Review: A bit torn between 3 and 4 stars for this.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 12, 2012
This novella is very competently written but doesn't have that extra-special something that Duran's writing usually shows.  But it's good, better than most 99-cent novellas I've read lately.  One thing I've got to say before anything else is that the product description here online is not accurate.  This is NOT a Regency novella.  It takes place in 1885, which makes it late Victorian.Another inaccuracy is the plot description online which states that our heroine pretends to be the wife of Viscount Ripton to get a berth on a ship bound for England and is surprised to find herself sharing a bed and cabin with a stranger claiming to be that viscount.  That's not quite the way it happens.Stated briefly, middle-class working girl, Amanda Thomas, graduate of Mrs. Lawrence's School of Typing, finds a job as assistant to a Mrs. Pennypacker, well-known memoirist who needs someone to help document her travels through Turkey and Greece.  Amanda, who has always dreamed of travel and far-off places, is delighted to have the job.  Until, that is, she finds out how extremely unkind her employer is.In Constantinople she meets a young man who is so taken by her that he travels to meet her at the next stop on Pennypacker's itinerary:  the Isle of Syra in Greece.  There, he, as Viscount Ripton, proposes marriage and she agrees to meet him at a church for the ceremony.  Unfortunately, he doesn't show up and so she goes to the hotel where he had been staying and asks for Viscount Ripton.  To her astonishment, a complete stranger answers to the name.This Viscount Ripton is in Greece looking for his cousin, who has disappeared, and also looking for someone who has been using his name and has stolen letters of credit.  He assumes that Amanda is a con artist working with the impostor. Amanda thinks he is the impostor.  And what on earth has happened to the viscount she was to have married?The real (or not?) Viscount Ripton more or less abducts Amanda and takes her with him on his search for his cousin and for the impostor (or not?).  You've probably figured it all out by now, right?  But still, it was a good story and the H and h are well drawn and the love story develops nicely.  My only problem with the novella is that it wraps up too quickly and too patly once everyone is back in London.  That's probably because Duran had reached her word limit for a novella.  Too bad.  More time spent on the H and h's reunion in England would have made this better.