for Hire with high hopes, and I wasn’t disappointed. The book is set in 1888, the story of former army cavalryman Quill McKenna, who’s the bodyguard of Ramsey Stonechurch, the main power broker and mine owner of Stonechurch, Colorado. When the Stonechurch family receives threats, Quill hires scout Calico Nash to protect Ramsey’s daughter from danger – and Quill begins to find himself attracted to her. Calico is a superb gunman, but after an unexpected demonstration, he’s willing to cede top honors to Quill:

Quill fell silent, thinking. After a few moments, he said, “Well, my father called it a preternatural bent. It was not a compliment. He didn’t trust that my talent wasn’t the devil’s doing, and he was certain I would come to grief for having it.”

“And your brother? Does Israel have the same bent?”

“No, but he’s done his best to prove that you can come to grief without it.” He smiled wryly. “If my father ever saw the irony there, he’s never said as much.”

Calico walked up to him, raised herself slightly on her toes, and kissed him on the mouth. “I appreciate the irony, and I am in awe of your gift. If I thought for a moment that I could be the shot you are, I might be envious, but what you can do is something extraordinary.”

“It’s probably a little important that I’m good at it, Calico, but it’s still only shooting.”

There’s very much more going on in this book than “only shooting – the action sequences are wonderfully done, the characters are sharply drawn (with a very refreshing minimum of anachronisms), and there’s a snarky note of narrative sub-commentary running alongside the story that ended up being my favorite aspect of the book.

The book – a historical novel! Dammit! I’ll try better in next month’s Romance Roundup!