A Dangerous Man

by Connie Brockway

Mercy Coltrane, a brash young American woman, travels to England to search for her estranged brother.  Strident in her quest, she seeks out the help of Hart Moreland, whom she knew years ago as Duke the Gunslinger, the hired gun her father enlisted to protect his land.  Now Earl of Perth, Hart is back in his native England in a hard-earned position of respect and power, and the last thing he wants is a reminder of his dishonorable past.  But Mercy Coltrane proves to be much more than just a painful reminder of the life he left behind.  Vibrant, beautiful, and witty, Mercy embodies the life of happiness that Hart desperately craves.  Connie Brockway is an author who understands the underlying fantasy of romance and dazzles readers with her emotional perception of love.  She writes with keen intelligence about the most important desires of the human heart.

Genres: Romance, Historical Romance, Historical, Regency, Historical Fiction, Westerns, Victorian

384 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published June 2, 1996

About the author

New York Times and USAToday best selling author Connie Brockway has twice won the Romance Writers of America's Rita award for best historical romance as well as being an eight time finalist. After receiving a double major in art history and English from Macalester College, Connie entered grad school with an eye to acquiring her MFA in creative writing. Soon enough she jettisoned the idea of writing serious literature for what she considered (and still considers) the best gig in the world, writing romance.

Connie has received numerous starred reviews for her romances in Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal. Library Journal also named her Her 2004 romance, My Seduction, one of the year's top ten romances.

In November of 2011, THE OTHER GUY'S BRIDE (a sequel to the perennially popular AS YOU DESIRE) was Amazon's Montlake Publishing's launch title. Here next book, NO PLACE FOR A DAME will be published September, 2013. A regency set romance, it is also the sequel to ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT.Today Connie lives in Minnesota with her husband David, a family physician, and two spoiled mutts.

Reviews

[Jultri · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF 42%. This book suffers from a case of too-much-going-but-still-boring-as-hellitis. English duke with secret past as a hired gun in America. Heiress he rescued once upon a time coming to England to look for her wayward brother. She wants his help once more. He wants to keep his reputation and family name pristine to marry off his sisters. She is a link to a past he wants to bury. He also wants to bury himself in her. It's conundrum but not for me. There's none of the clever banters and captivating characterisations that has enticed me to some of Brockway's other books. Onwards.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book, a bit different than the usual England based historical. It begins with the explosive first encounter of Mercy and Hart back in Texas, then jumps six years and over the ocean to England. Mercy has come to England to find her brother who has disappeared, except for a few letters asking for money. She's had no success, so she comes to Hart, who has gone back to his real life as the Earl of Perth, hoping to convince him to help. It's not a pleasant meeting. Hart has worked very hard to keep his past a secret, not wanting anything to affect his sisters' standing in society and having Mercy around threatens to ruin it all.

Mercy is desperate to find her brother. She feels responsible for the rift between him and their father and wants to get them back together, but she can't find him. Her trip to England from Texas is supposedly to find a husband, but she could care less about that. She has found Lord Perth and is determined to get his help. She runs into some trouble because he isn't the least bit interested in helping her. Meanwhile she's having an interesting time of her own as part of the same house party. Her Texan attitudes just don't mix well with the Victorian way of doing things. I loved the whole shooting competition and how Mercy teased Hart into participating. That was the first real sign of the sparks the were flying between them. Mercy refused to give up her search and ended up blackmailing Hart into helping her. She was also determined to help in the search. She had a couple of times when she was a real idiot and could have made things much worse, but got lucky. Spending as much time as she did with Hart, she soon realized that the cold, hard man that everyone sees is hiding a man who is hiding a lot of pain. One of the things I liked best about her was how she got him to open up to her and how she tried to relieve some of his pain. She also fell hard for him, even though she was sure nothing would come of it because of the huge differences between them.

Hart is a man who keeps iron control over himself and his emotions at all times. Years ago he had become a soldier to help support his family, later going to America to earn more for the same reason. He has done things that haunt his memories and give him nightmares, and make him avoid being around people too much. He guards his secrets, fearing what kind of damage they could do to his sisters if they were revealed. Having Mercy show up threatens what little peace he has. He denies her request for his help not wanting anything to do with that life again. But he also can't deny how much she intrigues him and attracts him. It was fun watching him try to fight it, especially during the shooting scene. Thanks to her blackmail he has to help her and at first it really angers him, especially when she forces him to take her along. It isn't long before he wants to help her on his own. The scene where she finds him battling his nightmares is heartbreaking as we see everything that is haunting him. I loved how he was able to tell her everything. The events of the next morning were funny in a way as Hart gets what he wants but is afraid to take. I really enjoyed the ending.

