2.5 stars
This book tried my patience. I started off loving it — I liked that the heroine was an independent, wealthy widow who had loved her husband and had a seemingly healthy relationship with sex. I was intrigued by the hero, who has savant tendencies and is on the spectrum. I bought their initial attraction. Everything was going just fine.
And then the plot happened. Like, omg, so much plot.
There is a murder, that is connected to another murder, and the hero is involved somehow, or at least was there. The hero’s one brother and his wife are estranged. The hero’s other brother is a Duke and a first-rate shitheel. The heroine has a sordid past before she was rescued by her first marriage. There’s an inspector who has it out for the whole Mackenzie clan. The hero and heroine have to have a quickie marriage so that they don’t get arrested. The Mackenzie patriarch was an abusive even more first-rate shitheel and permanently emotionally scarred his sons. The hero was institutionalized as a boy for being “mad”.
There’s tortured, and then there’s tortured. The latter, italicized tortured refers, in this instance, to the plot and writing, because it’s all too damn much. It’s all there to justify why the hero doesn’t know how to love and occasionally keeps things from the heroine, which are tropes I don’t love even in the best of circumstances, but here it’s just overkill of the highest degree. By the time that — spoiler! — the heroine gets stabbed by the Duke’s murderous mistress and she almost dies, I was like, “Is there any plot twist this book doesn’t have?”
Just, ugh. This book clearly comes from the school of “the more drama, the better.” The beginning was writing checks the middle and end couldn’t cash, and I want my time back.