CBR18 Book 13: "Better Than a Duke" by Suzanne Enoch

Page count: 352 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and Bramble for this ARC. My opinions are my own.

Beckett Raines, the Marquis of Hentrose, has been widowed for ten years, leaving him a single father to young Rebecca (who would like to be known as Lady Becks). He's been aided by a number of loyal servants, but now his meddling mother has decided that it's time for him to marry an appropriate woman who can be a good role model to the girl. Because Beckett was guided by his emotions the last time around, and his wife turned out to be very pretty, but rather vapid, and then died in childbirth, he's determined that his next marriage will be a partnership, with no romantic feelings involved. 

Iris Silbern has been widowed for four years and currently has to reside with her ten-year-old son, Edmund, with her aunt and uncle, in the house neighbouring Beckett's, and their first meeting isn't exactly flattering to her. She comes storming into his house, threatening him with a shovel, with her hair like a haystack around her head and her clothes wrinkled from a long time travelling. She accuses him of having abducted Edmund (when in fact, the rascal came up with a sob story about being a starving orphan), but calms down once she sees how happy her son is playing with Rebecca. It doesn't take long before the children are pretty much inseparable, and Beckett and Iris are bonding over being widowed single parents. 

It doesn't take long for Rebecca to discover that while the lady her father is possibly going to marry may look pretty and pleasant while there are other adults around, she's clearly planning to have Beckett to herself. She strongly implies that Rebecca will be sent off to boarding school and that her father will be all the happier for it. Meanwhile, Iris is hoping to borrow money from her uncle to buy herself a house in the country, where she plans to take in lodgers. They, on the other hand, believe she should get married again, even though she has no wish to ever remarry. They introduce her to the Duke of Trent, who is over seventy, already has two sons and several grandchildren, but is nevertheless looking for Duchess number six. Marrying the lecherous old man would ensure that Iris got enough money to secure a good education and a decent future for Edmund. And while he's outlived five wives so far, surely he'll not outlive Iris as well?

Obviously, neither child is happy with their potential step-parents, especially since it would mean Rebecca and Edmund would be separated. They'd much rather be siblings and decide to get their parents to marry each other, and their plans are forced to get ever more elaborate as Beckett and Iris stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that their perfect partner is right there on the other side of the garden wall.

Last year, I got an ARC of A Duke Never Tells, Suzanne Enoch's previous novel, and it was a perfectly fine read, but I can't really remember a thing about it now, except that two different couples were romancing each other while assuming other people's identities. It certainly didn't make me smile, and even laugh, as much as this one. The previous book became a bit too messy to be a fun romp; this one succeeded better. A lot of romance novels, movies and television have done parent trap retellings, or stories with similar tropes. A few years ago, I read Don't Want You Like a Best Friend by Emma R. Alban, but here the scheming children are debutantes who try to get their parents to marry so they themselves don't have to. This one was a lot more entertaining, which isn't always an easy feat when two of the characters concerned are children of nine and ten. 

Even when they start acknowledging that they are growing to be more than just friends, neither Beckett nor Iris considers the other as a suitable future spouse. Beckett wants a lady of impeccable pedigree and breeding who can help advise and guide Rebecca and ensure that she fits into polite society. While he tries to ignore his overbearing mother, her constant criticism is starting to wear on him, and he's worried that growing up without a mother is damaging Rebecca. Because he was blinded by love and made a rather poor choice of first wife, he now wants a marriage without romantic entanglements. He wants a marriage of convenience, a platonic partnership, more to offer a maternal influence for his daughter than for himself. Iris is stubborn, has a terrible temper, is not afraid to speak her mind and has, on occasion, punched men who offended her. While he admires her spirit, he doesn't want his daughter to behave that way. 

Iris, meanwhile, married a man she thought needed her help and guidance, only to discover that he had a gambling problem even before they got married, which only got worse as their marriage continued. He fell when drunk and drowned in a ditch. Iris' father-in-law allowed them to stay in one of the houses on his estate, but as soon as he passed, her brother-in-law kicked them out, leaving them homeless and helpless. She knows what Beckett is looking for in a new wife and understands why she's not suitable. While she feels happier in his company than in years, she also wants him to have a wife who will be accepted in society, rather than constantly shocking and causing minor scandals. 

