The Wrong Bride

The Wrong Bride is the opening novel of Catharina Maura's Windsors series, published by her own imprint, Ichara Publishing, in 2022. Maura writes the kind of contemporary romance that a lot of readers find through recommendation rather than reviews, and this book is built on two of the genre's oldest devices at once: a marriage arranged by contract and a younger sister standing in for an older one. The pair at the centre are Raven, who has been treated as the second-choice daughter for most of her life, and Ares Windsor, whose name carries the family business.

Ares is written as a man in full command of everything except his own household. He wants the alliance the contract represents, he wants his private life to stay private, and he has no interest in the woman he has ended up married to, which is a position the novel then spends its length dismantling. The Windsor family provides the rest of the cast, along with a corporate world of magazines, boardrooms and press cycles that gives the couple somewhere to fight.

The series continues with the other Windsor siblings, and each volume is written to stand on its own. Readers coming to the book should expect the conventions of the subgenre rather than a quiet one: an unequal marriage, a husband who keeps information to himself, and a heroine whose loyalty to her family is tested against her own interests.