Elizabeth Hoyt 'To Seduce a Sinner'

Lord Vale is the amusing life of the party who has just been jilted for the second time. Melisande is the serious mousy woman who has loved him for years. She would have dismissed him as a shallow London rake except that she happened to see him comforting a fellow soldier outside a soiree one night.

Now don't laugh....this book felt rather contrived. I enjoyed the fairytale told at the beginning of each chapter a bit more. I didn't dislike either character, even appreciated that Melisande stays true to her central serious nature, forcing Vale to come to appreciate her instead of having love change her. But the plot is quite thin and it's rather central to the emotional life of the hero, so it can't afford to be this, well, silly or convenient. I felt this way about the plot in the first book of this series but to think that four books are going to be spun around it, hmm.

There are interesting emotional excavations, enough to keep the book going, just not enough to make me love it. And the sex is truthfully a bit too graphic, too early in the story. Since I enjoyed the surprisingly graphic sex scenes in Hoyt's Prince series, I can only describe this one as lacking a bit of finesse.

Historical Romance 2008: 2.5 of 5 blankets on your pallet.