Review: Highly Improbable
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 24, 2014
************SPOILERS*************"Never a Mistress, etc" begins with our heroine, Jane, a young (19 or so) woman, alone on a battlefield in Belgium. This setting and other clues leave the impression that the story begins during or very near the time of the Battle of Waterloo which occurred in 1815.  So, why is this young woman on the battlefield?  Why it's because she is there to practice as a surgeon, the customary name for a doctor in those days.  Run this through you BS meter and see if you come up with the same impression as I did: a woman...1815...alone...tending to wounded MALE soldiers on an active battlefield...yeah, right.So, as luck would have it, our intrepid Jane out looking for the wounded,  is accosted by two deserting French soldiers.  Enter Ned.  A British spy who, even though seriously wounded, manages to rout the French deserters and rescue Jane.  It's a win-win situation for Jane because not only is she rescued, but now she had a patient on which to practice her skills.  Yea.Our protagonists hole up in a handy, nearby cave while Jane proceeds to remove the bullet from Ned's leg, stitch it up, and manage his wound-induced fever.  Twelve hours later Ned awakes and feels well and strong enough to have rip-roaring sex with Jane...a virgin.  She's all okay with that since she figures that she'll never marry.  Cut to 6 years later and we find Jane raising her six year old daughter alone.  Needless to say, Ned reenters the picture, discovers a daughter and proceeds to woo Jane who is increasingly stubborn and annoying.  There's also a witchy former friend of the now disgraced Jane who's set her cap for Ned, a cruel, inheritance- withholding grandfather and a threatening suitor for Jane, a couple of kidnapping attempts on Jane's daughter Violet all thrown in to pad the story and as an attempt to create suspense.Bottom line for me:  the thoroughly improbable beginning made it impossible for me to read the remainder of the novel with anything but the most jaundiced of eyes.  Apart from the mild action in the denouement, this story, from the clunky, awkward title to the dry listing endings for some of the characters in the epilogue, was predictable and boring.  It is the first of a series and I believe I will give the others in the series a pass.