Ilze

Really disappointed with this one, because Julie Anne Long is one of my favourite authors and so far she hasn't had a single miss. But this one - made it to page 64 and had to set it away. A few of my reasons:

1. Huge age difference between the hero and heroine (17 years).

2. The hero is supposed to be 37 years old but his personality is portrayed as if he were at most about 24 years old and in the scenes with his father he acts about 18 years old. But because of the plot, the hero has to have some sort of second- or third-hand connection, in his adult life, to the event in the book's prologue (the murder of the heroine's father 17 years previously). It would have made some sense if the hero had been portrayed as a 37-year-old, but without that, it made no sense.

3. The hero's father is immensely powerful and wealthy, and the hero is his heir. It is just not credible that the 37-year old heir of a powerful and wealthy English nobleman in that period would be playing at cloak-and-dagger things, and still a happy bachelor, instead of being deeply involved with the family concerns, as well as married (or at least widowed) and busily raising a family to carry on the dynasty. Age 37 back in 1820 was already well past middle age, because the average life expectancy was about 40 back then - the hero's teenagerhood should have been long in the past!

4. The heroine is simply told that their engagement is over by her fiance when her adopted father is killed and turns out to be deeply in debt. This is illegal - men could not legally jilt their fiancees at that time, although women could jilt theirs. The fiance could have set things up so the heroine has almost no choice but to jilt him (e.g. offer her a payout), but the author chose not to do this for whatever reason.

5. The situation with the adopted father being deeply in debt is also very sketchy - the debts are not gambling debts, just lifestyle debts - but there is no explanation for why he needs to maintain such a lifestyle and not tell the heroine about the situation, or how he had planned to get out of it.

There were lots more errors, inconsistencies, just plain hard-to-believe things going on in the story, and that was just the first 65 pages! One or two things wouldn't bother me, but this was too much.