Mischievous Miss Murphy

Rating:
Summary: Lecherous peer stalks chaste swindler.
Review: Imagine yourself the consummate confidence artist, minding your own business fleecing the Quality, when the scourge of husbands from John'o' Groats to Land's End targets YOU, in his venery, as his next amusement. Such is the predicament of white-tressed, sherry-eyed Candie Murphy and her even more larcenous uncle, Max. Their latest scam goes bad and collides with the latest lubricious misadventure of Mark Antony Betancourt, Marquess of Coniston. Jail is where this sinful son of a duke ends up with the lovable philosopher and his devoted knockout of a niece. Tony's satyriasis click into gear and, after posting bail, warns the lass TO HER FACE that she has no say whatsoever in the fate he has decided for her: humiliation, insults, bullying, blackmail, extortion and, eventually submission. If you accept this unsavoury premise, you will enjoy this funny, well written regency with its endearing heroine and witty dialogue. There is even a winsome widgeon named Cleopatra to offset the beastly libidinous Mark Antony. I did not accept this premise. Or its treatment.

For one thing, the lady makes the merest pretext of resisting, her chaste curiosities trammeling even her heretofore indomitable self-respect. The lady who can outwit ANYONE barely tries to sidestep this vulgr subornation of her virtue. Her veneer of resistance, slight though it is, promises a battle of wit and wills, especially when her loving, uncle leaves her to the libertine's mercy, leaving US with little more than witless compliance from HER and willfulness, period, from His Grace. All it left ME was annoyed. (The hallway scene at the Murphy lodgings, for example, made my blood boil! This is not romance. This is abuse masquerading as courtship!) If Miss Murphy had insisted at the outset that she was NO stake in Coniston's bednotcher's game, then there could have been endless fun watching him learn his lesson, and reform. The nervy and ingenious Miss Murphy had the means to do it, if her takedown of Coniston's affine (the odious Ivy Dillingham) was anything to go by. But where is the fun in craven capitulation to presumptuous encroachments and proprietary airs?

Why make the heroine a swindling trickster if not to employ her cunning in her own defense? Why make the hero a licentious lowlife (if Coniston CAN be called a hero) if not to prey? And prey? In the end it is Coniston's own sick sense of honour that rescues Miss Murphy from a fate worse than death in an odd case of turnabout is failed play. In a curious reversal, Chastity comes on like a callet and Lust takes an uncharacteristic holiday as neither perjurer nor peer bothers to learn whether beneath all that eyepopping pulchritude there is a person worthy of ANY prevenance. Character, alas, is irrelevant: That they met in police lockup means nothing to either one of them.

This could have been a case of the irresistible force meets the immovable object, but here the Object won't stand her ground. And the force...well...yields. Even if the nobleman didn't live up to HIS title, this book should have lived up to its own. END