This is a book of two halves. The first half is slow as treacle, repetitive and bogged down with unnecessary detail. The second half is alive with delightful banter and the slowly burgeoning romance with a wonderful, emotional ending.
Here’s the premise: with a title like ‘The Unexpected Duke’, the plot is laid out from the very first page. Lieutenant Hartley is forced to relinquish his army career to take up the role of Duke of Fenniston after the sudden death of his cousin. He hasn’t rushed back from the continent, in case the late duke’s young wife should produce an heir. Now that hope of that possibility has gone, there’s no choice but to take up the reins of his new position. To say he’s reluctant is an understatement. He’d enjoyed the army life, but feels totally unsuited for his new responsibilities. At Steynling, he finds the sickly duchess keeping to her rooms, but her sister, the widowed Claire Hambledon, is running the house and estate, and although hostile to the upstart outsider, she’s willing to dutifully help him find his feet – and find a duchess for himself.
The central conceit of the book is laid out from the start. He accepts that he must find himself a suitable duchess, and is quite happy to let Claire help him, as well as showing him how to manage his estates. She wants him to find the right woman, but doesn’t for one moment consider that she might be the one. And yet they have the hots for each other almost from the first moment they clap eyes on each other.
And here’s the thing: how can she not be suitable, when her own sister is the current duchess? If one sister is acceptable, why on earth would the other sister not be? And this is in essence the only obstacle to the romance. Frankly, it’s silly.
I confess that the transition from sort of enemies (even if quivering with lust) to very friendly indeed is nicely handled. The first half of the book is heavy with details of the estate management which frankly I found tedious. We really did not need to know the names of all the tenants and the stories of their lives. It was especially tedious since Claire seems to know everything there is to know about them, down to the name of the smallest infant and the crops yields and the whole nine yards, and Hart is the typical perfect new overlord, kindly and generous and sympathetic and a very fast learner. Yawn.
But then things get a bit hot and heavy and although they pull back from the brink, Hart decides to make a running joke of their attraction, and so the second half of the book lightens up considerably. Happily the move to London for the season and duchess hunting is skipped over with a light touch, and eventually Hart realises they have to be together. And then she won’t have him, and so he becomes truly the hero with a glorious and truly romantic ending that shows he’s finally understood her.
I don’t recall whether there’s any sex in the book, but there is some fairly graphic lusting all the way through. I don’t have many criticisms of the writing, apart from a number of minor Americanisms (like ‘go do’ instead of ‘go and do’), trivial stuff, and some missing words that a final edit should have picked up. There are a couple of oddities, though. The main house switches from Steynling Cross to Steynling Hall and back again randomly, and the book is set in 1813 (written explicitly at the opening chapter, and confirmed by historical events), but the blurb says 1830s. That’s just careless.
Still, I enjoyed it and would have given it five stars if not for the dull patches in the first half and that silly assumption that the sister of the current duchess isn’t suitable duchess material. But a good four stars.
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