Review: Characters as flat as Kansas
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 16, 2013
The first pages of this novel are promising:  Ned Kellington, a wounded British soldier comes to his senses near the corpse of a Frenchman, just after the Battle of Waterloo.  Unfortunately, the first pages prove to be the high point of the novel, and it's all downhill from there.Ned soon encounters a British nobleman's daughter, Jane Whetherby, who is in disguise as a physician aiding the troops.  Yes, we're asked to believe that a nobly-born lady, without the knowledge or permission of her family, is wandering alone on battlefields as a young, innocent-yet-knowledgeable angel of mercy.  We know that Ned has been injured and is perhaps out of his senses with pain, but Jane's urge "to frolic on cave floors" with Ned in one night of passion can only be the result of some grievous blow to the head that the author has neglected to mention.  And this episode is just the first of many in which Jane responds to Ned and to nearly every situation she encounters in ways that are self-contradictory, incomprehensible, or downright absurd.There is lust aplenty in this novel, but romance is sadly missing.  For instance, Ned sounds more like an abusive caveman than a romantic hero:  "The problem was that she intrigued him as no other woman ever had.  He was attracted to her to such a degree that just seeing her in another man's arms was enough to make him want to march across the room, throw her over his shoulder and take her off to be thoroughly ravished.  Just what he'd do when he was finally done having his way with her, he had no idea."I won't be reading more by this author.