Mine Till Midnight by Lisa Kleypas

Narrated by Rosalyn Landor

Mine Till Midnight is book one in Lisa Kleypas’s series about the Hathaway family; it was published in 2007 and an audio recording – with Rosalyn Landor at the microphone – was released in 2009. That version was never available worldwide however; only one or two of the series was actually available in the UK before now (the same is true of the earlier and perennially popular Wallflower series.) Last year, I noticed first two or three titles in the Hathaways series appearing at Audible UK and immediately assumed that they were reissues of the 2009 recordings – but they’re not; they’re brand new recordings.

The five Hathaway siblings were not born to wealth and privilege. Instead, they were thrust into the upper echelons of society when Leo – the only male sibling – inherited a viscountcy from a distant relative, although unfortunately, the title comes with only a modest fortune. Leo has been in a downward spiral for the last year or so, since the death of the young woman he planned to marry, which is how come we first meet our heroine Amelia – the oldest of the four female Hathaways – as she is planning to drag Leo out of Jenner’s (the club owned by Sebastian St. Vincent). She’s accompanied by her adoptive brother Merripen – a Rom (here’s one change from the original – “Gypsy” has been changed to “Rom”) – and they pull up outside the club in time to witness an altercation between some obviously drunk patrons who are vying for the attentions of a prostitute. Before things can get nasty, the fight is broken up by another man – a younger one with dark hair, gleaming hazel eyes and the face of an angel who, for all he is dressed like a gentleman, obviously isn’t one. He’s Cam Rohan (also a Rom), the club’s manager – and just looking at him is enough to take Amelia’s breath away. But she quickly squashes the ripples of nerves and heat that run through her to focus on her reason for being there, irritated when Rohan waves off her concern for her brother as nothing to do with him. It’s only when Merripen speaks to him in their own language that he at last agrees to allow them inside to search for Leo, and on learning that Leo has left the club for a nearby brothel, and of Amelia’s intention to seek him out there, Cam arranges transportation and accompanies them to retrieve the errant viscount.

With Leo at last back at home, Amelia decides it would be best to get him away from London, and the action then shifts to the family estate in Hampshire. On arrival at Ramsay House, Amelia is distressed to find it in such poor condition – it’s obviously been long neglected – but being Amelia, she puts a brave face on it and determines to make the place if not comfortable then at least habitable. It’s here that the family makes the acquaintance of the owner of the adjacent land – the Earl of Westcliff (It Happened One Autumn) and his American wife, Lillian – and where Amelia encounters Cam again; for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom, he’s staying with Westcliff while working on some sort of experiment with rockets. (I think?)

Now Cam and Amelia are once again in each other’s orbits, the romance gets underway, and when, after a fire at Ramsay House, the Hathaways are invited to stay at Stony Cross Park (the Westcliff’s home), they’re thrown into even closer proximity.

I’m not going say any more about the plot; there’s a lot of it, and that was actually one of the main problems I had with the book as a whole. It’s the first book in a series, so there is bound to be a fair amount of set-up, but there’s so much of it that I felt that half of it was devoted to plotlines other than the romance. The Hathaways are a dysfunctional lot; Leo is a complete mess, full of self-pity, suicidal and doesn’t give a shit about what would happen to his sisters if he offs himself; Win is the family beauty, but is fragile following a long illness; Beatrix, the youngest, is an eccentric who tends to kleptomania for reasons she doesn’t understand and thinks a lizard makes a good pet, and Amelia, at the grand old age of twenty-eight has resigned herself to never marrying and spending her life managing them all. I could sympathise with her to an extent – Leo has completely abdicated his responsibility as head of the family, and someone needs to step up, but she’s determined to martyr herself and is the sort who knows what is best for everyone and doesn’t like it when someone else tries to suggest that maybe she might need to make some changes as well.

Cam Rohan was introduced in the Wallflowers series. He’s half Rom and half Irish with the luck of the devil (which he calls his “Good Luck” curse) and an aptitude for making money. But he’s also starting to long for an unfettered life, the life he’s supposed to live as a Rom, and he decides he’s going to leave his Gadje (not Rom) ways behind once and for all and join a group of Roma who are staying temporarily on Westcliff’s land. His friends – Westcliff and St. Vincent (who has also come for a visit) – try to persuade him to stay, but Cam is adamant. He’s going and that’s all there is to it. He’s going, for real. He really is. He’s leaving. His mind is made up. Until about two days later when he changes it because – Amelia.

Despite the fact that modest, proper Amelia is the embodiment of everything that annoyed him about Englishwomen, Cam, equally smitten at first sight, wants to snatch her up and carry her away somewhere and do something uncivilized. Barbaric, even.

I can deal with insta-lust when the author builds and later convinces me there’s a true connection between the characters, but here, I didn’t feel there was much chemistry between Amelia and Cam at all. In fact, I couldn’t see what Cam saw in Amelia, and while Cam is a good, kind and caring man, I didn’t feel I ever got to know all that much about him; his struggles to reconcile his Roma heritage with his current Gadje way of life aren’t elaborated and seemed to just disappear after he’d angsted about them a bit.

I never had the opportunity to listen to the original 2009 recording, so I can’t make any comparisons between the two performances. What I can say is that, as usual, Rosalyn Landor’s narration is excellent in all respects – perfectly paced, superbly characterised and clearly differentiated. She’s particularly good when it comes to her portrayals of Amelia and her sisters, who are all easy to tell apart in conversation, and she does a good job with the men, too – Cam, Merripen and Leo are all clearly distinguishable, with Ms. Landor expertly conveying the frustration and despair that lurk behind Leo’s insouciance and the pent-up emotions Merripen feels for Win. Her ability to create a wide range of different character voices is always impressive, she hits all the right emotional notes and once again delivers an insightful and nuanced performance.

I know the Hathaways is a much-loved series in the historical romance genre, and I had honestly expected to enjoy Mine at Midnight more than I did. But while the narration is excellent, there is just too much going on in the story for the romance to be sufficiently developed, and the sheer number of other plotlines meant that they – while generally interesting – are not well developed either. I’m chalking it up as a “miss”.

Caz

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