Book Review: Wicked Intentions by Elizabeth Hoyt

Once upon a time in Georgian England, sex magically cured everyone’s trauma. Two people started off damaged, broken, and lonely, but then the healing powers of the Almighty Penis and Sacred Vagina cured them, and it was good. Amen.

This is not Elizabeth Hoyt’s best book. It attempts to do a lot of cool things—non-Regency time period! mysterious murderers! BDSM! PTSD!—but, uh, it doesn’t work. Wicked Intentions is a Wallpaper Historical with a lot of sex in the second half. The sex is very hot, granted, and I enjoyed those scenes very much, but that is honestly the only thing propping this book up (unless you consider shameless sequel baiting to be a positive). Honestly, this book was more lusty than romantic—like erotica with an incongruous Happily Ever After.

So, I guess what was most disappointing about this book was Hoyt’s failure to deliver upon the promises she made regarding the characters—particularly the hero, Lazarus Huntington. The first thing we’re told about this guy is that he has notoriously taboo sexual preferences. Apparently all of London knows about that this guy is one kinky motherfucker. The author keeps building up all this anticipation, but about halfway into the book, the big reveal comes, and…Lazarus likes to restrain his women with scarves, blindfold them, and…give them oral sex.

Guys, that is so fucking vanilla. I can’t.

Yeah yeah, this is 1737. I get that. But this is 1737 presented for the modern reader. And you can’t promise a modern reader that your protagonist has a “sickening craving” only to not deliver.

Also, I’m just…not exactly sure I like how Hoyt dealt with Lazarus’s “sickening craving” anyways. Apparently, restraining and blindfolding women is a maladaptive behavior that he performs because he’s afraid of forging real human connections (or some such fake-psychology explanation). So once Temperance has cured his trauma with her magic vagina, he no longer needs to tie people up. Sorry, but I’m still unclear on what was so horrifying about Lazarus’s preferences in the first place? Why did he need to be cured?

Going along with that, Wicked Intentions also attempts, badly, to do something with mental issues. Apparently, if anyone touches Lazarus, he experiences excruciating physical and mental pain. Thing is, we don’t really get a lot of explanation about what event in his childhood triggered this—apparently he was “born this way,” but I don’t think that’s believable, especially considering that Temperance also heals this issue with her magical hoohah. I appreciate that Hoyt was trying to do something with mental health and whatnot in a historical setting, but…the psychology of all of it was just so bad.

Lazarus sounds like a cool character, but he’s just so badly fleshed out, you know? I didn’t buy into him.

And then I was just really pissed at how the author dealt with Temperance, i.e. SO MUCH internal slut-shaming and self-flagellation. Again, I understand the time period is 1737, but that absolutely does not require that I read 300 pages of a woman calling herself a whore because she has a normal sex drive and wishes to have sex with her husband. (Hello, welcome to 2017, where this is already a thing.) The internal monologuing just goes on and on, with Temperance wishing she could be “born anew, pure and without sin.” Good god. Enough already.

Anyway. So. Here we have two fairly problematic characters, and now they’re supposed to be falling in love. Except I really didn’t feel like they did. Sure, at the end of the book they claimed that they loved each other, but I don’t feel like the preceding 300 pages convincingly made the case.

I mean, we start off with them being strangers, and Lazarus just…hurts Temperance’s feelings for fun? Until one day he discovers a conscience and realizes he wants to make her feel better, sort of.

During the day, he reviewed conversations they’d had, remembering the look of hurt in her gilded eyes when he’d something particularly crass. The pain he’d caused her provoked a strange tenderness. He wanted to heal the hurt and then hurt her again just to make it better.

I…what?

He wants to keep hurting her feelings just so he can be the one to make her feel better? That sounds abusive as fuck to me. But okay, sure.

At some point, Lazarus and Temperance have sex. And then they proceed to have a lot of sex for the rest of the book. It’s all very lusty and, y’know, whatever. Elizabeth Hoyt might disagree, but I don’t think having copious amounts of sex constitutes as sufficient bonding experience for two people to believably fall in love. Sex and love are not the same, guys—which is why romance and erotica are two different genres. Again: whatever.

Now, I did kind of enjoy Wicked Intentions, at least in the second half once the slut-shaming and creepy verbal abuse ended. I mean, Hoyt writes good sex scenes? (Which, again, are very vanilla and do not live up to the advertisement of outrageous kink.) I liked the end, which revealed the identity of the murderer Lazarus had been looking for the whole time, and also presented the protagonists with a sweet HEA that I felt was satisfying, if not exactly fitting to their storyline. When all was said and done, I was really satisfied, you know?

I’m just not exactly clear on what, exactly, was going on in this book.