Title: Scandalous Desires Series: Maiden Lane #3
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt
Published: October 18, 2011
Genre(s): Romance: Historical
Page Count: 393
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Widowed Silence Hollingbrook is impoverished, lovely, and kind--and nine months ago she made a horrible mistake. She went to a river pirate for help in saving her husband and in the process made a bargain that cost her her marriage. That night wounded her so terribly that she hides in the foundling home she helps run with her brother. Except now that same river pirate is back...and he's asking for her help.
"Charming" Mickey O'Connor is the most ruthless river pirate in London. Devastatingly handsome and fearsomely intelligent, he clawed his way up through London's criminal underworld. Mickey has no use for tender emotions like compassion and love, and he sees people as pawns to be manipulated. And yet he's never been able to forget the naive captain's wife who came to him for help and spent one memorable night in his bed...talking.
When his bastard baby girl was dumped in his lap--her mother having died--Mickey couldn't resist the Machiavellian urge to leave the baby on Silence's doorstep. The baby would be hidden from his enemies and he'd also bind Silence to him by her love for his daughter.
Ah, finally. It took three books, but the Maiden Lane series has finally delivered a hit. Scandalous Desires is exactly what I think this series was supposed to be doing all along—sexy romance featuring heroes and heroines who live outside of the ballrooms and garden parties of the English upper-crust. For those looking for a love story between a working-class widow and a morally-gray Irish pirate, you’ve come to the right place.
I honestly didn’t even go into this with high hopes. Silence Hollingbrook has been a peripheral character in the series since the beginning, and I didn’t really like her. In the first book, Wicked Intentions, she spent too much time slut-shaming herself for wanting to have sex with her husband in the daytime (gasp!). In the next book, Hoyt used Silence’s point of view for unrepentant sequel-baiting, which was just annoying. But with this book we finally get all Silence, all the time, and I ended up being pretty pleased with the result.
In general, I don’t think that Hoyt’s characterization is her strong suit. She writes strong, captivating sex scenes and (in this book at least) focuses on a fast-paced plot. Those aspects of Scandalous Desires were great, but…depth of characterization was not where this book excelled. I loved reading about Silence and Michael, would read this book again, but I don’t really have a firm sense of who they are. I can tell you what they did and how they did it, but I can’t tell you what kind of people they are beyond a cursory, surface-level explanation, i.e. respectable, working-class widow and Irish-beggar-turned-notorious-pirate.
But somehow, in this book, that doesn’t ruin everything. It was enough that Silence and Mickey fell in love, and that it was believable. Unlike most romance novels, Scandalous Desires is far more plot-driven than it is anything else, and because in this book the storyline was pretty engrossing and worthwhile, I wasn’t outrageously upset that the author spent less time exploring her protagonists’ hang-ups and issues. Which isn’t to say that they didn’t exist on the page, just that they weren’t as centered into the text as I might generally prefer.
The thing, though, that I really dug about this book is that Elizabeth Hoyt finally managed to pull together a cohesive plot that made contextual sense. The series is set in the slums of St. Giles, London, and the first two books made attempts to maximize that setting by featuring side plots about this seedy place and the people who live there. But it never really panned out, or made sense for who the characters were, or whatever. That isn’t the case here.
Mickey O’Connor is not some fancy lord who’s slumming it just for fun (or some half-assed excuse that doesn’t pan out logically speaking). He was born and raised in St. Giles, poor as dirt, forced from his earliest memory to beg on the streets. He’s fought to gain and maintain his underground business, and along the way he’s gained some enemies. When those enemies threaten his infant daughter, who’s been adopted by Silence, he takes matters into his hands to protect them both.
Previous books have shown characters crossing back and forth between dirty alleys and elegant drawing rooms, but in Scandalous Desires Hoyt focuses on dark, dangerous atmosphere of St. Giles, and incorporates it into her central plot rather than the periphery. This is what she should’ve done since the beginning. Forget lords and ladies who visit the slums momentarily before going home to their safe beds—Silence and Mickey don’t have that option, and it gives the book a lot more urgency and increases the interest factor by quite a bit.
I really, really, really enjoyed Scandalous Desires precisely because I felt like Hoyt was actually utilizing the more unique aspects of her chosen setting. I complained that the first book in the series felt like Wallpaper Historical. This book does not. This book fully explores life for the less-respectable lower classes in the very early Georgian era, and does so very well.
Sure, maybe I would have liked stronger, more defined personalities from both the hero and the heroine, but when I’ve got a really captivating, unusual story to keep me flipping pages, I’m not going to make too big an issue of it.
This book has exactly what I wanted and expected from the Maiden Lane series in the first place. Criminals, vagrants, characters who don’t have more money than they know what to do with, distance from dukes and ballrooms and tea parties, a time period where Napoleon Bonaparte isn’t mentioned twice every chapter, smoking hot sexytimes that don’t make me cringe (okay, I did cringe when we met Mickey’s “randy member” but that was it).
Scandalous Desires, you have done your job.
