Lynne Connolly‘s review of The Greek Tycoon’s Disobedient Bride by Lynne Graham
Contemporary romance released by Harlequin Presents 1 Dec 08

The title is even worse than usual, because of the adjective. It put up my hackles from the start, but then, the stupid HMB titles usually do.

Lynne Graham is very hit or miss for me. She deals in very young and feisty heroines, and dark, impossibly gorgeous heroes. It can squick or it can work very well, or it can exasperate. This one exasperated.

It started with a legal impossibility. Two, actually. The first being that a will can specify that two people must get married in order to inherit. To each other. A will can specify that a person will inherit once they are married, but it can’t say who they must marry. That’s an infringement of civil liberties and wouldn’t last five minutes in a British court of law (in case you readers of historical romances are reading this – it’s always been that way).

Second, that a legal will registered with a solicitor can remain unknown to any of the parties mentioned in the will. Doesn’t happen these days. One of my uncles died seemingly intestate, but it took, oh, a week before the will showed up because of the legal networks. It isn’t completely impossible, but the way it was depicted in the story was. I usually put the book down at this point, because the plot falls apart, but I wanted to see what Graham was up to, so I read on. I could read it as a complete fairy story, although I do prefer well-researched reality if the book is set in a realistic setting.

Her heroine, Ophelia, was exasperating, vacillating between the innocent and the knowing, never really settling in a satisfactory manner and the romance was one of those “I hate you – until there’s a bed in the room” ones that leave me irritated and wondering why they bothered. The magic vayjayjay kept Lysander, the hero, going. And the poor dear girl didn’t seem to be very bright or even intuitive, only seeing what was happening when it was shoved right under her nose.

I couldn’t see much connection between the hero and heroine. Lysander was wealthy, a tycoon, busy most of the time, and bored with his sophisticated girlfriends, of which there were many. He was a male slut, and then he expected her fidelity, in fact, he didn’t want her showing her body off to the public between shoulders and knees. It was meant to display his newfound possessiveness, but it made him a hypocrite. And just once, I want the sophisticated girlfriend to win. They’re not disposable sluts, as are depicted in these stories, they are women making their own way in the world. And if I read about Lysander’s “metallic” eyes once, I read it a hundred times. Yes, I get it, you’re comparing him to gold. But I got the first time. And the second. And the third…

Anyway, Graham does write a good sex scene and her sexual tension is pretty much spot on. When she gets it right, it’s fantastic, as she did a few years back with the book about the clumsy but endearing woman and the French aristocrat (I’m not even going to pretend to remember the title – they’re so similar I’m bound to get it wrong).

This one is a D for me, but I’ll carry on reading her books for the gems that pop up from time to time. She’s a great writer, but this book showed laziness and slapdash writing, with it’s repetitive prose and thrown-together characters. It would be lovely if she could afford to take her time over writing something but I know how HMB works, and she needs to keep her rate of writing going if she’s going to earn a good amount.

Interesting that when I looked up the blurb on the Internet, the blurb for a completely different book kept showing up. A Rom Sus which, when I looked it up turned out to be “Goodbye She Lied” by Russ Hall. It’s on Amazon, and a few other places. Different publisher, different book, different genre. Wtf?

Grade: D

Summary:

It amazed Ophelia that Lysander Metaxis- a Greek billionaire notorious for his harem of adoring women -wanted to marry her, a humble gardener with a grumbling old manor house and debts up to her ears.

But soon she realized Lysander didn’t want her- he wanted her property and her body. But marry him she would, because she had no choice if she wanted to keep what she cherished most. And disobedient she would be, because her new husband had no intention of loving her…

Read an excerpt here.