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Sophie Barnes’ Diamonds in the Rough series continues with the sensual but imperfect The Illegitimate Duke, about two society wallflowers who find love in a deeper place.
Lady Juliette Matthews, raised from a nightmarish and slavish poverty to her second London season thanks to the death of a distant relative which promoted her brother to a dukedom, must obey society’s rules as she attends the first ball of the season, though she loathes being yet another pretty and silly ornament on the dance floor. Among the other women who have come out during her season very few have snagged a proper husband, but Juliette has no desire to do the same. Not when she’s attracted to Florian Lowell.
Florian is a popular, handsome and dedicated doctor who has become Duke of Redding unexpectedly and in an extremely unlikely way. Apparently, the previous duke had no heirs, so petitioned the King for permission to name his successor, who happened to be Florian, his nephew through his sister; but the various websites I turned up in a Google search told me this couldn’t happen. Also dodgy is the fact that Florian’s ducal connection is through his mother and peerages don’t usually descend through the female line – but anyway, he’s become a duke, which means both hero AND heroine have been thrust into unexpected high social positions! What are the chances? Florian is being forced to observe the season’s social niceties while complaining about them the entire time he’s experiencing them, preferring to spend as much time as he can at his practice.
Juliette decides to donate her services and allowance to St. Agnes’ hospital in St. Giles, which is experiencing a severe typhus outbreak. Her hefty monetary gift allows her a position on the hospital’s board of trustees, thus giving her life a shape and meaning. Florian is naturally on the board of trustees as well, which puts them into each other’s orbits and allows them to fantasize about one another.
But Florian will not allow himself to propose to Juliette for fear of the dark secret in his past resurfacing; he is the biological son of one of the most notorious criminals in all of London’s history – and the man substituted another at his hanging and is currently performing deeds most foul in the city. Bartholomew’s goal is to take over both the district of St. Giles and get revenge on Florian for turning against him, and he will do anything – including hurting Juliette – to get what he wants. As typhus rages through the city and Bartholomew schemes, Florian and Juliette begin to battle their way toward one another – for better or for worse.
The Illegitimate Duke has a few good things going for it, mostly its slow-building romance, but its inconsistencies cause it to fall short of the mark.
Florian is… depressing, in a word. He is dark and angsty and brooding about how much his job means to him. Eventually he gets to show his more light-hearted side but it takes a while, so if you like your heroes darker in nature he might be more your type than he is mine.
Juliette is forthright, carving and brave; she’s not afraid to actually get her hands dirty, which is a super appealing quality. Unfortunately, she’s yet another maiden who is Not Like Those Other Society Girls and gets her fulfillment through charity work. It’s fine to like society frippery AND be into charity, and I don’t know why authors must insist that these two things cannot go together.
The romance is a decent slow-burner with a lot of tension. Juliette and Florian spend a lot of time downright mooning over one another before actually consummating their relationship. And there’s many, many delightful steps along the way that brings the relationship to a proper boil without spoiling the pot – including our heroine actually masturbating while thinking of the hero! That’s a downright advancement from those olden days where heroes wouldn’t even touch a girl’s sacred Pearl of Pleasure. Meanwhile, Florian’s hands shake when he thinks of Juliette; there’s something nice about his hands shake from emotion in reaction to Juliette versus him getting the traditional hard-on in response to her, although it did occur to me to worry about how well he could treat his patients if his hands shook when he got nervous!
The worst part of the novel? Bartholomew, who is the most two-dimensional, boring, cackling villain I’ve ever had the displeasure to encounter. If he’d had some depth or humanity to him I might have rated the book more highly, but he’s terribly dull. The other secondary characters worked well enough; I liked the intimidating, matchmaking dowager duchess Viola and Vivien, Juliette’s spunky best friend.
I have to give the author some credit for doing a good job capturing the rudimentary nature of medicine in the regency era; unfortunately everything else about the period seems to trip her up. While the medical stuff helped add some extra oomph to the general thrust of the story, which is strongly character based and quite romantic, the details just slaughter it. There is a lot of darkness; a lot of almost gothic darkness, with our heroine and our hero nursing many vulnerable types through typhus. And not everyone makes it to the end.
The Illegitimate Duke is highly flawed. The swoony romance just couldn’t overcome the clichés, melodrama and cartoonish villain, all of which combined to prove the novel’s undoing.
Buy it at: Amazon/Barnes & Noble/iBooks/Kobo
Grade: C-
Book Type: Historical Romance
Sensuality: Subtle
Review Date: 27/08/18
Publication Date: 08/2018
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.
Lisa Fernandes is a writer, reviewer and recapper who lives somewhere on the East Coast. Formerly employed by Firefox.org and Next Projection, she also currently contributes to Women Write About Comics. Read her blog at http://thatbouviergirl.blogspot.com/, follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thatbouviergirl or contribute to her Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MissyvsEvilDead or her Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/missmelbouvier
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If you use an exception like that, you have to explain it, which takes up time that should be spent romancing!
There was a way it could be done, but it certainly wasn’t like this. I used it in Danger Wears White. If a title has died out, then it can be reinvested in someone else, anyone. It can’t be done at will, or at the request of the previous title holder, and it’s usually invested in the husband of a daughter, or in somebody completely new. But in effect it’s a new title and it will be deemed so – the Second Creation, and the numbering starts at one again, so he’d be the First Duke of Wherever of the Second Creation (not sure that’s exactly right in nomenclature, but the facts are right!)
Once the rules of descent had been laid down, they couldn’t be changed. A title holder cannot choose his successor. He can’t skip over anyone who might be in line to the succession.
Oh yes, and something else in what you said was a bit iffy. An illegitimate child is automatically debarred from inheriting a title. He might be awarded one for exceptional service or something, but he wouldn’t inherit one. And certainly not a dukedom.
