Heiress Gone Wild is the fourth book in the Lady Truelove series. It stands alone – I have read the first book in the series, but not the others, and while characters from the previous books make appearances in the book, you certainly don’t need to know their stories to read this one.

The story starts when Jonathan Deverill goes to collect his new ward, the daughter of an old friend, from her school in New York. He only learned of his wardship shortly before his friend died, and was under the impression that the ward in question was a little girl in pigtails. Not so – Marjorie Mann is nearly twenty-one years old, has lived at the school since her father left her there at the age of seven (he promised to come back for her, but never did) and is beyond ready to leave. While her friends moved on after graduation, she has been stuck at the school, working as a teacher (mostly to have something to do, as she is a considerable heiress), and she is bored out of her mind. Now that there is no hope of a life with her father, she is determined to take her fortune to London and find herself a husband, and she believes that Jonathan is just the man to help her do it.

Alas for Marjorie, this is not Jonathan’s plan. His first instinct, on realising that his ward is no schoolgirl but an extremely attractive young woman, is to leave her at the school for another six or nine months while he travels to England to talk to his sisters about bringing her out, and then travels to South Africa to make sure her investments are in order. Incidentally, I have a bad feeling about the nature of those investments, but they are never discussed in detail. When Marjorie buys herself a ticket on the same ship back to London and hires herself a friendly chaperone, he first tries to lock her in her room for the entire voyage, and then bribes her chaperone to pretend to be ill so that he can put Marjorie under the guardianship of a much stricter, elderly lady who he knows will prevent her from having any fun, licit or otherwise. On reaching London, he immediately tries to dump Marjorie on his sisters and then leave; when his sisters insist that he stays in London to help get Marjorie settled, he promptly finds an endless array of reasons to be out of the house and to avoid Marjorie like the plague. And why does he do this? Because by this point, he has decided that he is attracted to her, but not worthy of her.

I mean, he’s 100% right about not deserving her, if you ask me, but for Marjorie, this is just another man who has claimed to care about her, but who abandons her at the first opportunity. The main difference is that this one has kissed her – and later rather more than that – before performing his assorted disappearing acts. Oh, and also, he gets jealous of anyone else who might possibly be a suitor, which is just, dude, shit or get off the pot. And I am so very over the whole ‘jealousy = love’ trope.

You may have gathered from this description that I did not take to the hero, and you would be correct. Jonathan is, in my view, appallingly self-centred. It does not speak well of him that even though he agrees with Marjorie that the strictures with which she is surrounded (at least in part caused by his actions) are unfair, he’s still happy to go along with them because they are convenient to him. He knows that she feels abandoned by her father and by him, but he keeps on trying to explain to her that she shouldn’t feel abandoned by him because he totally intends to come back – and then he goes back to avoiding her. Even once he falls in love with her, I get the sense that he’s only interested in her feelings and wishes so far as is necessary to get her to fall in love with him in return.

But perhaps the biggest problem with a hero who spends all his time avoiding the heroine is that you wind up with a book where the hero and heroine are rarely found on the same page, at least for the first two thirds of the story. And this is a problem for several reasons. For one thing, it makes it hard to sell the idea that they are falling in love with each other if they never spend any time together. Their constant separation gave me no opportunity to see Jonathan actually treating Marjorie well or having any regard for her as a person until way too late. For another, it makes for a rather dull book when they are both off separately, periodically thinking of each other while going about their respective lives. And this is a pity, because when they actually do get to be in the same place at the same time, the book comes to life (it’s the only time when Jonathan becomes marginally tolerable, frankly)… but it really, really drags in between.

This last bit, to be honest, was rather a surprise. I’ve been reading and enjoying Laura Lee Guhrke’s work for years, and while there are periodically things that make me raise my eyebrows or wince, there is usually so much sparkle and humour that I enjoy the book regardless. I wouldn’t have expected something that was this, well, boring.

The side characters (who are in many cases heroes and heroines of previous books) are rather more interestingly drawn and give much more of a sense of having an inner life than Jonathan and Marjorie do. In fact, my absolute favourite thing about this book is the deliciously dubious Baroness who Marjorie hires to be her chaperone. She is quite frank about her need for money and willingness to be bought by the highest bidder, but she is also quite obviously very fond of Marjorie and gives her frank advice when she needs it. I would have liked to see more of her. And I would like to note that Marjorie herself, despite being stuck in a book with a terrible hero, is actually both intelligent and resourceful, without being overly endowed with Gumption. Her complicated anger and grief over her father rings very true, as does her desire to live life on her own terms. Alas, she begins to fall for Jonathan quite early and this rather dulls her flair.

Which is a pity, because there was very little flair left at that point.

