Simpering at a Lost Lord

This review is for the audiobook version of Loving a Lost Lord by Mary Jo Putney.

This is a book that was maybe ruined by the reader. She used a kind of breathy voice and made the heroine sound stupid, but not in words, in tone. The story is interesting enough, with a man washed ashore and a woman tending him through his amnesia, but the simpering voice of the reader made the heroine really unlikable. It has some interesting ideas in it, a man with an English father and an Indian mother inherits a title and faces racism within his own family, for example, but the reader just killed it. I ended up skipping through it because I wanted to see how it was resolved but also couldn’t handle the wishy washy reader.

There were many fantastic and unbelievable storylines in this book, including a disinherited man’s daughter not knowing about her father’s family, despite growing up attending various house parties at country estates. The hero spends a few DAYS in the ocean after his steam boat explodes near Glasgow without dying of hypothermia. An old woman hires a footman to kill someone and he fails four times before being caught, including shooting at him from a tree in Hyde park, which is less ridiculous than a blind woman performing surgery or regaining her sight after getting hit on the head, but still unbelievable.

If I were to read any other stories from this series, I wouldn’t choose the audiobooks, unless there was a different reader.