Mills & Boon, £4.99, ISBN 978-0-263-92616-3
Historical Romance, 2017
The cover of Nicole Locke’s Her Christmas Knight is lovely. The color scheme is gorgeous, and the falling snowflakes around the couple create a dreamy, whimsical feel to the whole thing.
There, folks dreading negativity in reviews can stop reading now and go do something else, like taking a walk in nature on a day with fine weather.
It’s 1296. Alice of Fenton from Swaffham is summoned to the court of King Edward for the first time in her life. Normally, it’s her wealthy cotton merchant of a father that gets that invitation.
She is put through a “game” in a dark maze, winning the game by cowering the dark until all the other participants are captured, and for this, King Edward deems her worthy enough to be his spy.
Has the king run out of actual spies to do his bidding that he has to resort to this 22-year old nitwit? Also, his “game” tests how stealthy the “contestants” are—it has nothing to do with how sneaky or deceptive they are when it comes to spying.
Anyway, now Alice has to locate the Half-Thistle Seal or her sisters would pay, pay, pay. Sadly, that’s not a real seal we’re talking about. The Half-Wit Seal is a naughty spy trying to sabotage King Edward’s fine regime, a dastardly fiend that leaves the king no choice but to sic the most professional spy on… oh, wait.
Alice of Swotbottom immediately bumps into her old flame while in King Edward’s palace: Hugh of Shoebury. He wastes no time castigating her for consorting with a tyrant, how dare she, and Alice is like, no, that’s not a Half-Wit Seal antic at all, don’t be silly.
I’m also giving Hugh of Shortbum the side-eye as well here for blabbing like that and nearly blowing his cover, plus it’s especially dumb to antagonize the woman that he suspects to be the king’s newest mistress, so don’t think I’m some kind of sexist here. So far both the hero and the heroine, plus the king, are all looking pretty dumb.
Alice starts meandering around in a mess of guilt. Despite having never been to court before, all of a sudden all the folks there are her “friends”. So, how can she lie to her friends like that? But she must, alas, or her sisters will be forced to leave to a better world where the average IQ of the folks there is three times that of the folks in this country!
It takes Alice two weeks of aimless bumbling before she realizes that maybe she should start asking people about the Half-Wit Seal in order to do that spy thing properly…
God.
Now, I know that people back in those days don’t know anything about vitamins, probiotics, and balanced meals. Kwashiokor has decimated their collective brainpower so they can’t help being this dumb, but come on. The author isn’t someone living back in those days, so she can do better, surely?
The bulk of this story sees Swotbottom and Shortbum acting more like insipid teens than spies, so intent on whining and moaning about how never their genitals shalt meet—well, until they do, and then it’s all about the pain of incompetent liars trying to maintain their deception while moping about how their genitals shalt never be met again once their cover is blown.
Best of all, Shortbum is supposed to have received top training from the best, to be the best.
A meteor crashing into this England and wiping all lifeforms in that place would be truly an act of mercy, as it would certainly improve the average global IQ and perhaps even move human civilization ahead by at least a few centuries.
The mopey, morose romance of two mentally-challenged people running around like sad headless chickens is already an eye roll of an experience, but it’s not the first nor the last romance story to feature such a couple. So, this isn’t a heinous sin in its own right—I can easily think of a dozen stories in this line alone that have such a couple.
However, the author then wraps this couple in a truly incompetent and heinously stupid “spy” plot, making this the equivalent of a vomit cake slathered with dung icing. Now that is just mean.
