So, with the time period a silly theatrical setting, I would hope there’s a strong plot to make it all worthwhile. Set against a voice that could as easily have been telling a contemporary tale, it just glared at me, like a LARPer at the mall.

But must I also ignore the piano at the musicale many years before composers wrote for the pianoforte, much less the piano? Or how we never find out exactly what Caire’s title is? And all the anachronistic language? Why bother writing in a unique time period - the early Georgian era - if you’re going to go all wallpaper on me? Wouldn’t it be easier to just go with the familiar Regency period if you don’t want to set a scene? Constantly substituting “of the clock” for “o’clock” does not compensate for the modern tone. Ok, but this is Romancelandia, you say, suspend your disbelief, you crone. Why, oh why, would a scandalous peer of the realm contract the services of a respectable woman as a guide to a slum in 1737? A woman? 60 years before Mary Wollstonecraft and her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, I’m to believe a powerful man sees a lower-class woman as some sort of valuable helper? When a book begins with a contrivance, it’s a bad sign. She accepts, but with the caveat that he also introduce her to polite society so she may find a new patron for the home.

Seeing how easily Temperance moves around the area, and knowing that the home is in dire financial straits, he offers her money in exchange for her guidance around the slum. Giles for a brutal murderer and he needs help navigating the streets and the people of the dangerous slum. Lazarus Huntington, Lord Caire, is searching St. Not long after returning home, however, she discovers that the frightening man has let himself into her sitting room and has a proposition for her that she can’t turn down. Along the way, she overhears a scuffle in an alley and ends up fleeing from a frightening man with long white hair and a voluminous black cloak who she saw standing over an inert bleeding man. She’s on her way back to the foundling home she runs with her younger brother, returning with her maidservant and an infant they pried from the arms of a dead young mother.

The book opens with the widow Temperance Dews wending her way through the dank and dangerous streets of St. What an anachronistic, ungrammatical, unfinished book that was.

I'll probably never win another book through Goodreads' First Reads again with this review.

Scandalous desires by elizabeth hoyt