If the book had been longer, I suspect I would have been annoyed with the length of time it took for the other marital candidates to be neutralised (and while she is clearly an unpleasant person, I think the consequences for Beckett's first choice ended up being more horrible than she deserved) and for Beckett and Iris to finally get together. This is also one of the times when an epilogue would have been nice, to see how the new family was getting along. It is possible to have epilogues in romance that don't involve pregnancies, and one would have been nice here. 

Judging a book by its cover: I don't think smug-looking dude in a cravat is the way to sell a romance, but I'm not mad that it's not a cutesy cartoon cover. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 21: "A Duke Never Tells" by Suzanne Enoch

Page count: 352 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

Thank you to Netgalley and Bramble for this ARC. My opinions are my own. 

Lady Margaret "Meg" Pinwell is about to start her first season when her father announces that he's spoken to his old friend, the Duke of Earnhurst, and secured her a coveted match with said duke's son and heir. Before Meg has a chance to even go to London and have any fun during the Season, the Duke promptly dies, and forces Meg into a year of mourning, since she is now affianced with the new duke. 

A year later, with absolutely no contact from the man she is contracted to marry, Meg is unsurprisingly a bit fed up. A missive to her parents assures them that the new Duke still intends to honour the agreement and Meg will become a duchess without ever even having been to London. The new Duke is rumoured to be quite the rake, with a reputation for gambling, carousing and womanising before his father's death. He didn't even show up to his own father's funeral. Meg asks her aunt Clara (her mother's younger sister) for advice, and they think up a scheme, where they will go to the ducal country estate, pretending to be ladies on the way to London, touring country estates. With Meg disguised as Clara's impoverished companion, they will hopefully get the chance to ask the duke's staff about him, so Meg can get a clearer idea of whether she wants to marry this man at all.

Unbeknownst to Meg and Clara, James Clay, the current Duke of Earnhurst is in fact residing at his country estate, arguing with Elliot Riniken, his father's former (now his) estate management about how his irresponsible behaviour has led to the estate being an overgrown mess, with a manor house that's falling apart. Water leaks have led to several holes in the ceiling, the library is partially covered in mould, and most of the staff have run off to get new positions, with the former butler having stolen a lot of the more valuable silver. The reason the estate is in such a dreadful state is that the former Duke wanted his son to return home, and face his responsibilities for a few years before his death. Both men were incredibly stubborn, James refused, while his father just gave up on any and all upkeep of the house or surroundings, because he decided it was up to his son to fix things. Now they're about to host a wedding in six weeks, and Rinikin can't authorise any repairs until the new duke signs off on them. James seems mostly happy to drink himself into a stupor. 

Since there are barely any servants left on the premises, the duke himself opens the door when Clara, not actually a noblewoman but the younger sister of a woman who has married an earl, arrives, disguised as a highborn lady, Lady Sophronia, accompanied by her paid companion, Mabel (Meg). Having recently raided the wine cellar, James thinks it will be a great idea to claim he is the butler of the estate, and he takes the two ladies into the duke's office, claiming that Mr Riniken is the duke. Riniken, a former army officer, is a good ten years older than James, so the two ladies are quite shocked by his appearance, not to mention the ramshackle state of the building, and the fact one of the only servants they can see appears to be drunk in the middle of the day. 

Since the ladies are pretending to tour country houses, they agree to go on a tour of the premises (in some of the rooms that aren't actively dangerous to enter), but they've not been there long before Meg tumbles down half a staircase, due to a rotten bannister, and injures her foot badly. The doctor proclaims that she needs complete rest for at least one week, probably two, and suddenly James' practical joke will need to be maintained for the duration of the ladies' stay, lest gossip spread to London that the new Duke of Earnhurst is a drunken madman who pretends to be a butler to visitors. 

Four people, lying about their true identities, two of them also about the reason they're even at the estate in the first place, are stuck in a house that's falling apart, forced into close proximity while maintaining an increasingly more elaborate deception. Since Meg/Mabel is forced to stay bedridden for a lot of the stay, Clara/Sophronia spends a lot of time trying to get to know the "Duke" better, so they can find evidence to present to Meg's parents for why the match must be broken. Finding herself gradually falling for the man she believes is her beloved niece's intended isn't exactly ideal. Rinikin, on his part, is fighting his attraction to what he believes to be a woman of a much higher status than himself. James, seemingly the world's worst butler, would also be a deeply inappropriate match for Lady Margaret Pinwell, or even Mabel the ladies' companion - but they also can't seem to stop being drawn to one another, kissing whenever the opportunity arises.

