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Ruth Anne Nordin’s Her Counterfeit Husband is what you’d get if you put Sommersby and While You Were Sleeping in a blender and set the dial to ‘farce’. It never for one moment rings true in terms of plausibility, nor is it in the least romantic, but it has a fairly original setup. And if that’s damning with faint praise, well, it’s the best I can do here.
Our heroine, Anna, is married to Jason Merrill, the Duke of Watkins (I can tell the names are going to be awesome). Jason is an abusive husband, and although he’s dying, this only means matters will get worse for Anna, since his younger brother Lord Mason (see what I mean?) is a lecher who can’t wait to get his hands on Anna after she’s a widow. So when Jason dies one night, Anna and her trusty butler decide they can’t let anyone find out about it.
The butler proposes the brilliant idea of hiding the Duke’s body and then claiming he’s gone away somewhere for a rest cure. They sneak out at night with the corpse and bury it under a tree. Then they start back home, only to find a man lying in the road. He’s been beaten into unconsciousness, but what’s really astonishing is that he looks just like the Duke. What are the odds? So Anna decides to pass him off as her husband. No matter who or what he is, he’s got to be more decent than his predecessor.
Then the man wakes up – and has amnesia. Like Jon Snow, he knows nothing, so after Anna convinces him that they’re married, she has to explain to this blank slate that he will be addressed as ‘Your Grace’, and teach him about etiquette e.g. don’t discuss our marriage in front of the servants. But he’s kinder and more honorable than her husband, and she soon finds herself falling in love with him.
So, where to start with this? Anna is the stereotypical abused-wife heroine in an historical romance – beautiful, kind, loving, believes she’s barren, is proven wrong (I wrote the last three words before reading the end). ‘Jason’ is equally flat and has no faults whatsoever other than occasionally squeaking his dialogue when he’s nervous.
Just in case you’re wondering about his past, though, at the halfway point in the book, he looks up his family tree and discovers that the Duke had an older twin brother who died at birth. Or did he? If you don’t want spoilers, then look away now; the baby was sickly and the evil parents didn’t want a sickly son inheriting the title, so they sold him to a circus (in this world, My Fair Lady could never have happened, because working-class people speak in the same way that dukes do). To cram even more soap into the opera, the evil Lord Mason was secretly poisoning his brother, so he doesn’t buy that ‘Jason’ has made a miraculous recovery and is now a better man into the bargain.
This book was a quick read, but all that stood out were the incredibly fortuitious coincidences, and how ineffectual Lord Mason was – the only thing he managed to do was to bump off his villainous brother, and after that he was useless. Everything is wrapped up with a neat bow, and even some minor character married to a nasty man is a happy widow in the end. The man dies off-page, but it’s entirely likely that Lord Mason killed him by accident. I like stories of characters who have to deal with deceptions, but I want them to have the depth and emotion and dilemnas of Sommersby, and this doesn’t even come close. Her Counterfeit Husband was more like a counterfeit story, with nothing believable about it.
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Grade: D
Book Type: Historical Romance
Sensuality: Warm
Review Date: 06/11/19
Publication Date: 09/2012
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
I'm Marian, originally from Sri Lanka but grew up in the United Arab Emirates, studied in Georgia and Texas, ended up in Toronto. When I'm not at my job as a medical laboratory technologist, I read, write, do calligraphy, and grow vegetables in the back yard.
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I get the parents are evil but–they named their sons Jason and Mason?!
Hah, yes! Mind you, some of the names I see on class registers these days have me regularly shaking my head and wondering what on earth the kids’ parents were thinking…
One of the most memorable from my classroom: Jewleen
O. M. G. Really?
I had a BuffyAnne once. Poor girl. There was also a James Bond – I kid you not. A friend of mine who used to teach in Texas once showed me a class list that had so many names with apostrophes all over the place that my response was “that’s not a register – that’s a list of the extras in Star Trek!”
I’m not understanding the name jokes. Why is Duke of Watkins funny? Or Lord Mason?
It does sound like an abysmal book, regardless of character names. Thanks for the review, Marian!
Well, Mason doesn’t sound particualrly period appropriate as a first name – as a last name it’s pretty old. It’s not a common name in the UK even now – although according to Wikipedia, it was the second favouritte first name for boys in the US in 2011.
As for the Duke of Watkins… it just sounds funny! And not at all ducal.
They are stupid names for the time, I agree. About every third noble boy was named George, wasn’t he? William, James, and Richard probably were a large percentage of the rest.
I hear some of the names kids get saddled with today and I shake my head, too. Rainbow? River? Really? But my poor dad had it worse, I am convinced: Sylvester Napoleon. He went by Jack his entire life…lol! And god help anyone who called him anything different!
In my Sri Lankan family, there’s a tradition of having British first names. Probably a relic of colonization. When it came to naming my father, though, his parents must have wanted something a bit different from Charles or Henry, so they called him Llewelyn.
No one managed to spell that correctly when writing to him, and once he got a letter addressed to “Luly”. Fortunately for him, it was also traditional that we didn’t use our first names and everyone went by their middle names instead. I’m an exception because I felt it was easier for people on this side of the world to say and remember “Marian”.
Llewelyn is a mouthful no matter where you live! Even in Wales, I imagine.
Luckily our parents picked names that were not run of the mill but common enough not to stand out. Donald, Gayle, and Lea Ann. (Lea is said ‘lee’) My dad had veto power on bizarre names!
