Devil’s Bride by Stephanie Laurens
Rating: ❤❤1/2
Genre: Historical Romance
Release Date: 1 March 1998
Synopsis: When Devil, the most infamous member of the Cynster family, is caught in a compromising position with plucky governess Honoria Wetherby, he astonishes the entire town by offering his hand in marriage. No one dreamed this scandalous rake would ever take a bride. And as society mamas swooned at the loss of England′s most eligible bachelor, Devil′s infamous Cynster cousins began to place wagers on the wedding date.
But Honoria wasn′t about to bend society′s demands and marry a man "just" because they′d been found together virtually unchaperoned. No, she craved adventure, and while solving the murder of a young Cynster cousin fit the bill for a while, she decided that once the crime was solved she′d go off to see the world. But the scalding heat of her unsated desire for Devil soon had Honoria craving a very different sort of excitement. Could her passion for Devil cause her to embrace the enchanting peril of a lifelong adventure of the heart?
Devil’s Bride is the first book in Stephanie Laurens Cynster Series. I enjoyed this book. Really I did and it was really one of my first historical romances and therefore it will always have a special spot in my heart. That being said, on a re-read it didn’t stack up as well as I thought it did and I think I forgave those shortfalls the first time around because I loved the characters so much and I still do, just everything else about it is a little bit of the mess.
The writing is quite inconsistent. It starts out reading like a traditional regency romance and I was here for it. But by about the halfway mark the tone and writing started to change, drifting into a far more modern prose. Modern tone in a historical romance doesn’t bother me if it’s set up that way from the start and I tend to enjoy it a bit more if I’m being one hundred percent honest but the change of tone in this was very strange and very out of the blue. It didn’t help that the timeline was a little all over the place. It skipped around which was both distracting and annoying and in some senses left me a little confused in places.
The Characters, while I loved them, were developed very poorly by the end and ultimately Laurens killed any likability for them. “Devil”, which is an appalling nickname, never changes, never cools on the arrogance, nor does he stop being a high handed dick. He’s an alpha and Laurens tries to explain why he is the way he is but he is given so little dialogue that he never has a chance to evolve as a character. Honoria by the end of it all comes across as very stuck up but she is also insanely competent and just gets on with things which is nice.
What could have been a great cat and mouse game between this pair fell kind of flat and the excessive sex scenes did kill their relationship for me somewhat. I wish there was less, it was way too much and it quickly entered into cringe territory. Sometimes less is more and this is one of those situations.
There is nothing subtle about the clues left about the murderer. It's like being hit repeatedly in the face with a brick, that’s how obvious it is. There may as well have been a neon sign plastered on the murderer’s forehead from the get go. This isn’t very well fleshed out and motivations never become clear.
On the whole it isn’t a bad read. It has a lot a great moments, but it's also quite slow paced. It’s bogged down with a lot of unnecessary sex scenes and descriptions. Laurens is a tell not show author, while not terrible, it really annoyed me in this case.
I can see why so many people love this book because I used to be one of them. Sometimes it's better not to revisit old favourites because it breaks your heart when they aren’t quite as good as you thought they were. This book is a good introduction to Laurens writing so if you’re looking for a new author she may be the one for you, but sadly, she isn’t really for me no matter how many of her books I read.