The mystery of her brother Will's whereabouts was well done. It gave a look at some of the less pleasant parts of Victorian London. There was more to his disappearance than was first suspected and it was interesting to see how it played out. The revelation of the person behind his disappearance was a bit of a surprise.

I also found the other characters to be well done. Lady Acton was a typical society matriarch with the attitudes and prejudices of her time. She also seemed to have a tight control over her son, who was supposedly courting Hart's sister Annabelle. Of Hart's three sisters I liked Beryl the best. She seemed to have an excellent head on her shoulders as was shown later in the book. I liked the way she treated Mercy and her reaction to Hart's revelations was excellent. I found Fanny to be the most forgettable of the sisters with her constant weeping. Annabelle turned out to be a total bitch and completely deserves the mother-in-law that she gets. I would have liked to see more of an epilogue and some hint of what happens with Will.

[Kristiej · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book way back when it was first published in 1996 and yep, been reading romance that long. From that book on I was sold on Connie Brockway as an author who really works for me. It’s been a few years since I’ve really read historicals and I had forgotten how much I enjoyed her and now I’ve been reading more this year, I wanted to go back and start at the beginning again.

The book opens in Texas with a gunslinger trying to rescue a young woman. It’s an impossible angle so in order to get the bad guy, he wings her.
The book then starts up some years later at a gathering of the ton for a few days. Mercy Coltrane is one of the attendees and isn’t she the young woman who was shot. And isn’t one of the guests, the gunslinger who shot her and who is more formally known as Hart Moreland, Earl of Perth and she is gunning for him – get the pun? No, she has more than forgiven him over the years. She realizes he took the only option he had. But she does want something from him. Her brother is missing and she thinks Hart can help her.

Wowzers is Hart a heck of a hero. He’s about as buttoned up and stuffy as they come – seemingly. But Mercy ‘gets’ to him and he practically oozes passion for her out of his very pores. It is most delicious to see. Everything he has done in his life is to further his sisters. He became a gunslinger in Texas in order to make money. He inherited the title but the estate was practically bankrupt and he wants his sisters to find successful matches. The house party is because his younger sister has attracted the attention of a duke. Mercy is a fly in the ointment as since she is American and a Texas American at that, the other gentlemen at the party have never met anyone of her like before and they become moths around a flame.

Rereading this book again after so many years was a complete and total delight. I picked up most of her backlist on Kindle as I remember them all with a great deal of love. Connie Brockway is one of the best and it’s like visiting my reading roots. I need more of her. More, more, more. I gave it 4 stars at the time but I’m changing it to 5 stars. The nostalgia alone deserves a star. I'm looking forward to reading many of her books I read and loved in the past and finding her all over again.

[kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mercy is a rancher's daughter in London looking for her missing brother, who was once rescued by a hired gun. Hart is an Earl trying to get his littlest sister wed, who was once a hired gun. They fall in love!

1. Here's the thing: there's a bit of everything in this book. Post-traumatic stress; opium addiction; soulless sisters; marksmen competitions; etc. It's just a lot of discordant elements--and while Brockway does a good job at pulling them together into one story, they don't all fall together as neatly as they might. Which leaves things a bit disappointing.

2. THE HERO SHOOTS THE HEROINE. JUST FYI.

[Phyllis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This a favorite novel by one of my favorite authors. A British aristocrat hides hides his unsavory past as a gun for hire in the American West. But when the woman he had bewn forced to shoot appears at a country party, his carefully constructed persons is threatened.

[Lucynka · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars, really. And while I was tempted to round up to 4 for the rating (solely because All Through the Night has given me a lot of goodwill when it comes to Connie Brockway), upon further consideration, I think I’ll have to round down. It isn’t that it’s a bad story at the end of the day, more that things just don’t quite come together as well as they could?

“American miss who shocks English society with her Wild and Crazy™ ways” is perhaps one of my least favorite tropes. Add on top of that the ridiculous, Gary-Stu-ish premise of “English earl who has a secret past as a deadly gunslinger in the American West,” and there’s really no reason for me to like this book at all. And yet…and yet…Connie Brockway still kind of makes it work for me, despite all that?

It helps that Hart, our hero, actually has a fairly legitimate reason for having been a gunslinger. (He joined the army at a young age, couldn’t reintegrate back into society after he got out, and so went to America to keep doing what he was good at, essentially. It was during this time that he unexpectedly inherited a title and a crumbling estate from a distant relative, so he figured, hey, might as well keep it up to earn the money needed to fix said estate. It’s better than entering into a marriage-of-convenience with a rich heiress, like so many of his romance novel counterparts, right?) Mercy I had a bit more of a problem with. Overall I liked her, but she did dip her toe into TSTL territory more than once, which was frustrating. She came off as very martyrish at first, but this too gets more of a valid explanation as the story goes on.