In your standard romance novel, you sometimes get romances featuring the mistaken identity trope. Well, in this book, not only do you get two romances for the price of one, but you get mistaken identity times four. Not only that, but you get multiple POVs. Not only do the readers get to see the story through Meg, Clara, James and Elliot's eyes, but there are a few chapters from the POV of James' very supercilious and long-suffering valet. 

It's been years since I read a romance by Suzanne Enoch, and this was quite different from any historical romance I've read before. Sometimes you have secondary romances taking place in the background while our protagonists find their HEAs, but in this book, there are four protagonists and both romances come with a number of complications, getting more and more farcical as the story progresses. 

While we are given reasons for why James Clay has been completely ignoring his responsibilities for years, causing his country estate to deteriorate so badly, they just seemed rather insignificant in the grand scheme of things. His father was too hard on him, he seemed to always prefer the opinions of Rinikin and treated him as a replacement son (at least in the eyes of James). Because of the weird power struggle between the former duke and his son, most of the staff went without wages and were forced to find jobs elsewhere. Rinikin is at his wits' end trying to keep the business side of the dukedom afloat. It's not until a beautiful woman is badly hurt falling down the stairs that James seems to see that the house is a wreck and he needs to do something to fix it. Not only does he authorise Rinikin to handle craftsmen to come to repair it, but he does a lot of the physical labour himself, especially when it comes to restoring the gardens (this also seemed rather out of character for a privileged nobleman). 

Obviously, everything works out fine in the end, with everyone's true identities being revealed in plenty of time for a double wedding and HEAs all over the place. This was a fun enough book, but I think four people running around lying about their identities was a bit too much for me. I don't mind a light-hearted romp, but there were a bit too many complications for me to be likely to want to reread this in the future. 

Judging a book by its cover: While I'm delighted to see something other than yet another cartoony cover on a romance novel, I'm not sure that this is a great improvement. The hot pink, the lurid green, the teal of the cover model's cravat. It's all a bit of an eyesore. The guy's smirk isn't exactly helping, either. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

#CBR5 Book 37. "The Handbook to Handling His Lordship" by Suzanne Enoch

Page count: 336 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Nathaniel Stokes became the Earl of Westfall when his cousin fell out of a boat in the Lake District and drowned. Before he was an earl, he was plain Nate Stokes, one of Wellington's most trusted spies, and he still can't seem to settle down and be a staid aristocrat. So no one will look to closely at him, or ponder why he was absent for so much of the war on the Peninsula, he cultivates a clumsy and bookish persona, wears fake spectacles and walks with a limp. He likes finding lost and stolen trinkets and artworks for his fellow peers, and is intrigued when the Marquis of Ebberling comes to him to find a governess that fled his home three years ago, who stole from him, and may have killed his wife. He's offering an obscene amount of money to get the job done quickly, and Nate likes the challenge of finding someone who disappeared without a trace so long ago.

Emily Portsman, as the girl is now known, found refuge at the scandalous Tantalus Club, a gambling establishment staffed entirely by well-born and educated young ladies,  run by Lady Haybury, the heroine of A Beginner's Guide to Rakes (and the first book in this series). She's not left the club for three years, for fear of Ebberling finding her. Twice a week, she has to dye her hair brown, and while she invites the occasional gentleman up to her rooms, she tries to stay unnoticed as much as possible. So when she overhears Nate at lunch, talking to his younger brother about locating a thief among the staff at the club, all her paranoia returns in full. Believing him to be a befuddled scholar, she invites him to her room to seduce his mission out of him, not realizing that she's playing straight into Nate's hands. As the two become closer, Nate becomes more and more convinced that Ebberling left several key points out of his tale, and that Emily is not the ruthless murderer he's been sent to find, at all. But how can they prove her innocence, against the word of a rich and powerful peer of the realm?

This is the fourth book in Suzanne Enoch's Scandalous Brides series. While all the couples from the previous books appear in this as supporting characters, it's also a pretty good book to start with, as it gives the reader all the information needed about the Tantalus Club and intriguing glimpses of the former couples, so that if you've not read the earlier books, you might be ore tempted to do so. It's probably also my favourite of the four, on a par with, and probably even better than the first one in the series.

