Silk and Steel

Silk and Steel is a historical romance by the American writer Kat Martin, published by St. Martin's Paperbacks in 2000. It is set in England and belongs to the Regency period in which the genre is most often placed.

Kathryn Grayson is a well-bred young woman with an inheritance, which is exactly the problem: her uncle can control the money if he can control her, and the novel opens with his attempt to have her declared insane and shut away. She escapes the house and gets into a carriage belonging to Lucien Montaine, a marquess whose reputation and temper mean that he is not the obvious person to ask for help. What follows is a journey across the country, pursued by the uncle's men, in which two people who have no reason to trust each other have to keep moving. Martin writes the story with a good deal of the machinery of the genre in it: disguises, roadside inns, the threat of scandal and the question of how a woman with no protector can get to London and be believed.

The author published a large number of novels in this style, and the book is representative of the late twentieth-century historical romance that sets a suspense plot inside a courtship.