Bantam, $5.99, ISBN 0-553-29945-X
Historical Romance, 1994
I read Iris Johansen’s The Beloved Scoundrel when it first came out in 1994. That was during my days of dipping my toes into the romance genre. I didn’t know then that the author was a pretty big LoveSwept author—this was during the time before she transitioned to become a suspense author—but I like what the back cover synopsis promised me: Russia, stained glass, and a brooding hunk in the step back art.
Imagine my surprise the other day when I discover a pile of romances by this author lying around my place. Didn’t I give them away years ago? Since I’m bored of the current offering in the genre, however, it seems like a good idea to revisit this one.
Sadly, it’s as underwhelming as I remembered.
Okay, the plot is going to seem vague, but that’s by design. The author has set things up so that the reader gets all kinds of fancy woo-woo words thrown at their faces from the get-go, only to slowly learn what these things are later. It sounds messy, but the author manages to make things work.
The story starts off in the Balkans. Our heroine is Marianna Sanders, now orphaned with her four-year old brother Alex needing her protection against the forces that killed her mother. Her mother’s death clearly has something to do with the disappearance of the Jedalar, a stained glass that once occupied a window of the local church in Talenka.
Luckily for her and Alex, our hero is also looking for the Jedalar when he comes across them. Jordan Draken, the Duke of Cambaron (obligatory nickname: the Duke of Diamonds), grabs them back to England, introducing them as his wards. Mariana is 16 at that time, but don’t worry, the boink-boink only comes when she is older and hence won’t make too many readers cringe in awkward embarrassment.
Meanwhile, the search for the Jedalar continues, and somehow Napoleon is involved because of course he is.
The mystery part of this story is actually the better part, although I guess pretty quickly the nature of the stained-glass piece that makes it so much in demand by all the warring factions in Europe. The pacing is fine, and if I have any quibble, it’s how the author makes the whole thing a bit more cartoony than it should be as things progress.
Still, I appreciate the mystery because the romance is so dry and bland. Marianna and Jordan have the standard “young girl grows up and her bigger bosom now makes the hero drool” arc, nothing new there, but the characters are so one-note that I have a hard time caring for them in any way.
Marianna has no believable human emotions. She is skilled in making lovely stained-glass works because she is trained, but I find it hard to believe that she will willingly forgo any human comfort just so that she can do this all day, all night. She’s also the kind that claims she doesn’t need any man; she is not like other girls, so she puts out, but she doesn’t want to get married because, remember, she’s not like other girls. Oh, but she gets super jealous when the hero appears to be interested in other women, even after she’s pushed him away over and over because, remember people, she’s not like those other girls.
Her antics get tedious and predictable after a while, and it doesn’t help that she is so condescending and judgmental even when she is sixteen. A remarkable author may be able to make a young snot acting like she’s smarter and better than everyone else a likable sort, but Iris Johansen isn’t that remarkable, I’m afraid.
Jordan is the serious, quiet, but super capable man of action sort, and he’s more likable than Marianna by default because he isn’t 16 and constantly scolding everyone around him before he thinks they are his inferior in every way. He is boring, however, and his personality when it comes to the romance eventually devolves into him just reacting to the heroine’s tedious hot and cold, push and pull antics.
Throughout it all, I never get a good idea as to how a duke ends up being such a capable secret agent running around doing spy things. Do they train blue-blooded lads the art of kung fu and spying in Oxford? How can he do all this while at the same time managing his diamond mines, keeping to his social calendar, and juggling his mistresses again?
Anyway, the romance being drier than the Sahara is one big strike against this thing, as it’s hard for me to care for the romance—and this is a romance novel, after all. The mystery is a far better aspect, perhaps a foreshadowing of the author’s career path in the coming years following its publication!
