The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife was a shocker - not because of any of the content particularly, but because it
is simply a boring and badly-written book with minimal nods to historicity. I found it such hard going, in fact, that I only managed to read three-quarters of the way through before giving up.
So why was it so bad?
It mainly comes down to the minimal plot, and the fact that this is presumably being billed as a 'historical romance' but the historical aspect was laughable. Our heroine, Harriet Gardner, behaves entirely unlike a woman in Regency London; so do all the characters around her. She has a position as some sort of instructress at a Ladies School and chucks it in with an hour's notice to work as a companion to a cantankerous lady - er, no. She has various exceptionally unlikely conversations with various people, including the supposedly wicked duke who instead comes across as a rather petulant and unfeeling chap. The romance seems to be missing - hero and heroine just fancy the pants off each other.
A couple of side characters, including the cantankerous woman, Lady Powlis, and the duke's niece Edlyn,
are as indistinct as the central pair. The chapters begin with quotations from various writings of Mary Shelley, including
Frankenstein - why? All in all, this book was a waste of paper, and I won't be reading any others by this author.