The Daring Exploits of a Runaway Heiress by Victoria Alexander Series: Millworth Manor #5
Published by Kensington on April 28th 2015
Genres: Historical Romance
Pages: 352
Format: eARC
Source: the publisher through NetGalley
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Also in this series: The Shocking Secret of a Guest at the Wedding
Also by this author: The Shocking Secret of a Guest at the Wedding
To Do:
Swim naked in the moonlight
Play in a high stakes card game
Ride an elephant
Be painted sans clothing.
Take a lover…Lucy Merryweather has inherited a fortune—and her great-aunt’s list of unfulfilled wishes. What better way to honor her memory than by accomplishing as many of them as possible? And with Lucy’s family an ocean away in New York, nothing stands in her way—if one ignores the private investigator hired to spy on her.
Yet Cameron Effington is infuriatingly difficult to ignore…
As a reporter, Cameron is always looking for a good story. An American heiress running rampant between Millworth Manor and Mayfair is the perfect subject. Not to mention captivating. And extremely kissable. And if Lucy believes he’s a detective? Well, the truth should never get in the way of a good story—or hinder delicious, impetuous passion…
I received a review copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.
Review
You know that feeling you get when you see a disaster just waiting to happen? The kind where you know it’s inevitable; it’s just a question of when? That’s the feeling I had most of the time I was reading The Daring Exploits of a Runaway Heiress. The die was cast almost from the beginning, when Lucy jumped to the conclusion that Cameron was a detective hired to protect her, and he decided to go along in the interests of getting a good story. I spent the entire book waiting for the shoe to drop and for the resulting and inescapable explosion (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors.)
What I didn’t expect was for the metaphorical shoe to drop, as it were, with agonizing slowness, heightening the anticipation of impending doom. Nor did I expect to enjoy it as much as I did, given that secret-keeping is one of my biggest peeves when it comes to romance. But Victoria Alexander can almost always be relied on for plenty of humor in her romances, and that turned “Oh, dear, this is going to end badly” into a ruefully amused “omigosh, how much deeper a hole can he dig for himself?” – and kept things moving along at a fairly brisk pace, besides.
Lucy is a charming heroine, daring but never brazen, reveling in the limited freedom afforded by an absence of relatives and a companion she has essentially suborned into helping her. She plans and carries out her adventures with a sense of fun mingled with practical common sense. Cameron is a likeable idiot – likeable because he is a good and decent man if you can overlook the ongoing deception, and an idiot because he’s quite blind to what he’s beginning to feel for Lucy, and to that metaphorical hole he’s digging himself into. I also quite like Lucy’s companion, a young woman named Clara, and Cameron’s eccentric friend Phineas, though Phineas only makes a few appearances. (I sniff a future romance between those two.)
My only real complaint is that the couple’s reconciliation after the reveal and separation was a little too staged. The situation seemed a bit unlikely, and the dialogue, intentionally florid due to the setting, didn’t quite ring true for me. (The parrot in the preceding scene was a nice touch, though.) But on the whole, The Daring Exploits of a Runaway Heiress was a fun read, a nice light historical with plenty of humor and an engaging heroine – a good choice if you’re looking for something to read on vacation.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
- Historical Romance Reading Challenge 2015
R_Hunt @ View From My Home
I am very picky with my historical fiction and don’t read this particular era, but I was curious as to whether you would enjoy this when I read the blurb. Didn’t sound like “you”, all that nakedness and elephants, lol. Glad it was a light read you could eventually enjoy, but I do dislike when I am waiting for a MC to find out a secret and it drags on throughout the plot. Oh well, they can’t all be absolute winners!
R_Hunt @ View From My Home recently posted…Weekly Wrap-Up 5/8- 5/10/15
Lark_Bookwyrm
It’s fun, but ultimately not one of my favorites. Though Lucy is actually quite clever about being painted sans clothing… she puts a lot of thought into how to carry out each adventure without actually getting caught doing something scandalous, or (in this case) even doing anything all that scandalous. Her levelheadedness is part of what appealed to me.