The writing is serviceable in this novel, slipping towards well-written at a few intervals. The most hard-to-read portions were ones that I assume tied the series together. While I understand that I started with the third in the series, the forced description of our MC as a “wallflower” and always a “wallflower” felt hopelessly strained and needless: we understand her character at this point and it only serves to connect the series, meaning it read as poor writing. Besides that, much of the writing slid towards the classic pitfall: telling and not showing. Kleypas hammers certain points over and over again to the point of annoyance, making several chapters hard to read.

I want to love the characters more than I do. Evie has the potential as the shy heroine, but her development is offset by her inconsistent character. Same with Sebastian. I would have loved to see Sebastian show consistency in his character, but he quickly loses his “villain” archetype to become the rich noble who just happens to know how to fight. It felt so sudden that I wanted to understand then what his history really was. The side characters also fell subsequently short of feeling real.

The marriage of convenience plot starts strong and instantly beocmes strained. While I love the bad boy turns to caring lover trope as much as anyone else, Sebastian’s motives make as little sense as his inconsistent character. While he looks to marry our heroine to settle debts, he immediately reveals that he’s not much of an overspender, immediately squashing his whole reason for marrying Evie in the first place. Honestly, it would be more believable that he had been secretly pining after her for years, even in the interest of a one-night stand. The flurry of action at the beginning also created a distinct lull in the middle and end of the novel. And, the wrapping up of the attempted-murder plot came quickly, too much so, leaving us with no time to really feel like Evie might have ever been in danger. 

Oh, also Evie’s dad died and she moves on very, very fast, which is maybe one of the more annoying parts of the plot. 

However, it’s fun.

It was fun, if not well-written.