The formidable Mrs. Julien has mentioned that she's partial to a big lug in her romances. While I don't mind them, I'm much more fond of the intelligent, slender and frequently sardonic hero, myself. Nate Stokes is just such a man, a war hero who can't boast about any of his achievements, because he's been a spy. He's had so many secret identities that he barely knows who he really is anymore, and he's certainly not comfortable with the Earldom that fell in his lap. He keeps himself busy finding lost trinkets for other peers, as well as teaching his younger brother how to be a responsible and trustworthy adult.

Emily (also known as Rachel, or Eloise) is a wonderful heroine. She's worked hard to get to where she is, getting an education and a higher position in society mainly by deceit and false references, and has had to hide, fearing for her life for years. She's proud of her abilities and enjoys her job at the club, making an honest living even though most of society scorns her and her fellow Tantalus Girls. She's refreshingly different from a lot of romance heroines in that she's not a virgin (none of the Scandalous Brides are, if I recall correctly), she enjoys sex and isn't afraid to admit it to herself or the hero. It's even more refreshing that the hero in no way judges her for it, or slut-shames her in any way.

Used to being the smartest person in any given situation, what Nate wants most of all, is to be surprised. Emily constantly ends up reacting in a different way than he expects, and he finds it wonderfully invigorating. The initial stages of the relationship, when the two of them are trying to subtly interrogate each other, while also trying to dupe the other from finding out their true intentions, is very enjoyable. I also liked that they came clean to each other before the situation got too much out of hand, and once they'd started being honest with each other, there was very little in the way of insecurities and melodrama, despite the two characters' gap in social standing.

While the resolution of the romantic plot line was fine, and seemed to be a lot more plausible than a lot of other historical romances out there (certainly a lot more than them just getting married and not caring what the consequences would be for their standing in society, Loretta Chase, you might want to take notes!), the resolution of the murder plot was utterly ridiculous. My disbelief can only be suspended so much, and I just see no way that Nate, highly valued agent of the Crown though he may be, would get that sort of assistance in clearing the name of his beloved, the employee in a gambling den. The rest of the book is delightful, though, so I will forgive the extreme implausibility of that bit of the plot. Be warned, if you're planning on reading this book, that it gets a bit silly there towards the end. Apart from that, I highly recommend it.

CBR4 Book 65: "A Beginner's Guide to Rakes" by Suzanne Enoch

Page count: 352 pages
Rating: 4 stars
Date begun: June 5th, 2012
Date finished: June 7th, 2012

Lady Diane Benchley's late husband was a dissolute gambler, who left her with nearly nothing after she paid off his creditors. She does possess the deed to his town house in London, however, and has very specific plans to make herself a fortune. Shocking all of polite society, she sets out to establish an exclusive gentleman's gambling club, run and staffed entirely by respectable women.

Oliver Warren, the Marquis of Haybury, has tried to forget Diane for two years, since they shared two incredible weeks of passion shortly after she was widowed. Diane knows only that Oliver abandoned her in Vienna without a word and sped back to England, and his heartless behaviour means she has no qualms about blackmailing him into providing the start-up capital for her club. She intends for him to be a silent, entirely passive partner in the club (once he has used his considerable experience as a very successful gambler to help train her staff).

Oliver has other plans. He's not spent long with Diane again before realising that he was a fool to leave her. Now he just has to convince the woman whose heart he broke to take him back, through fair means or foul.

While the book has an completely baffling title, which has NOTHING to do with the plot of the novel at all, A Beginner's Guide to Rakes is a lot of fun, and can now be added to my list of delightful romances where the heroine shoots the hero at some point. Diane has very good reasons for detesting Oliver, and being reluctant with trusting any man with her heart. To his credit, and very refreshingly in a romance hero, once Oliver realises the truth about his feelings for Diane, he does whatever he can to make up for his previous misdeeds and sets out to prove to her that he can be trusted.

As well as creating an engaging central couple, who spar most entertainingly, Enoch doesn't neglect the supporting cast, making sure that they are fully fleshed out, making the reader more invested in the creation and continued success of the Tantalus Club. Several of the characters are also clearly going to feature in future books, without their introduction and presence in the story feeling as forced as it sometimes does in planned multi-book series by other authors. The first instalment in the Scandalous Brides can definitely be recommended.