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Title: The Duke's Dark Desire

Author: Sophia Wilson

Narrator: Nano Nagle

Format: Unabridged

Length: 1 hr and 33 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-09-16

Publisher: Sophia Wilson

Genres: Romance, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Margery Fairchild is a governess and loves to ride horses. A chance encounter with charming Duke Avery turns her world upside down. But when she courts another man, the Duke learns devastating news that has him plotting to take the other man down before Margery is thrust into scandal.

A clean and wholesome romance from Sophia Wilson, full of intrigue, unexpected twists, and a shocking secret.

Members Reviews:

You will love them.

These books are my kind of reading. Since we seldom have snow in Texas, I have to curl up with a book that makes me content and warm. You will love them.

Five Stars

Love the book. Very good.

Give this one a pass

I don't normally write reviews for books because there are usually already reviews that confirm my sentiments. However, at the time of this writing there was only one fake 5-star review for this, and this most certainly did not deserve even that.

*****May contain mild spoilers******

First of all, this story is NOT a regency story. It is a story that happens to be set in regency times where the characters wear regency clothes and throw out a few old-fashioned phrases, but that is all. I'm all for some allowance to suspend belief within a story, but when there are so many things in the story that do not fit with the time there is only so much belief-suspension that can be garnered. Maybe I could have been more forgiving, but the story was not good enough to warrant it. The situations were too implausible, the romance between the H and h way too rushed, and the story itself was very mediocre. In the end, the glaring errors could not be overlooked by the what good there was in the book.

The social mores and conventions of the time were probably not researched much because they were hardly followed. For starters, there was way too much informality between the characters. For example, formal introductions between two people just meeting for the first time are just that--formal. Even in slightly less formal introductions, when introducing oneself, a young man did not introduce himself to a young lady by only his first name. That's really petty, but there were other behaviors like this, and it distracted from the author's effort to make this seem like an actual regency story. Because of the informality of the characters' actions, I often found myself picturing them in a more modern setting in some place like the U.S. rather than in old regency England.

Secondly, I don't think any governess would be treated as nicely as the h was treated. I cannot imagine any employer of that time giving their governess as much free reign of her employer's home and horses or as much free time as she was given (especially not time off to go to a ball where she had to travel to London and stay at an inn), nor would they invite their child's governess and her old governess to join them for tea after the latter two had been frittering away the afternoon working on hairstyles for the ball. (Oh, and she's a governess. Where does she have the money to buy colorful clothes/bonnets/fripperies suitable for balls and general outings? As far as I knew, governesses were mainly resigned to drab colors, like gray, for their simple clothes.) I also doubt the parents would be the ones feeding their child breakfast in the kitchen in the mornings. When having tea, the hostess would certainly not leave guests to go do the dishes.