Review: Unrealized potential
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 3, 2014
Most Regency and Victorian era romances follow a fairly standard formula: beautiful girl meets beautiful boy and they are instantly attracted; misunderstandings ensue, events, circumstances, or friends intervene to bring them back together and the couple lives happily ever after.  Initially it appears that Never Too Late chose a different formula by having our heroine, Mrs. Honoria (Nora) Duchamp, be a good 15 years older than our hero, Lord Devin.  While still beautiful, she is a woman who works to support herself.  Apart from the romance element, there is a bit of intrigue as Nora investigates the abuse of children and women in the burgeoning mid-19th century market for photographic pornography.  The author does give decently researched lip service to various elements of mid-19th-century English history throughout the course of this novel.  If this is the good news, what then is the bad news?The author has all of the elements necessary to make this novel stand apart from so many others of this genre. Unfortunately those elements were not fully explored and were often glossed over to get to the "good stuff," meaning the sex scenes.  Indeed, the author took the time to build some tension in weaving the tale about the abuses of young women and children in early photographic pornography and the efforts that were made to try to hush up social reformers who protested it, but then she drops all of that to pursue  the romance and sexual relationship between Devin and Nora.  There are several chapters in which nothing about the investigation into this is mentioned or discussed.  In these chapters Nora comes off as looking like a person of weak character as she continually chides herself for her feelings for Lord Devin given the differences in their ages and social standing, but as soon as he quirks his brow, they're going after it like rabbits.  In addition, due largely to what I believe to be poor character development, I could not find myself connecting very closely with either of the main characters.  While I love a great culminating sex scene between characters that I have come to like, there's nothing interesting or entertaining about it with poorly developed characters.  I've said this before in reviews, but I'll say it again: unless you care about the characters there's nothing sexy about the sex.Bottom line: this book had great potential but the author chose to bring it down to the level of just writing about the romance/sex between Nora and Devin and failing to skillfully interweave the pornography plot element that could have added to the overall tension of the story.  That failure makes Never Too Late just another throw-away beach read.  It's a shame as it could've been so much better.