Avon, $7.99, ISBN 978-0-06-291362-3
Historical Romance, 2020

Caroline Linden’s About a Rogue is the first entry in the Desperately Seeking Duke series. The name of the series isn’t entire accurate as it may take a while yet before the Duke of Carlyle kicks the bucket.

Unfortunately, a few years ago, an accident had left the Duke with a brain injury that left him in a child-like state. He’s not going to be siring any kid, let’s just say. The Duke’s only sister died a while back too, and when the story opens, the Duke’s younger brother and heir to the title had just passed on too.

This leaves the Duke’s mother, His Grace the Duchess of Carlyle, reeling from both grief and dismay. She is the iron lady behind the curtains type, having built the fortunes and shaped the destiny of the family with her own hands. The solicitor has located three possible heirs to the title now that there is nowhere else. One is a soldier, one is a gambling man, and one is a—this one hurts her the most—a Frenchman.

She will be damned if the family fortunes and good name evaporated up the nose and excreted out the rear end of a no-good POS once she and the Duke pass on, so she has them summoned to an audience with her. In this one, only the soldier and the gambler show up. She tells them what she expects of them: she wants them to shape up to be respectable, knowledgeable men worthy of inheriting the title and all the goodies that come with it.

To sweeten the pot, she will give them an advance and then a generous monthly allowance. The one she will deem most worthy will inherit the title, but the rest can still keep the money and continue to get their allowances. However, should any of them do anything she considers unworthy or disreputable, she will terminate their allowance without hesitation.

That’s the premise of this series. This one is the story of the gambling man, Maximillian St James. That’s not his full name, but once that is revealed, even the heroine agrees that he should just go by Max.

Yes, Max is a lover, gambler, and more, but he has dreams of his own. Now that providence has landed him into this reality TV show of a premise, he is determined not to squander it. Oh, he doesn’t care whether he’d be the duke. With this access to a generous amount of money, he can finally set in motions his plans to make a stable life for his own.

He befriends Samuel Tate, the owner of the lucrative pottery business in Marslip Hill, and he sees possibilities in cultivating that friendship. Sure, Samuel runs a good business, but he is still a middle-class bloke and Polite Society takes advantage of this by often buying from him in credit and doesn’t pay up. Well, Max is confident that he can charm and smooch his way into getting those people to pay up. Now that he’s well known to be an heir to a dukedom, he can also leverage the new doors opened to him to expand the business.

In other words, he can be the best business development manager Samuel can ever have.

However, Samuel runs a family business, and he’s not going to let any interloper come in and take even a small rein of the business. In fact, he’s planning to leave everything to his daughters Bianca and Catherine…

Hey, wait a minute. Bianca and Catherine? Oh yes, one is sweet and agreeable, while the other is outspoken and thinks she knows everything. The author thinks she is being sneaky by having Bianca be the outspoken one, but oh no, I see what she is doing.

Ahem, anyway. Since the Tates run a family business, Max decides that he’d be part of their family then. Samuel encourages his attentions on the sweet and agreeable Cathy, so Max is confident that he’d soon be a part of a prosperous business that will bring him some much-craved stability in his life.

Alas, Cathy is in love with someone else, and Bianca knows this. She already gives Max the side eye from the get go, because she is confident that the man is 100%, no, 500%, no wait, 10,000% useless wastrel, so she not-so-subtly manipulates her sister into finding the determination to agree to an elopement with her sweetheart.

Unfortunately for Bianca, Cathy’s decampment means that Samuel is in danger of breaching the wedding contract with Max. Not wanting Max to sue for money, Samuel points out not-so-sweetly that he still has another daughter to shove down the aisle to Max…

This one starts out so, so good. There are lovely prose, an intriguing set-up, an interesting character in Her Grace the Duchess of Carlyle, and Max seems like a rake archetype that actually has some depths beyond that contrived bad boy façade of his. So much so that I find thinking that this one would be an easy four-oogie read, maybe even a keeper, and the one that will pick me up from my current ennui where this genre is concerned.

Sadly, this story dies the moment Bianca and Max marry.

Let me put this way: imagine meeting this hot guy that is also charming and wealthy, and you are ready to give that guy a test ride before the night is over. So the two of you go to his luxurious mansion, and you are already planning how to spend his money after the honeymoon. You lay on this big comfortable bed in anticipation, while he says he needs to take a few seconds to go to the washroom.

So you wait.

And wait.

“Are you okay in there, sweetheart?” you call, somewhat impatiently.

“Just a second!”

And wait.

And wait.

Oh for heaven’s sake, is he taking a big dump in there?

You wait.

And wait some more.

What is happening? Is he turning into a werewolf in there? Should you just cut your losses and go get drunk before the night is over?

That’s how I feel while reading this thing.

Since Bianca and Max marry by the first quarter or so of this story, it dies a pretty early death and the rest is akin to me waiting for someone on life support to finally bite the big one.

Here’s why: nothing interesting happens after that.

Now, it is likely that someone new to the genre may be charmed by this story, but me, I’ve bored. You see, the big bulk of this story sees the usual drama unfolds. Bianca wants a chaste marriage, Max agrees while constantly flustering her, and Bianca starts seething while getting more and more horny inside because that’s how it is. It’s that same old song and dance performed in a way that feels tired and played out.

A big reason why I never can get invested in this song and dance because from the get go, Bianca is a nitwit. She pegs Max as the worst of the worst just because he’s cute and charming and from the city, and I find that really eye-rolling dumb of her.

For someone purportedly to be a brain behind the business, our heroine never displays any of this vaunted intelligence of hers. She abets her sister in a dumb scheme without thinking of the consequences to both her and her family, she makes swift and terribly awful judgment of people and stick to her guns despite all evidence to the contrary, and she is also that weird type of heroine that doesn’t feel any hormonal stirrings until the hero is in the picture.

Therefore, I can’t care less that Max will soon show her how wrong she is. Why do I care that she realizes that she is wrong about one thing, when I am confident that she is wrong about a hundred other things?

Also disappointing is how the author tries to hype up Max’s brainpower, but in bewildering ways. For example, the company brain Bianca never for some reason considers the packaging of her company products to ensure that they remain in good condition when they reach their destination. Okay, so the heroine is actually dumb. What else is new? However, the author then has the hero pointing out that more straw of a certain kind is needed for pottery works that would be transported by road. How does he know this? The author says that this is because Max used to sleep on straws in stables. Well, okay, but how does he know? Did he study the texture and tensile strength of the straw he is sleeping on?

I guess I am just mildly annoyed by how the author tries to display brainpower in her characters. For Bianca, she is “intelligent” because the author says so, despite all evidence to the contrary. For Max… I suppose it’s like scientists in popular media—the whole “I am good in science because… er, science is cool!” thing that never works for me. I wish the author had something different with Max for this instance, such as perhaps he’s had an apprenticeship or a sugar mommy taught him stuff. People don’t just become smart by osmosis or something.

There is some drama toward the end, but it involves a villain that only shows up later in the story and is inconsequential for the most part. My reaction is basically, “Who are you again? Whatever, doesn’t matter. Bye!”

Sadly, that’s About a Rogue in a nutshell. It has a great premise, but the author doesn’t do anything interesting with that, unless I count the efforts to have Bianca make me roll my eyes up in angles and degrees that have never been attempted by human beings before.

So yes, this one is a whole lot of well-written “Whatever, doesn’t matter, bye!” claptrap. As a fan of the author, it really breaks my heart to type that previous sentence.