Scandals of an Innocent (MIRA) [Paperback]

This is the second in a hilarious trilogy of romances set in the fictional Yorkshire village of Fortune's Folly.

All three are set about five years after the same author's novel "Unmasked" which was set in 1804 and the main events of which also took place in Yorkshire. Many of the characters in that book reappear in the "Brides of Fortune" series. IMHO it enhances the reader's enjoyment of this trilogy to read all four books in sequence.

In other words I would recommend that potential readers should read "Unmasked" first, treating this trilogy as the second, third and fourth part of a quartet, which would therefore consist of:

1) "Unmasked"
2) "The Confessions of a Duchess (Brides of Fortune)"
3) This book, "The Scandals of an Innocent"
4) "The Undoing of a Lady (Brides of Fortune)"

The pretext of the "Brides of Fortune" trilogy is that the obnoxious and greedy squire of Fortune's Folly, Sir Montague Fortune, discovers that the village was not covered by the legislation which repealed a whole range of ancient medieval laws in the seventeenth century. And that he can reactivate them, claiming outdated and absurd feudal dues.

In particular, Sir Montague reactivates something called the "Dames Tax" whereby any unmarried heiress in the village must pay him half her fortune. Under the terms of the tax, every widow or maid in Fortune's Folly who has or stands to inherit any property must marry within a year or pay half of it to Sir Montague.

Needless to say, this infuriates the maids and widows in Fortune's Folly: and it also causes them to look around for possible husbands, making the village into "a veritable marriage mart." And needless to say, all the male fortune hunters in England, from impecunious aristocrats who need money to maintain a bankrupt estate to young men on the make, flock to Fortune's Folly in the hopes of snaring a wealthy bride who needs to marry or give half her wealth to the greedy squire.

One of the women affected by this absurd tax is Alice Lister, formerly housemaid to a rich widow, who as she had no surviving children or family, left Alice a substantial fortune. At the start of the book, Alice gets caught up in a ridiculous scrape at the urgings of her friend, Lady Elizabeth Scarlett - half sister of the wicked Sir Montague, but definately not a supporter of his greedy schemes. And in the process she has the misfortune to be caught in an embarrassing situation by Lord Miles Vickery who is part of a (fictional) law enforcement agency called "The Guardians" working for the Home Secretary.

Lord Miles is in Fortune's Folly for two reasons. Having inherited one title and one set of debts from his late father, a profligate aristocratic bishop, and then the Marquisate of Drummond and an even bigger set of debts from a still more profligate cousin, Lord Miles desperately needs a rich wife. But that is not the only reason for his presence in the village. Lord Liverpool, the Home Secretary, had seen the host of young men travelling to the village looking for wealthy wives as the perfect cover for a covert investigation into a suspect death.

Liverpool believes that Sir William Crosby, a local magistrate who had been shot in what appeared to be a hunting accident, may have been murdered by local criminals to whose nefarious activities he was getting too close. Three of the "Guardians" who investigate crimes for the Home Office - were young single men who had inherited serious debt problems from profligate parents.

So in the first book, Liverpool ordered Dexter Anstruther, Lord Miles Vickrey, and Lord Nat Waterhouse to go to Fortune's Folly on the pretext of looking for a bride, and to investigate Sir William Crosby's death while they are about it. At first they thought that a rogue industrialist called Warren Sampson had murdered Crosby - but then Sampson himself is found murdered. Finding evidence which led them to suspect Sir Montague's brother, Tom Fortune, of the murder, the Guardians had him arrested: but at the start of this book, Tom Fortune is on the run, having bribed the jailer at Newcastle prison and escaped.

But meanwhile the Guardians find that the cover of looking for a bride becomes a reality. Dexter Anstruther actually did find a bride in the first book: Miles Vickrey was very taken with Alice Lister, but he made the mistake of throwing her over to pursue an even wealthier heiress.

The lady concerned having chosen someone else, Lord Miles takes the opportunity to renew his attentions to Alice. But apart from the fact that she is still furious with Miles, the terms of her former employer's will, specifically designed to protect her from fortune hunters such as himself, may prove a formidable handicap for such a rake ...

This book, and indeed the whole trilogy, is quite ridiculous, often funny, distinctly sexy, and highly entertaining. Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer this is not. But neither does it read like an insipid attempt to copy their work for a lowbrow audience, a pitfall which all too many modern attempts at a regency romance fall into.

If you are looking for a light-hearted romance to relax with, without making too much of an intellectual demand on the brain and with few pretensions to detailed historical accuracy, this trilogy is very good fun, and on those terms I can recommend it.

I really enjoyed Confessions of a Duchess (this book's predecessor), and was prepared to enjoy this as much. However, the hero Miles is really rather unpleasant to Alice for a fair bit of the time, blackmailing her into an engagement she doesn't want, blackmailing her into behaving certain ways, and generally being smug, aloof, annoying and superior. Alice, to her credit, doesn't like this, resents him and wants to be free of him...
Except, except, except - even when she's declaring (no doubt with a heaving bosom in best regency tradition) that she hates him, the minute he touches her, she melts and is unable to stop him taking ever-more outrageous liberties. A couple of times I felt quite uncomfortable with the level of his coercion and the humiliation of her acquiescence.

We find out very late in the day why he's so isolated from his family, and why he's so determined to be detached from Alice, but for heaven's sake, he's a grown man and should be able to put the past in the past, not sulk about how he woz dun wrong. And it's no excuse for his treatment of Alice...

He totally ruins her in a spectacularly public way, destroying the good name she's fought so hard to obtain, and yeah, yeah, he comes through and rescues her from the evil machinations of the baddies, and to be sure, he ends up declaring undying fidelity and love, but he'd been too horrid for too long for me - I thought she was a mug. She should have told him to take a running jump and let him drown in his debt.

I appreciate that my review doesn't chime well with the very long one from Marshall Lord, but I've read a lot of this style of books, read a lot of Ms Cornick's books, which I generally rate highly and have all of Georgette Heyer's, so I review from experience! I recommend Confessions of a Duchess, and remember enjoying Unmasked when I read it a while ago, but this was, for me, an uncomfortable read at times.