Zebra, $8.99, ISBN 978-1-4201-4812-1
Historical Romance, 2021
Wait a minute. Once a Laird is the sixth entry in Mary Jo Putney’s Rogues Redeemed series, but that series is about five men that bonded in a cellar while they were pew-pew’ing in the army in Portugal. Oh, get your mind out of the gutter, people, I said “bonded”, not “boned”.
So, five men… and a sixth book?
I confess that I haven’t been paying close attention to the who’s who in this series, as they all sort of blend together into some bland mass of boring paragons, so I’m not sure what happened. Maybe there were more than five guys in that cellar, and some of them had been very quiet in the background and hence were unnoticed by the others?
It doesn’t matter. This one seems to be the final entry into the series, so all the rogues have been redeemed, glory be to the highest.
Okay, Kai Douglas Ramsay’s first love Giselle died while he was in college, so now he would never love again. He traveled the world, seeing things and doing soldier-ly stuff in the process, until a letter informs Coble Kai that his grandfather is about to croak. So, he has better come back to the island of Thorsay and learn to be a laird, as he’s taking over once the old coot dies.
Shortly after he arrives at Thorsay, our heroine Signy Matheson approaches him and these two tell one another everything and anything. That way, there will be nothing left in the rest for the story for anyone to discover. Suspense and surprises are overrated in the genre, after all!
That’s it. The rest of the story is about Coble Kai and Siggy-Wiggy in a cycle of mutual admiration as they ooh and aah all over Thorsay about how toasty that paradise is, and really, they and the place are the best ever. Potential subplots are brought up and then resolved quickly, often with the power of just existing as an awesome person. The whole thing is quite the snooze, really.
The romance, if I can call it that, is as long as it is because our heroine keeps finding flimsy excuses as to why she can never permanently dry hump her man forever after. There’s actually nothing to stop them from getting married. In fact, the people all love them so much that they would be more than happy to swing pom-poms and cheer our hero and heroine on if they have had enough drinks. So, really, the romance is a no-conflict zone too, and it’s a snooze as well.
Okay, the author’s last few offerings had been one long snooze, so it’s not like this one is breaking any new grounds here. There is one thing about Once a Laird, however, that has me seriously questioning whether the author’s earlier stories were as good as I recalled them to be.
Early on, Siggy tells Cobble Kai that Giselle didn’t just die like that, she died after miscarrying his child, and the idiot noble, now-dead wretch made Siggy promise to never tell anyone that our hero is the deadbeat dad of the dead baby.
After this revelation—that supposedly have these two tearfully humping one another out of a grief—is out of the way, I am treated a few pages later to these two talking about more mundane things in a cold, dispassionate manner. It’s like our heroine had told him that Giselle had a hard time taking a dump instead.
Even when he is alone, our hero doesn’t dwell on the revelation that he’d merrily ran off to college without even checking once to see whether he’d completely ruined a poor lass’s life for twenty seconds of shagging. He just states that he’s grieved long enough, so oh well. Seriously, there is no reaction from him at all. He spends little time during the rest of this story to even think about the dead girl his careless splooge-dribbling had sent to the grave, and instead, he’s lusting after the dead woman’s sister.
Giselle’s death isn’t even an issue in the relationship, as our hero barely has any believable reaction to this revelation. Siggy hastily assures him, in the same scene right after spilling everything out that, really, he can’t blame himself because there’s nothing he could have done. Besides, Giselle was always frail and sickly, so Siggy is convinced that her death is inevitable. At that point I have to question as to whether our heroine even likes her dead sister.
If that weren’t perplexing enough, later on, he’d tell Siggy-Wiggy that she and her sister are very much alike, so that’s why he loves her too.
Did Mary Jo Putney write like this back in those days? I thought she had written emotional stories that resonated with me and brought on the feels, but this one is more like a tale of automatons badly trying to pass themselves off as human beings. Siggy-Wiggy’s emotions can come on and then are abruptly switched off, as if her feelings were controlled by the author using a remote, while Cobble Kai resembles a cold-blooded automaton that never seems to care about Giselle at all.
This one is a readable story with a badly botched romance, one that is so badly botched that I actually question whether my favorable opinion of the author’s early books was just me putting on a pair of nostalgia goggles. I suppose I can reread those books, but you know, I’m actually scared to find out! Let me retain still a few illusions about life, okay?
