Review: DID I MISS SOMETHING?
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 10, 2014
Having checked out the other reviews, I am wondering if I read the same book as everyone else.  I must have, because the characters' names in the other reviews are the same as those in the book I read.But I found this a particularly emotionless book.  Oh yes, the heroine did her thing from time to time, and the hero maintained his icy rage, but there was no emotional impact;  no reach inside me and squeeze my guts with angst, hope, fear or passion.  Even the sex scenes were rather cold-blooded and mechanical - but maybe this was because the hero was constantly conscious of his alter-ego's reaction to the heroine, and those reactions were so matter-of-factly stated, that they had as much impact on me as him saying he had a headache and sort of deadened me to any pizzazz that might have been when he got to bed the girl.Or maybe it was the girl going to see her family straight after the wedding, then coming home to her new husband after dining with her family?  That was truly weird and not at all romantic.I found the inciting incident rather iffy.  The heroine was no wilting miss who'd been compromised before Society.  She had not even appeared in Society.  A locket, gifted to her by the hero's brother, was presented as evidence of her being compromised by the hero's brother, but when kissed by the hero, he discovered she was an innocent.But this man whom we are supposed to believe has always been determined not to marry, and who has a very low opinion of women, decides to marry a girl he's never clapped eyes (or anything else) on before, even though he's already deduced that she is untruthful, and all because she dared to confront him in his own home with a derringer.  Okay - I decided to suspend my disbelief and read on.The hero is no hero.  He's a jerk with strong judgmental tendencies and an overblown sense of his own consequence.  If anyone deserved the heroine, it was him because frankly, the girl's a manipulator who's goal in confronting the hero in the first place was to exaggerate a short-lived friendship with his brother and extort 200,000 pounds from the hero as recompense.  Excuse me?  Does this author have any idea at all of precisely how much two hundred thousand Great British pounds was in that era???  Even the hero's offer of one hundred thousand pounds was too ludicrous for words.The heroine also has a father who did not reprimand her for her actions in seeking out the hero, or for managing to find herself marrying the man less than 24 hours after confronting him with aforementioned derringer.  Dear papa just did not strike me as a realistic parent of that time.I did not see any real character arc for either the hero or the heroine.  She certainly did not grow, and our hero just did this about face at the end of the story with no evidence along the way that he was even capable of changing, let alone making any progress in doing so.Then the first encounter between the hero and his long-estranged (and he knows how to maintain the Ice Age, this hero) mama was simply glossed over, even though it is his childhood perceptions of his mama that are the core of his internal conflict.  That was a great big cop out, and the ending itself was a non-event.The book cost me 87 cents,  Even at half the price it still would have been over-priced