Marian is a very pretty name and not a very common one here in the US. It always makes me think of Robin Hood.
Thank you! Makes me think of Robin Hood too, except when I was reading Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series with its references to the Marian reforms.
My father’s routinely-used Sri Lankan name is Chrysantha, which is a common name in Sri Lanka but not so much in other parts of the world, so after we moved to the Middle East, he received a letter addressed to Christina. Then again, his not-routinely-used traditional Sri Lankan name was Kandekapuge, which is such a mouthful that although it’s supposed to be passed down from father to children, he left it off my birth certificate.
Hi KesterGayle: Virtually all of the 31 present and extant dukedoms in the UK today have a name associated with a geographical place within these isles. For example: Dukes of Edinburgh, Cambridge, Sussex, York, Grosvenor, Devonshire, Bedford, etc. So Watkins – a somewhat ordinary though historical name – doesn’t really gel with the usual (actual) titles and sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb. A quick google of the gazetteer of British place names does not turn up anything. I guess that’s why it’s so jarring and rather silly to use Watkins as the title name of a dukedom. Rather like having the Earl of Richard or Viscount Jayden.
Thanks Elaine, I guess I knew that but never really thought about it. Are nobility still addressed by their place names, or is that a custom that has gone out of style? And are dukes unfailingly addressed as Your Grace, or is Sir acceptable after the first greeting? Why are dukes called Your Grace when no other noble title is accorded that honor? It sounds like it has religious connotations to me, and I’ve always wondered about that.
All the titles and protocol are a bit daunting to my very working class American sensibility!
I believe the forms of address are still used pretty much as they’ve always been. I think “Sir” is used for a prince or royal duke after first meeting (otherwise you’d be forever “Your Royal Highess-ing”! Titles and protocol are pretty daunting to us on this side of the pond as well! It’s not something we’re taught at school… unless you’re at Eton or Harrow, I suppose!
There’s a fabulous post by KJ Charles which is my go-to for matters of title and address: http://kjcharleswriter.com/2016/07/27/enter-title-here-2/
Thank you for that link! I thought earls were the closest to dukes and that marquesses were lower ranked. You learn something new every day,
And I loved this:
‘Duke’ is an immensely important title, with only a handful existing at any time, except in romantic fiction where they outnumber the servants.
From My Fair Lady (and from Shaw’s Pygmalion):
“An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him
The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him”
I do wish authors of historicals would pay a bit more attention to this basic fact of English society.
And that applies even now in 2019.
Whenever there’s a barren heroine in a romance, I just count down to the revelation that the (usually rapey/abusive) previous husband was shooting blanks. I could do a drinking game to it.
It is so, so predictable. And if the heroine believes herself barren, she will blame this shortcoming on herself rather than her husband, and she will never come to terms with (her supposed) infertility.
LOL, utterly ridiculous…….geez. As other’s have pointed out: it could’ve worked, but alas
Thanks for the review!
You’re welcome. Glad you liked it!
Duke of Watkins? What is he, a vanilla baron?
The odd thing is, this book sounds like it could be fun if there were slightly fewer unbelievable coincidences *OR* if it was intended as a comedy. As a farce, this could be as hysterical as “The Court Jester.” But when a book takes itself seriously while putting forth so many unbelievable things, it’s bound to fall apart.
Just did a check on Amazon. “The Counterfeit Husband” is self-published, currently free on e-book, and has a sold 4-star rating with 162 reviews. So hurry, hurry, hurry! This deal won’t last forever.
But in all fairness to Ms. Nordin, she published it regardless of the story’s flaws and plot holes. I’m getting to be like that producer who clapped at the end of every movie no matter how bad it was because he knew all the effort and dedication that went into it. So, not meaning any sarcasm whatsoever, I really do applaud the author of this book. At least she didn’t make the hero a brute, unlike some other self-published authors who have been reviewed here lately. So that’s a big point in her favor.
At the start, when the heroine and the butler were wondering whether they could pretend the duke wasn’t dead, I thought I was in for the romance version of “Weekend at Bernie’s”. So yeah, this could have made a good comedy with some tongue-in-cheek allusions to movies.
Wow! I can’t believe I’ve never heard of “Weekend at Bernie’s.” It sounds like a scream. I just put a hold on it at the library, so thanks for the movie rec.
There already is an historical romance Weekend at Bernie’s! It’s called The Countess by Lynsay Sands. I didn’t enjoy it, but then again, I really didn’t find Weekend at Bernie’s funny, either.
I looked up The Countess on this site, and what similarities! The abusive husband turns out to be a younger twin who has usurped his brother’s birthright, and his death allows his newly-returned brother to slot seamlessly into the gap (which is a bit similar to Lorraine Heath’s A Matter of Temptation, where the only difference is that Evil Twin is stopped before he can marry the heroine).
I just wanted to say that I finally watched “Weekend at Bernie’s” the other day and thought it was hysterical. Thanks for the rec, Ms. Perera!
Glad you liked it! Though from what I’ve read, the sequel is best avoided.
A sequel? Where do you even *go* from that point? Thanks for the warning. I’ll be sure to skip it.
The Duke of Watkins???
Check, please!
I never thought I’d be nostalgic for names like Hawksmoor or Stormhaven.
Agreed! I simply could NOT read a book with a Duke of Watkins. It makes me gag