In this romance novel's rather unusual storyline, our heroine, Phillipa Carstairs,
became engaged to a man who promptly disappeared. It's been almost nine months since she saw him, and she's heard nothing from or of him.
Should she continue to wait? Could he be dead? Should she move on?
Her grandfather suggests that Phillipa asks Maxwell, Lord Montrose, to look for
her fiancé. Although Phillipa thinks he's a bit of a fop who is more interested in his clothing than anything else, she asks
and Maxwell agrees to do a bit of digging to see if he can discover the errant fiancé.
He's not quite the fop she believes him to be: he is instead a spy for the Crown who knows absolutely everyone. As Phillipa and her grandmother travel with Maxwell to Brighton and then Paris on the trail of her
her vanished fiance, she begins to wonder whether she picked the wrong man.
Strangley, many of the plot threads in To Love a Wicked Lord seem a bit, well, pointless. Phillipa's grandmother appears to be undergoing some kind of personality transformation and behaving incongruously, but nothing much is made of that in the end. Phillipa's search for her fiancé sort of peters out,
while her relationship with Maxwell grows but not organically. She comes across as rather weak and naïve woman; Maxwell is never easy to get to know. Overall, a rather disappointing novel and not particularly believable.