My Dangerous Duke by Gaelen Foley

Narrated by Marian Hussey

I really struggled with the first few hours of My Dangerous Duke, and had I not been listening for review, there’s a good chance I might have abandoned it. The narration by Marian Hussey is fine – in fact, it’s the best thing about the audiobook – and she’s a massive improvement on Annette Chown, who narrated the previous instalment in the Inferno Club series. But the early part of the story progresses at the speed of a snail moving through molasses and is weighed down by lots of irrelevant and overly descriptive prose, so much so that I wished (and here I’m dating myself) I could cut and splice large chunks of it so as to keep things moving.

Fortunately, however, things do start to pick up a bit after that, as the hero and heroine finally meet and begin interacting. The story is one of murky secrets, dark deeds and feats of derring-do; in fact, the last section of the book turns into a cross between Indiana Jones and a computer game, as our intrepid heroes head off on the trail of a hidden treasure. There are plenty of sparks flying between them, although I’m somewhat weary of the hero who believes he is unworthy of love because He is A Bad Man Who Does Bad Things – and that’s the source of most of the conflict in the romance. I also had to check the publication date of the book – 2010 – because there’s an old-skool feel to My Dangerous Duke (especially when it comes to some of the wince-inducing purple prose – I hope Ms. Hussey was well compensated for having to utter lines like this: He knew how to safely wield the oversized weapon with which Nature had endowed him) that made me think it must have been written in the 90s or earlier.

The book opens some weeks after the kidnap of our heroine, Kate Madsen, by a gang of local smugglers. Totally bewildered, she is kept in a dark cellar until, in the opening chapter, she’s taken out, drugged up to the eyeballs and taken to Kilburn Castle, where she’s going to be presented as a “gift” to Rohan Kilburn, the Duke of Warrington. The duke is large, dark, handsome, famously bad-tempered… oh, and he’s cursed. Apparently the Warrington dukes end up killing their wives (so he can never, ever get married) and the castle is haunted. Kate might have been barely able to stand up in the duke’s presence, but she is able to appreciate his impressive physique and his dark hotness. He’s also horny – but draws the line at shagging an unconscious woman after Kate passes out in his bed. When she wakes up the next morning, she’s intent on escape and flees, ending up perilously close to the edge of the crumbling cliffs… (oh, no!) She slips (OH, NO!) but is saved by Rohan (phew!) who pulls her to safety and takes her back to the castle where, finally, she gives him her side of the story, together with A Piece Of Her Mind. Once that’s all settled, Rohan questions one of his oldest associates, who tells Rohan that despite Kate’s protestations to the contrary, she is really Kate Fox, the daughter of famed pirate Gerald Fox and a French noblewoman who was the daughter of a member of the Promethean Council, the ages-old nemesis of the Inferno Club. (As explained in the previous book, The Promethean Council is kind of a Regency version of Hydra, intent on world domination).

So now, it’s all unsettled again, and Rohan goes back to thinking that Kate might be a spy. Except he doesn’t really think she is. Or does he? He wavers over that a fair bit while the time they spend together over the next couple of weeks only serves to strengthen the already intense attraction between them. Yet even though – as we’re told repeatedly – Rohan has a voracious sexual appetite, he behaves as a gentleman around Kate, even though wanting her so badly is frustrating the hell out of him.

All that changes, though, when Rohan agrees to escort Kate back to her cottage, only to discover that it’s been burned down. She’s utterly distraught – but has the presence of mind to retrieve the book left her by her mother which she’d hidden in one of the outbuildings. This book contains clues to the location of the tomb of Valerian the Alchemist, one of the Promethean’s greatest treasures and for which they have been searching for generations.

Kate has no family and nowhere to go – and Rohan sees his chance. He offers Kate carte blanche (yeah, what a prince!), something he’s never done before, preferring to bed lots of different women rather than keeping a long-term mistress. He also has it in his head that if she’s a virgin, he’ll trust her story that she knows nothing of her heritage and will know she’s not there to spy on him. I … really can’t think of anything to say about that other than WTF?

Thing is, Kate is just as hot for him as he is for her, so she agrees to his proposition. After all, what other options does she have? She’s been living in the castle for the past couple of weeks, so her reputation is ruined anyway; she has no family to go to and no other prospects, so she might as well take what Rohan is offering – a generous allowance and his gorgeous body. It’s only after they’ve slept together that Rohan finally tells Kate that truth about her past and how it intertwines with his own family history.

After this is where the story turns into Historical Tomb Raider. I won’t give any more plot details – the book is quite plot-heavy compared with some historicals, and while it’s a bit bonkers, it’s not impossible to enjoy provided you’re prepared to take it all with a large pinch of salt and use action movies and treasure-hunt games as your points of reference.

The biggest problem I had with the story, though, was that I never warmed to either of the central characters. I suspect that the forbearance Kate continually shows Rohan is meant to show what a forgiving, level-headed person she is, but most of the time, I found her too much of a doormat. And as I said at the outset, Rohan is your stereotypical darkly brooding hero with a chequered past, with nothing to distinguish him from the many, many others of his ilk.

I enjoy listening to Marian Hussey so I was pleased when this title showed up at Audible with her name attached to it. She’s an accomplished narrator on all counts; her pacing is excellent in both narrative and dialogue, she differentiates expertly between characters according to gender, age and station, and she is able to utilise a variety of regional accents to good effect. She’s also a very good vocal actress and is able to inject the right degree of emotion into any given scene, not going too far or giving too little. Kate’s dialogue sometimes sounds too whiny –but when I went back through the text to some of the examples I’d noted, I found the dialogue itself was whiny, so Ms. Hussey’s delivery is appropriate for what is on the page. Her male voices are generally good; hers is a mezzo-range voice, so she is able to sustain a lowered pitch for the men without it sounding strained. I did, however, notice a tendency to puff out a breath at the ends of phrases and sentences, particularly in Rohan’s speech, and especially when he was supposed to be shouting or angry. It’s difficult to describe in writing, but it’s almost as though she adds an extra syllable to the ends of words, so that a phrase like “See you soon”, comes out as “See you soon-ah”. I didn’t notice this happening with any of the female voices, and it didn’t happen with all the males – but it became quite obtrusive at times.

One thing I often notice when I listen to an audiobook is that repetitions of certain words and phrases stand out more than when I’m reading the book. Perhaps my aural memory is stronger than my visual one (I do tend to read pretty quickly, whereas an audiobook takes as long as it takes). In this, characters looking “askance” seems to be their favourite activity J

Once I got past the first two or three hours of My Dangerous Duke, it was an enjoyable enough romp, but is unlikely to be something I’ll listen to again. The pacing is very uneven – there are recurring instances of lengthy description that slow down the narrative – and the story is very slightly batshit, but if you’re in the mood to switch your brain off for a few hours and just go with the flow, the narration is good enough to carry the listener through the worst excesses. Mind you, I still stay Ms. Hussey deserves a medal for managing to utter lines about the hero’s “raging member” and his “notorious size” without corpsing.

Caz

Narration: B

Book Content: C

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence Rating: Fighting

Genre: Historical Romance

Publisher: NYLA

My Dangerous Duke was provided to AudioGals for a review.