Manufactured, paint by numbers chemistry.

NB:  I received my copy of this book free in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway, but that has not affected the content of my review.

NBII:  This review is six months late, and I did not like the book.

NBIII:  I will probably never win another Goodreads giveaway.

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I originally rated this three stars after finishing it because there was a cute dog in it and I allowed myself to be emotionally manipulated by its presence, but the further I get from it, the more I’m just like, no, I didn’t like this. It didn’t work for me.

Sweetest Scoundrel is the ninth book in the Maiden Lane series by Elizabeth Hoyt. I did want to read the first book in the series before any of the others; in fact, I would have preferred to read the first eight before even thinking about this one, but I won number nine (shudder), so I had to read it, and my library system didn’t have the first book, so I just sucked it up. And really, it didn’t matter. (Nothing that my OCD cares about actually matters.) These books are designed for you to pick them up at random.

I have no idea if this book is representative of the quality of Elizabeth Hoyt’s writing, but I hope it’s not. The book hits all the checkboxes in the arc of most romance novels, but it never felt like anything more than those checkboxes being checked off. It felt like the only reason the characters were doing things and beginning to like one another and how they interacted was because the author wanted them to, not because those things were something their characters would actually do organically.

Asa is in the process of re-building his pleasure gardens (including an opera house complete with new opera) after they burned to the ground. Eve is the money manager for her brother, who is financing Asa’s pleasure gardens. She threatens to discontinue Asa’s line of credit when she believes he is being irresponsible with the money, but he can’t have that, so they strike up an unlikely partnership. She will continue his line of credit if he allows her to supervise how those funds are spent, to make sure they are spent responsibly.

Both of them of course have the requisite tragic backstory. Eve suffers from PTSD, her triggers including dogs and aggression in men. Asa’s father disowned him for owning a pleasure garden (really? it’s like Hoyt wanted him to be disowned, but didn’t want him to actually have done anything worthy of that disowning). He doesn’t think she’s attractive, but soon finds there’s just “something about her” anyway. Eve is terrified of masculine men, but there’s just “something about Asa” that she doesn’t mind. Sigh. That’s terrible writing. The attraction between two characters should not be an unidentifiable “something.” It should be concrete and identifiable and the author should know it and communicate it to the reader; even if it’s not stated outright, it should be implied and easy to figure out. And there is no way that any of Eve’s issues could have been overcome without time and patience and lots of communication, not a manufactured visit to his estranged family so Eve could see his improbably quaint situation, and an out of nowhere sexual encounter in a carriage, wherein a sexually traumatized virgin has no problem watching a man she just met days before pull out his junk and masturbate, basically unprompted.

The only part of this book I genuinely enjoyed was the subplot with the adorable dog, who the characters rescue from being homeless, and that was basically impossible to fuck up.

I’m still going to try out the first book in this series eventually, but I’m a little more wary now than I would have been otherwise.