Parliament did not have jurisdiction over titles, or their bestowal. That’s not the business of government. The only way Parliament would have become involved was if the previous duke had committed treason – and then he loses the lot. Titles are the jurisdiction of the Crown Office and ultimately the monarch. But that’s why in this case it’s referred to as the Crown – because the Company of Heralds, and other offices would be involved. But not Parliament.
Mind you, that’s not as bad as the book where a woman strides on to the floor of the House of Lords and demands a divorce – um, no. Not ever. So many reasons.
And if a title goes to a distant relative, then the family is super-careful to find the said relative (who would have to be known, he can’t pop up from nowhere) and bring him up right. He’s going to represent the family, he’ll be the centre of power, the chairman of the board of a very complicated corporation, so he needs to be taught. And to meet the people who will help him (and the rest of his family!) So no shock dockyard worker dukes. Especially before blood tests and DNA tests became available. However right he might have been, he would have been rejected in the courts. And oh yes, the case would have gone to court!
We writers work at the interface between improbable and impossible, and it’s up to us to get it right, and to know the difference.
This is fascinating. Thank you so much for taking the time to post it!
This is a great explanation. Thank you.
Thanks, Lynne! As you say, it’s lengthy, but it’s important to know if you’re going to write historicals and try to pull of this sort of plot point. It’s the same with that old chestnut of “oh, let’s have a marriage of convenience and then we can get divorced/annulled”. Er – no. Or the book I read where the hero, on finding out his biological father wasn’t the man who claimed him as his and brought him up decided to renounce his title in favour of his brother.
It’s hard to believe an author who has been writing historical romance for a number of years wouldn’t have done some basic research – but I get the impression that many of the newer authors these days are doing their research by… reading other historical romances.
This is such a wonderful addition, thank you so much!
I should add that the author’s excuse for the Duke not being thrown out of the race for Dukedom, so to speak, comes from the fact that they’re lying about his parantage, saying he’s the child of his mother and her husband. Only he, his uncle, and his parents know about the true source of half of his DNA.
It seems to me that the author has gone to contortionist lengths in order to write a story about an aristocratic hero… when he probably didn’t need to be one at all. I have heard from so many authors that they are being pushed into writing ducal heroes (because “dukes sell” apparently), and we’re ending up with so many heroes who are titled but really have no need to be so. I wonder if that’s what happened here and Ms. Barnes had to find a way to make her “ordinary” hero into a duke and completely messed up as a result. I can think of several books lately where the ducal hero hasn’t needed to be a duke (the latest Lorraine Heath, for example, and the latest Kerrigan Byrne, where it’s so cursory, blink and you’ll miss it) – and I’m wondering if these ridiculous – and impossible – reasons are being thought up so authors can keep “Duke” in the title while writing the hero they want to write.
There are a (very) few British peerages which can pass through the female line. One of them is the dukedom of Marlborough, but that possibility required an act of Parliament, passed after the first duke’s only son predeceased him. This was a one in a century accommodation for one of Britain’s greatest and most powerful soldier-statemen. As such, the general point that a peer cannot nominate his successor is absolutely correct.
I suspect it would have required an act of Parliament at the very least, and as you say, it’s only happened in extremely exceptional circumstances. There are also a very few females who are peers in their own right – but they’re rare and tend to be the oldest titles. The problem is that using these exceptions in historical romance will always stand out because they are SO unusual – which I think means the author has to be even more careful to make sure of their facts, This author has been writing historical romance for quite a while and really should have known better.
I agree. A writer cannot use an exceptional arrangement such as Marlborough’s without a convincing backstory. The Duke of Wellington, whose career paralleled Marlborough’s and who WAS alive during the Regency, is probably the only other 18th or 19th century British peer who might have petitioned successfully for such an accommodation. So unless the fictional duke has a career similar to Marlborough/Wellington’s, the story will not be at all plausible. It will simply look as though the writer has not done her homework.
Yep, there’s nor reference in the series to their dead cousin being particularly powerful either – just rich and titled and a favorite of the king, but no grand service for the country. Am I right on that account or is it different in the first book, Caz?
I’m afraid I stopped reading Ms. Barnes’ books a few years ago – I tried two or three and gave up, they were so dire. So I can’t answer that one! But I suspect not ;)
Good review, Lisa. Sadly, Georgette Heyer and various other past and present mistresses of the Regency would be pretty disgusted by this one. For a start there was a Regency because the King was considered “mad” and he was pretty much kept completely out of the public eye so the Duke of Redding’s so-called petition would have fallen pretty flat even before it got off the ground! On the other hand, the Regent was always massively in debt so maybe enough palm-greasing could overcome this silly idea of a childless duke choosing his own successor!!!
This author doesn’t work for me either, Elaine – I gave up on her years ago. Lisa will tell you she and I exchanged a couple of emails during editing about the ridiculous premise. It took me a few minutes on Google to find out that it was IMPOSSIBLE – not just unlikely or possible in exceptional circumstances but impossible – for the holder of a peerage to choose his successor. I am not a bestselling author of historical romances who probably does research on a regular basis, and I found the information on a credible website in under ten minutes.
Like Caz said, I was amazed that an author who’s so good at carefully detailing medical procedures of the time could be Just That Bad at getting how succession rules work.
The author’s excuse for the petition going through was that he and the Prince Regent were very close friends. Juliette ascends to the peerage because her distant cousin on I think their mother’s side dies childless too and the title fell to her dockworker brother. SO.
I’d forgotten that – peerages can’t pass through the female line (I don’t think) so that’s impossible too! This book should have been called The Impossible Duke (and Duchess)!!
The Grand Research Failure!