what I read on vacation- April 2011

Notorious Pleasures-- Elizabeth Hoyt.  Hoyt is one of my favorite authors, but her last book, Wicked Intentions, about the woman who runs an orphanage in the worst part of London and the rake who is her only means of keeping it open, left me cold.  Hoyt's plots are usually extremely absorbing, and make sense both intellectually and emotionally.  But Intentions didn't make sense to me on either level.  Notorious Pleasures, the next book in the series, is about one of the women who has come on board to help support the orphanage by the end of the last book, Lady Hero Batten.  She is the sister of a duke and she is well-trained about the responsibilities of her position.  She understands that her marriage will be more about an alliance between two families than about her own emotional needs.  So she is perfectly willing to marry the Marquess of Mandeville (a marquess outranks a duke, so even for her it is an "advantageous" match).  Then she meets his brother, and their attraction to each other is irresistible. 

First of all, I will say that it is light-years better than Wicked Intentions.  I was completely absorbed from beginning to end-- it kept me happy on a full day of flying, sitting in airports, and then a long drive home.  But Hoyt sets herself a formidable task, since we meet Griffin, the Marquess's brother, while he is .... in the act with a married woman in one of the sitting rooms at a very large social occasion.  He also runs an illegal gin distillery.  Although of course he reforms by the end (it's so expected that a rake will reform by the end of a romance novel that I don't even consider that to be a spoiler), it's difficult to respect him. 

(But now there are minor spoilers ahead, skip a paragraph if you don't want them.) 

Also, the type of scandal she sets up is not just the typical historical romance novel scandal (the hero is caught in the garden with his hand down an innocent maiden's dress and now they must marry!!).  It's the kind of scandal that would be scandalous even by today's standards.  The brother of a very public man seduces his brother's fiancee right after their very public engagement, so she breaks off her engagement to marry the younger brother, and then the older brother marries his former mistress, who is essentially a prostitute?  That would be front and center in the National Enquirer for weeks.  Kardashian sisters, move over.  But Hoyt treats it as a "minor scandal" (I'm pretty sure I remember that she even uses that phrase).  It's more than a little ludicrous.  There is a lot of pain and outrage between the two brothers-- with some additional history thrown in-- and while Hoyt doesn't exactly ignore that, the combination of the "oops" attitude toward the scandal and the brother's sudden kiss-and-makeup meeting makes the ending just a little toooooo easy.  The fallout from that kind of scandal would last for months if not years-- both the public fallout and the emotions among the protagonists.  Bottom line:  It's good.  If you like Hoyt, you'll like it.  But it still doesn't measure up to her earlier Four Soldiers books, or even the Prince trilogy. 

Reckless-- Anne Stuart.  Charlotte is a 30-year-old virgin who wants to observe people having sex before she resigns herself to life on the shelf.  Lady Lina Whitemore is her widowed, very experienced cousin who takes her to a weekend-long orgy so she can watch her fill.  She is 'abducted' by Lord Adrian Rohan, a notorious rake whom Charlotte has secretly had a crush on for years. She spends the weekend locked in a cell with him.  The most tedious part of the book was the setup of exactly how Charlotte, a protected, inexperienced spinster, could plausibly get into this situation, and it doesn't really work. But once the story gets going, I forgot about that. The secondary romance, between Lina and a parson,  is in some ways more interesting than the primary one, and in the middle of the book, they were given almost equal amounts of page time.  So it was truly disappointing that the resolution between Lina and Simon was over and done with in a single conversation.  The issues they had going required a couple of chapters if you ask me, and I would have liked to read them.  But if you can ignore the overwrought setup and the too-quick ending, this was a really good read.  And best of all:  I read it on my Kindle, which doesn't have page numbers, so I had no idea how long it was.  I figured it was about 225 pages or so, and when I finished it, I thought-- not bad for a short book.  Then I looked it up on Amazon and and was surprised that it is over 400 pages.  A book that can keep me so interested that it seems to be half of its true length is rare indeed. 

Kiss and Tell-- Cherry Adair.  It was cute and fun and kept me absorbed.  But even though I know nothing about military operations, there were moments that I thought, oh, please.  That couldn't possibly happen.  And it had another adorable, talkative heroine.  The popular thing these days seems to be the cute, perky, quippy heroine-- and since that wasn't my personality even when I was the right age to be cute and perky, I don't have much patience with them.  It makes me roll my eyes that feminists have practically handed the world on a platter to the women who are in their twenties right now and what they want is to be cute, perky, and adorable.  Anyway-- this heroine, Marnie, skates right along the edge of being too cute, but it never gets to the point where I wanted to pull her hair out (as I did with the heroines in Talk Me Down and Catch of the Day), so she's not too bad.  And part of her growth as a character is that she wants to be taken seriously by her father and her brothers, so it gets dealt with in a way that I appreciated.  Marnie is up at her grandmother's cabin in the woods when a tree falls through the roof during a big storm.  She is rescued by Jake who lives in a cabin further up the mountain, who turns out to be a anti-terrorist specialist who has been put on leave from his job because he was framed for a couple of questionable incidents.  Marnie is caught in the middle when a team of terrorists shows up to finish off Jake.  If you're not too picky about plausible plots, this one was enjoyable.  My pickiness goes way down when I am on a plane. 

Beyond Seduction-- Kathleen O'Reilly.  Yes, I did it.  I read Mercedes' story (see this review).  It's the third of a trilogy by O'Reilly.  The first one I enjoyed, the second one was awful, and this one was somewhere in between.  The heroine, Mercedes, appears in the first two books because she is the sister of the heroes of those books.  In the first two, she is exactly the kind of cute, perky character that I just mentioned.  But she's better in this one, and in fact, she grows up quite a bit as the book goes along and becomes even more bearable.  It still isn't as good as the others of O'Reilly's that I've read (Sex Straight Up is still my favorite), but at least it took the bad taste out of my mouth left by the last one.  The story:  Mercedes writes a sex blog, and her thinly veiled accounts of events in her brothers' lives very nearly alienates her from them (and the reader) in the first two books.  But she doesn't care, because she is an ambitious writer, and her blog's popularity soars with the steamy stories.  Then she meets Sam Porter, host of a popular, nationwide TV talk show, who is in front of the camera so much that he highly prizes his privacy when he is off the air.  When he decides to run for Congress, Mercedes' career becomes a liability.  Again, an author ignores the real consequences of what would be a highly public and somewhat scandalous relationship, but it's still a better than average read.

Minor nit, though.  Here is half a paragraph from Beyond Seduction:  "Trust.  Now there was a four-letter word.  Men weren't designed for trust, they were designed for other four-letter words."  NOT KIDDING.  On page 185.  Can they not count?  How could the author, the editor, the copy-editor, and assorted beta-readers, not notice that T-R-U-S-T is FIVE LETTERS?  If she was making a snide remark about four letter words (which is the only thing I can think of), then why in the next sentence are there "other" four-letter words, as if trust is one of them?  Adding that one to my list of gaffes.