Rating: 2 stars
Genre: Historical Romance
Recommended for: Fans of humorous boddice rippers
I can't be impartial about this because blandly put Coulter's humor, just like Julie Garwood's, doesn't work for me at all. Had I known this was more on the humorous rather than the angsty side, I'd never have picked it to begin with.
Impartially though, the heroine had little to recommend her in the first half of the book. For the first 100 pages she only reacts with nods and single line answers to her encounters with every person she meets, including the hero, even when she's insulted. Such a cold fish, I've rarely met before. And then to make matters worse, she proceeds to drug and force to marriage a man who has said to her face that he doesn't want her!
Disgusted as I was with her at that point, Coulter did turn the tables on me and made me more sympathetic to her in the second half, mainly by making the hero a brute. At this point, I felt those two totally deserved each other. And just when some angst was starting to come out of their struggles and making me interested, the humor crept in. Well, the book lost me at that point. I believe however, that this is where things got interesting for most readers who actually liked the book.
If you like Garwood's humor and bodice rippers, this is a good mix of both of them, along with a really good and hard to solve mystery. If you like crazy servants that intervene in their lords' lives and make you laugh out loud, again, this is the book for you. A note though, that the hero and heroine are first cousins and though that was not frowned upon at that time, some readers might still feel repulsed by this detail.
If you however don't like any of the above tropes, you may skip this with no regrets whatsoever.
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