Deborah Cooke, $2.99, ISBN 978-1988479156
Historical Romance, 2016

Claire Delacroix’s Something Wicked This Way Comes is part of a series called The Brides of North Barrows.

It also has a solid, gripping prologue that has me at the edge of my seat, eager to read more…

Then it’s the first chapter and the heroine comes into the scene and I’m sure everyone can hear the sound of the toilet flushing from here.

Oh yes, the story. Sophia Brisbane and Lucien de Roye have a complicated history. They are still in love, but she believes that she had lost him on top of everything else in her previously cozy life. The truth is that he’s done all this just to keep her safe, even if it means sacrificing any chance of a future together.

Ooh, someone play some dramatic music already.

Indeed, the prologue has it all: a duel, a fake death, a brooding hero determined to make life hard for himself with perplexingly complicated choices because drama is hot, and so forth. It’s a solid read all around, and you know what, I would have been perfectly happy had the story ended right after that.

No, it goes on and in the first chapter, I am treated to the heroine doing mundane, oh-so-typical wide-eyed, goody-two-shoes heroine antics along with some predictable the-other-hot-woman-is-such-a-PITA angle to make Sophia look even more saintly in comparison.

Then it is off to luncheons, boring conversations, Sophia sighing sadly about her past…

What is this? What happened to all the brooding melodrama of the prologue? It’s like the author had deliberately taken a needle to puncture her story like it’s a balloon. C

Then, finally in the third chapter, these two meet again. Oh good, perhaps now there will be more action, drama, et cetera?

No, it’s more mooning and sighing with exposition added on to help Sophia get the full picture.

Now, discounting the prologue, this story is alright, I guess. It’s readable.

I feel that the plot is tad too big for the length of this story, so the story feels tad too compressed for its own good.

Still, given how the characters here tend to favor overblown displays of martyrdom and self-suffering over more pragmatic avenues of action, I suspect that these characters will make me want to chew on glass shards and drown the delicacies with a glass of turpentine, were the story be any longer.

Hence, despite the plot and pacing issue, the story ends on the right place and length, all the while without inflicting hurt on me, so I’d take that as some kind of victory.

However, I will always wish that the rest of this story has matched the prologue in terms of tone and style. Right now, that prologue feels like it should be in a very different story. The next few chapters are just not worthy of having it as their prologue!