Zebra, $5.99, ISBN 0-8217-6871-9
Historical Romance, 2001

James Armstrong, the new Duke of Kinross, vows revenge on the American agent Gilded Lily who caused his brother to hang. Imagine his surprise when the agent turns out to be Lily Hawthorne, a luscious young woman who has been spying for America since she was 18. She was responsible for the most arrests of British spies. I say most of the arrested must be poor unfortunate innocent sods because there is no way a complete nitwit like Lily can be a spy in the first place, much less a good one.

Yes, I cannot even buy the premise that a superstitious twit who gets captured by James so easy like that (because she disobeyed her two male protective buddies and venture out alone in the dark) can be an agent. Especially when this agent can’t even tell that even when James is boinking her, he is plotting bad things to do to her. Then there is some engagement thing between these two, all the while there is no trust, just sex, sex, sex and our super agent staring at our hero like a deer caught in the headlights of a truck.

Isn’t it sad? In a genre supposed to empower women, here we still have books that pass off stupidity as a unique form of female intelligence. Well, To Tame a Duke is stupid, stupid, stupid, and I will end my rant here and move on to better books. Okay, one last word: stupid.