Wonderful read with a few hiccups
This was a very good read and would have been near-perfect if not for a few little things which always drive me crazy in historical romances (details below, because some of them are slight spoilers). The murder mystery that is weaved throughout was not painfully obvious, as you sometimes find, and I liked how it was solved and what the explanation ended up being. There was a secondary romance between Maggie, Adam's sister, and Garth Dutton, Jillian's lawyer and standing alone, the romance was good, well-developed, etc., but personally I don't usually like romance sub-plots with other characters and in this case, it really drove me crazy because _____ (spoiler, so see specifics below to know more).
Setting: England, 1806
Sensuality Rating: 8.5 (a lot of chemistry between hero and heroine, very hot kissing scenes and well-written erotica)
SUMMARY (from the back cover):
"The London ton is abuzz with the latest scandal. Jillian Whitney, well-born but penniless, has been living under the roof of a wealthy nobleman old enough to be her father. When Adam Hawthorne, the mysterious Earl of Blackwood, meets the lovely rebel, he's intrigued enough to want to lure her into changing protectors.
Suddenly, Jillian's beloved guardian is murdered, and she is the only suspect. Forced to flee, she falls into the arms of the earl, who offers refuge from the law but no escape from an intoxicating passion. Although Jillian swiftly loses her heart, she knows that the eligible earl would never marry a woman tainted by scandal. But is Jillian underestimating the strength and depth of a man's passion?"
SPECIFICS:
(* = kind-of-spoiler; ** = spoiler)
(1) I liked that Jillian was an independent woman and able to stand her ground and hold her head high despite the rumors surrounding her regarding Lord Fenwick. Adam was one of those wonderfully-handsome tortured and untrusting heroes just trying to hide his vulnerability, ::sigh::. Jillian seemed to succumb quite easily to him - over and over again!, though I don't blame her - but the erotic scenes were very well written and in the end she proves her strength.
*(2) Adam's unwillingness to bend regarding Christopher's possible parentage and his initial treatment of the boy was not at all in keeping with his otherwise honorable character.
*(3) I CANNOT stand when authors find it amusing to fill their books with constant misunderstandings and things left unsaid or misinterpreted. I thought I was in the clear with this book: I was on page 337, the murder mystery has been solved and now all that was left were the love realizations, marriage declarations, and the usual wonderful happy ending that we all read these books for, right? Wrong! One last obstacle must be thrown in our lovers' paths - of course!
**(4) Regarding the secondary romance between Maggie and Garth, the reason it really soured for me was because in this case it ended up negatively impacting the primary romance and causing the entire misunderstanding. (Garth is from a very prestigious family that puts a lot of weight on being scandal-free; Adam's family is scandal-ridden and his recent harboring of a murder suspect - Jillian - just adds to it all. The fact that he now intends to marry her makes it even worse). Maggie wasn't completely to blame, because she doesn't ask Aunt Sophie to speak with Jillian - doesn't even know their meeting occurs - but still, she should have openly spoken about it with Garth and shown much more sadness and regret over Jillian's rejection of Adam.
**(5) The thing I do have to commend Martin about regarding the words-unspoken/mistunderstanding debacle is that when Jillian goes to Adam because she knows he's planning on proposing and she lies to him, telling him she's in love with someone else and is going to marry that man, Adam responds so amazingly that it was all I could do not to say "awww" out loud. He's so heartbroken, but he's willing to give her up because he thinks that is what Jillian wants: "For the first time in his life he understood the true meaning of love. He understood that when you really loved someone, you cared about their happiness more than you did your own."
BOTTOM LINE:
Read it! A wonderful Kat Martin book that I will definitely reread ... though maybe I'll skip pages 343-380 from now on.
(Written on January 12, 2008)