The fact that her spirited defense of her own person, and personhood, convinces him that Mary is a person of quality and worthy of his attentions – he even offers to wed her, to save the reputation he has thoroughly sullied by abducting her and taking her to France with him, again in anger –should not in any way make him any more likeable. In modern romantic literature, he would be relegated to fetish subgenres usually self-published, and given titles like Taken or Violated.

He is so rough with her he chokes her, and leaves bruises. He even attempts to rape Mary, seemingly in a fit of anger – for which brutality she shoots him, it is so satisfying. It would be hard to imagine, however, a modern romance in which the bad boy seeking to be redeemed is a murderer and admitted rapist. There are a lot of “bad boy redeemed” stories in modern romance, after all.

In fact, right up until she falls for Dominic’s bad boy wildness, she could easily be transplanted into a contemporary twenty-first century novel and not be out of place.Īctually, even after she fell for the bad boy, she wouldn’t be out of place. Oh, I liked Prudence, and Léonie is adorable, in this book as well as in her own, but Mary is not only a firebrand, she is practical and thoughtful and just a really good person, in stark contrast to Vidal. She is by far my favorite Heyer heroine yet. Mary Challoner, the woman who so bravely saves her sister from an ignominious fate at the hands of Vidal, is another matter.

His father, the Duke of Avon, was well-known for his past doubtful activities, of course, but we didn’t see it in action, for all that we know he abducted the lovely Jennifer against her will, several years before the book began. In fact, a more volatile brat of a hero I have rarely read, and his planned seduction of a young woman – but then not marrying her, and essentially leading her to an unwilling career in sex work – really taints him for me. Not that anyone could believe Dominic, Marquis of Vidal, is controllable. Yet, here we are, two sequels interrupted only by one rather heavy historical fiction novel – I wonder if that’s why this sequel exists? Could be it that Heyer was so exhausted from the rigors of in-depth research into the career of William the Conqueror that she needed to set her mind to a world she had already created and could more easily control? I really had it in my mind that Georgette Heyer really didn’t do those. Setting: London, the English Coast, the English Channel and throughout France

Devil's Cub by Georgette Heyer