Something I want to talk about a bit was the seduction scene, which occurs fairly late in the book, and which I found rather hard to read. The viewpoint is entirely Jonathan’s, and the whole time he is seducing Marjorie, he is castigating himself for taking advantage of her. Unfortunately, while I suspect we are supposed to read this as him being a gentleman who is overcome by his feelings, in this instance, I felt that he was absolutely right to be castigating himself. They have just had one of their moments of sympathy after weeks of him avoiding and ignoring her, and they go from kissing to third base quite fast, which would be fine, except that this is definitely a scene in which the heroine is seduced, rather than being an equal participant – he kind of pushes past her uncertainty. It’s not not consensual, and I might not have noticed this so much except that Jonathan’s own feelings of taking advantage really made me take a step back and go, actually, you know what? You are, kind of. Why don’t you stop? I’m pretty sure you could, in fact, contain that desire which is ‘flaming so high’ if you really wanted to.

(It’s also probably not a good sign if your seduction leaves the seductee with ‘her emotions bounc[ing] from joy to perplexity to desire to anger and back to joy again, over and over, round and round’. If you are so worried about protecting the girl, maybe try giving her a hint as to where you stand?)

What’s interesting about this is that I’m sure I’ve read a multitude of seduction scenes along these lines in my time, without turning a hair. I suspect that there are three factors in play which make this one different. The first is the viewpoint – we don’t really know how Marjorie feels about any of this, and Jonathan’s own feelings are, as I have mentioned, not entirely reassuring. The second, frankly, is my own dislike of Jonathan. In other seduction scenes I’ve read, I’ve had a lot more faith in the hero’s good intentions and care for the heroine than I have here, and it’s a lot easier to overlook things which don’t feel quite right if the rest of the book is convincing me that this relationship is lovely and awesome.

But I think that the most significant factor is that this book was published in 2019, not in 2009. One thing I’ve noticed in the last five to ten years is that there is a lot more emphasis in romance novels on making consent very, very clear. This trend pre-dates #metoo, but it’s been increasingly explicit since then (and that’s awesome, frankly – finding sexy ways to model explicit consent is a fantastic contribution to the culture in my view!). So this feels like a throwback to an earlier era of romance writing…and it’s not one that I really wanted to go back to.

My other problem with the story is that I’m not convinced that Jonathan is in love with Marjorie. Desire, I will buy. He is pretty much floored by her from the start, no question about it. But even when he is proposing marriage he doesn’t sound like a man in love. The compromises he offers aren’t about making her happy, they are about convincing her to say yes. This is a subtle, perhaps a nitpicking, difference, but I think it’s crucial. And it’s in keeping with the rest of his behaviour; the only difference is that now he has decided that he wants her, rather than wanting to avoid her. It’s still a very selfish version of love.

I mean, he does kind of finally get it right in the last few pages, but unfortunately by that point I had long ago decided that I wanted Marjorie to embrace the single life and become an eccentric photographer or something. Or maybe elope with the Baroness. She seems broad minded enough to go for it, and she would definitely be more fun than Jonathan. And at least she is absolutely open about the selfishness of her motives.

I was so disappointed by this book. I’ve loved Guhrke’s earlier novels – the marvellously bonkers Not So Innocent, which pairs a skeptical police detective with a psychic who has seen his murder is sweet and funny and still holds up eleven years later. Or there’s Guilty Pleasures, with its archaeologist heroine who overhears the hero saying rude things about her and decides, you know what, stuff him, I’m going to live life on my terms and stop being self-sacrificing. I even have a soft spot for Dylan, the bad-boy composer in His Every Kiss, who I would certainly want to strangle in real life, but who is irresistible on the page.

These earlier novels are funny, charming and original; the heroines have interesting careers and inner lives, and the heroes, while having a tendency to think they know what’s best for everyone, almost always come to deserve them. Alas, even setting aside the perfidious Jonathan (and really, we should all be setting Jonathan aside at the first opportunity), this book lacked spark. The minor characters – Jonathan’s sisters, and especially the baroness – were delightful. But the hero and heroine were frankly rather dull, and I didn’t like their relationship at all. In fact, I spent most of the book desperate for a rival suitor to turn up and sweep Marjorie off her feet.

I think the mistake I made with this book was not washing my hands of it about two thirds of the way through, when I realised that I was a little bit bored and also had no time for the hero. Alas, I kept reading, and while the book itself did not get worse, my attitude did, and I quickly descended into Bitch Eating Crackers territory with it, becoming annoyed about everything from questionable seductions to minor characters sharing surnames with terrible Australian politicians. So instead of a slightly bored DNF, this book wound up with a downright grumpy D.

Ironically, what this book and review have made me want to do is go back and visit Guhrke’s backlist, because I found myself really missing the wit and charm and sheer bonkers fun of her earlier novels.

But I won’t be re-reading this one.