Leisure, $6.99, ISBN 0-8439-5134-6
Historical Romance, 2003

There should be a warning stuck to this book. I know, some of you are right now thinking that “Connie Mason” on the cover is warning enough. But I actually thought she was actually improving in her last few books. With Seduced by a Rogue though, it seems that the same demon that threw a party in The Exorcist has come on to possess this book.

Let me put it this way: the heroine Phoebe “Feeble” Thompson is so horrifically stupid in this book that if any reader suffers a heart attack while getting worked up in screaming for her death, well, tough. The plot of this book is a convoluted mess: Feeble married Ramsey Dunsmore (the usual “spy/rake/earl” combo) and after one glorious night where the moon turns purple and Barney the Dinosaur walked the deep, moist, succulent love grooves on earth, she leaves him on the account of one flimsy lie told by the very transparent villain. He spends the years after whoring and hating all women until today, when he has to slip under covers to find a missing Egyptian heirloom last seen owned by her father…

And as these two people shriek, scream, and indulge in stupid sex, I am busy smashing my head against the wall. The villain is so transparent that they may as well hammer a neon signboard into his skull saying “Evil lives here!”, but Feeble just keeps believing him over the husband. On and on and on she goes, until I really want to kill something. What is the author thinking?

The trademark cheese ball writing and silly lines are all here, but the heroine’s catastrophic stupidity – which is the entire plot of this story – makes this book an excruciating agony of a read. Proceed with caution, unless you have a really high threshold for idiot heroines who should be euthanized from the get go for humane reasons.