In a lot of ways, A Dangerous Man is the book I wanted Catherine and the Pirate to be, way back when, as both stories have the same basic premise: Heroine seeks out man she has a tangential relationship with, who is trying to put his sordid past behind him, and enlists his help in finding her brother. In Catherine, the hero is the brother’s best friend, but here it’s her father’s former hired gun, who shot her in the shoulder six years ago to save her from an even worse fate. It’s an interesting set-up between a hero and heroine, and even though Mercy (pleasantly) doesn’t hold a grudge against him or anything, I expected this connection between them to play a bigger part than it actually did? (I mean, he effectively saved her life and left her with a life-long scar! You’d think that would hold more emotional weight than it seemingly does.)

My real criticisms, though, have to do with the pacing and structure, I think. (Well, and the villain, but we’ll get to that.) Mercy’s ostensibly supposed to be worried about and looking for her brother (it’s the whole reason she hunts Hart down, after all, after very conveniently seeing him in passing), but the first two-fifths of the book see her just fucking around. (Not quite literally, to her credit, but still. Priorities, girl! Is this important to you or not?) And then when the searching finally picks up, a lot of it happens off-screen? And then the whole reason her brother was missing in the first place: Hillard needed money to finance his fancy lifestyle, got him high as a kite, and then figured he’d just murder one of the Coltrane siblings and effectively take the remaining one’s inheritance for himself? It’s a pretty convoluted, wacky scheme, to be honest, and the way he’s presented when the truth comes out makes him look more insane than evil, which seems strangely out-of-character from what we’ve seen previously. Like, if he was just a sociopath this whole time, fine, but the way Brockway writes him at the end implies there’s something mentally off about him, as opposed to him just being an asshole with no moral qualms.

Ultimately I think the story’s biggest sin is that there’s simply too much going on: Did we really need so much drama with Hart’s three sisters, when only one of their plotlines (Annabelle’s) has any bearing on the actual plot? (And Fanny, poor Fanny! Why even include her at all, if you’re only ever going to use her as a fat, pregnant punch-line?) Add to that Hart’s on-going PTSD, his Daddy Issues (namely, said deadbeat dad still being alive somewhere for no damn good narrative reason, until he conveniently isn’t), and Mercy’s brother’s apparent opium addiction, and you have a plot that’s over-stuffed. Perhaps if Brockway hadn’t spent the first two-fifths of the book with Mercy just dicking around in English society, these things would have been spread out enough to make them feel organic and not overwhelming. As is, though, half of it just seems like drama for drama’s sake.

That said, Brockway is doing some unusual (and occasionally dark) things here, which I have to appreciate. I like that Hart and Mercy’s past involves him literally having shot her. I like that she literally blackmails him into helping her. I like the weird sexual tension of their very public shooting competition. I more or less like the romance, itself (not my favorite, but I do think it works on the whole), but the first sex scene between Mercy and Hart is incredibly dubious on the consent front—but then this actually gets directly addressed and discussed between the characters, which is again pleasantly unusual (especially for a romance novel from 1996).

So yeah, an imperfect but worthwhile read, in my opinion. Not nearly as good as All Through the Night, but still good enough to keep me interested in the author. In this age of series and sequel-baits, it’s refreshing that it’s a stand-alone novel, but also kind of a shame at the same time? The end with Mercy’s brother disappearing for safety’s sake does indeed scream sequel bait to me, and I think a full book focused on the character (recovering from the events of this novel, getting into some sort of new adventure/scrape with love of course~) could be really interesting. Ah, well.

(Lastly, because I feel it’s worth mentioning, the slur “Chinee” does get thrown around in reference to a Chinese man. Which would have been common enough during the time the book is set (the 1870s), but definitely not cool during the time it was written (the 1990s). But the character who uses said slur is Hillard, so it’s possible/likely Brockway was using it on purpose, to foreshadow the fact that he’s the villain.)

[Christy Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise was interesting, the characters were interesting, the settings were dynamic, but the plot was too slow to hold interest.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I wasn't sure whether to round up or down. This is an early book of Brockway's (published 1996), which I didn't realise when I bought it. Foolishly, I thought it was much more recent, but that turned out to be just the edition I bought. LOL.

I have begun reading Brockway's books over the last year or so, and in general really liking them. This one not quite so much, however. The flavour is very different to the lightly humorous books of hers I have been reading. This one is serious, a 'straight' HR with a romance held back by various obstacles (including a lack of belief in each others' love - cue eyeroll). There is an evil baddie whose identity is hinted at, but not revealed till the very end, in a slightly melodramatic confrontation.

Whilst there were some less traditional (for 1996) England-set HR features, such as Perth's 'cowboy' background, and the American sharp-shooting heroine, overall it felt pretty traditional. There were also a couple of scenes which were very saucy for 1996! Might have been a little shocking at the time. But for me, the characterisations weren't that wonderful, so I didn't get completely gripped by the book, although I liked it OK overall. But not my fav by this writer, for sure.

