Avon, $8.99, ISBN 978-0-06-237196-6
Historical Romance, 2021

Okay, I said in my review of Lisa Kleypas’s previous offering that she would likely be offering more of the same, conflict-free group hug of a romance in her next offering. Well, I’m wrong, because the author does a 180 and ramps up the external conflicts here. Stabbings, amnesia, and more are found here, so I’m going to have to eat my previous words here.

There are also some variations to the formula. The heroine Merritt Sterling is a girl boss, a widow that has been managing her late husband’s shipping company very well, to the chagrin of some quarters that just want to see her fail.

However, we all know the romance genre rule: the heroine must never overshadow the hero in any way, because if she does that, that will be perceived by some people that she’s wearing the pants and possessing the bollocks in the relationship, and hence it’s no longer romantic.

This rule actually works to the benefit of Devil in Disguise, because this means that Merritt is not another powerful duke wearing a working class skin suit, and she’s not going to snap her fingers and all conflicts will be resolved magically. Because of this, the couple has to do some actual work to get to their happily ever after, and this means that, hallelujah, there are some external conflicts at last to keep things interesting.

Yes, Merritt and the hero Keir MacRae don’t bring on much drama in their relationship to keep my interest up, hence my relief that there are external conflicts to provide some diversion.

My lack of interest in them is because the author escalates their relationship from zero to 9,999 in the space of, what, three opening chapters?

They first meet when he storms into her office, not too happy about a botched and delayed shipment of whiskey that can cost his business a lot of money and a good amount of reputation. Right away Merritt is telling him her entire life story, something that always creeps me out a bit because I always believe that people that drop their own Wikipedia entry on strangers within a few minutes of saying hello are likely to have serious boundary issues at the very least.

Then she is asking him to kiss her and they get so heated up from there. Then, ah, he gets stabbed for some mysterious reasons—who wants him dead and why is the key suspense element in this story—and oh no, he recovers but has lost all memories of the previous week. This conveniently erases all his memories of going all slobbery and humpy on her, oh dear.

Luckily, he is still wildly infatuated with her, whether he remembers anything or not, and in fact, they have to get engaged because she is compromised by taking him under her wing for some bedside TLC.

See? The author wastes little time getting the humpty and dumpty out of the way before the story even reaches the halfway point. Were this something like the author’s past few books, where the main characters spend a lot of time mutually admiring the perfection of one another while wandering around picking up random strays or doing some creative endeavors to emphasize their virtues further, this would result in another bore of a read.

Here, however, there is no shortage of drama. Merritt’s is more boring, as she’s all about her reputation; she has nowhere to go in this story as she starts out at the top as a good boss, good person, and good everything else. The only arc she has is one that leads her to hop onto Keir’s choo-choo train. On the other hand, Keir drags more drama into the door with him. While the suspense here isn’t the most original or memorable, hey, compared to the author’s previous few offerings, I’d take generic suspense plot over the minutes of the Care Bear group hug society meetings.

Times like this make me yearn for the days when I gave numerical scores in my reviews. Because I have to adopt a one- to five-oogie system to make it possible for the WordPress platform to categorize the reviews, this means the final score of Devil in Disguise isn’t telling the whole story. It’s a readable but average three-oogie story were it by any other author, but as a Lisa Kleypas story, this one is an easy four-oogie read when compared to her last few ones.

So yes, the actual score is closer to three and a half, but I’m rounding it down because hey, this is Lisa Kleypas. It would be quite insulting to her reputation if I gave her a pity half-oogie round-up like she was someone doing business for the first time!