Kathryn Caskie
October 2009, European Historical Romance (1816 England)
Avon, $6.99, 368 pages, Amazon ASIN 0061491012
Grade:
D
Sensuality:
Hot
The Duke of Sinclair has seven children and each and every one of them is a problem child. Since they’re all of age, he exiles them from their homeland of Scotland and they set up residence in the wilds of London to fend for themselves. Edinburgh society had long since called them the Seven Deadly Sins and the siblings enter London with their respective sins very much intact. In The Most Wicked of Sins we meet Ivy Sinclair, whose sin is envy.
In order to get back into her father’s good graces, Ivy has been angling after a marriage proposal from Lord Tinsdale who is just boring enough to be respectable. Things were going well, and she thought she’d had him wrapped around her little finger - when some upstart of an Irish miss, fresh on the scene and as pretty as a picture, turns Lord Tinsdale’s head. Ivy is upset…and envious.
I only say she’s envious because the characters in the novel make it clear on several occasions that this is Ivy’s deadly sin. Left up to my own devices I would have just called her desperate. The woman is fed-up living like a pauper and wants to go back to living the life of a Duke’s child. Tinsdale was to have been her meal ticket. That Miss Feeney came along to interrupt her marriage plans doesn’t make her envious of Miss Feeney so much as annoyed or angry at her. If Lord Tinsdale had suddenly found a pot of gold on his doorstep and no longer felt the need to search for an heiress, where would Ivy’s envy have come in then?
But that’s not really important because there are a lot worse elements to The Most Wicked of Sins than a contrived character flaw, such as stereotypical Scots-speak (och, aye; dinna fash); over-use of adverbs (earnestly, masterfully, amusedly, drowsily…); purple prose (“the scalding tip of his erection” - ouch); a wallpaper of an historical setting (Ivy never has a chaperone, bursts into a man’s room unannounced, sees a man taking a bath and comments that “the water must not have been cold”); a ridiculous plot (Ivy will hire an actor to impersonate a Lord who will then impress Miss Feeney, make Tinsdale angry and force him to come back to Ivy. Foolproof!); and last but not least, a boring romance.
The actor Ivy hires to impersonate a new Lord who is soon to arrive in London is called Nick. (What would happen when he finally did arrive and people saw it was a different person? I don’t think her stratagems were ever thoroughly contemplated.) He’s good-looking with a perfect accent, and (in only very minor ways) rough around the edges. Those rough edges were the most interesting things about Nick. We learn that he’s not a good dancer and that Ivy can handle a phaeton better than he can. These imperfections were refreshing to read when heroes are usually so great with everything, but still, they were superficial and did not reach to the man himself. I never felt as if I knew or understood Nick, or for that matter, Ivy. Their back-stories were weakly developed and so made it difficult for me to understand why they each did the things they did. Because they appeared as little more than talking heads, I couldn’t drum up any interest in their romance either.
There was nothing for me to hold on to in The Most Wicked of Sins. The main characters were uninspired, the plot unbelievable, and none of the siblings were drawn deftly enough for me to even consider giving the upcoming installments a chance. All in all, it was a below-average read.
-- Abi Bishop
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