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like it. The characters were ok. It had some very nice theatrical moments, especially a nice end to the villain. I would have liked to see Annabelle get more comeuppance, or change for the better, or something. Overall good, but not spectacular for me, at least not at the moment. The heroine was a bit too up on her high horse. I felt sorry for the heroine and she wasn’t a terrible person and she wasn’t badly written, but I also didn’t like her very much. 3/3.5

[Anne Libera · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe closer to 3.25 - I really loved Connie Brockway back in the day and I can see the intensity and complexity (in a soapy way) of the main characters in this outing but I found it hard to dive into the story and started and stopped a number of times.

As always, i am writing about my personal experience of the book and this is not meant at critique or review.

[María · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this one. I liked the hero and the heroine. I understood Hart Earl of Perth’s motivations for his violent past and I would have befriended Mercy Coleman. And I loved Hart’s disintegration of his “cold hearted” facade.

[Nell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a big fan of Connie Brockway – two of my top 10 favourite romances of all time belong to her (As You Desire and My Dearest Enemy by the way) – but for some strange reason this book just didn’t quite do it for me. My first time reading it I had the same reaction, so I guess at least that’s consistent.

There was something about this one that just didn’t have the usual fluidity and character wonderfulness that CB usually brings to the table. I thought the hero, Hart, had plenty of deep emotional potential, and he was probably the best thing about the book for me.

Mercy was a good strong feisty heroine, and there was nothing about her that struck a nerve, but nothing that struck a chord either.

For me, I think a good portion of the problem was there was so much going on, and there just wasn’t time left over for really delving into the emotional development of the characters.

I was glad to reread this book though, because I wanted to see if my opinion of it had remained the same. Question answered.

[Wolffe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book in a thrift shop and, being only 50 cents, decided to give it a go. Sometimes you get lucky and find wonderful gems in the 50 cent bin.[return][return]This time I was pleasantly surprised. Having never heard of Brockway I didn't know what to expect, but she delivered with a smart, witty novel that kept my attention the whole way through.[return][return]The mystery is quickly figured out but that doesn't detract from the story. The characters are nicely done, though there are a couple of groan worthy moments during the sex scenes where the purple prose gets a bit out of hand.[return][return]I thought Hart was an especially nice hero. I like heroes who have believable flaws and his was completely understandable. Mercy, his heroine, had a bit of the too-stupid-to-live syndrome but was a fun read nonetheless.[return][return]I'll definitely be looking for Brockway's other titles in the future.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this western/Victorian romance! Hart, the Earl of Perth formerly known as Duke when he was gun-slinging in America and Mercy Coltrane, and American cattle ranch heiress looking for her brother are on a collision course, and boy, is it a good dustup! They are complicated, multi-dimensional characters with rational motivations, which Ms. Brockway does so well. The way Mercy handles herself with bravery and confidence is cheer-inspiring. A great heroine for this wonderful romance!

[Eleanor · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Connie Brockway a lot, and I like this book, but I wasn't as wild about Mercy and Hart as some other characters she's created. As usual, she's worth reading, in my opinion, but compared to some of her others I found this one just fine. (And I was disappointed because I saw an Amazon review that called it "a tad overwrought," so I expected big angst!)

[Nisha-Anne · Rating 1 out of 5]

God, I can't believe after such a long and arduous search for this novel, I can't stand it. Mostly because of the American heroine. Damn it. Maybe it's the wrong time. Maybe I'll try again another time.

[marz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoy Brockway's characters. I've read a few of her books lately and I'm never disappointed. Sure, there will always be something that seems drawn out too long or not enough, but overall I like the pace and romance in her novels.

[Carla · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a fun Victorian-era romance that contrasts the values of Victorian England with those of the Wild West of Texas at that time. The characters are well written and the plot moves along nicely. A good escape read.

[Renee · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was just okay for me. I liked the plot and the way it was written was good too. My biggest problem with it was that all the way until the end the h and H thought the other hated them. And everything that was said between them was taken wrong...It was irritating. Sex **

[Captmashpea · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a fun story. I think that too much happened to soon. I know that they knew each other (sort of) in their past but I think that their relationship should have been build up a little bit more and over a longer period of time.
(e-Book).

[Sylvia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Regency

[Tressa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Dangerous Man was an enjoyable book, but certain aspects seemed unlikely for the time period.

[Susan (the other Susan) · Rating 3 out of 5]

An earl called Duke.

[kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just did not love these characters as much. The storytelling was solid - typical Brockaway - but I just couldn't care.

[Juli · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars. Well done and enjoyable

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Light reading.

[Robert Kradoska]

American Mercy and Englishman Hart