Anna Harrington’s Lord of the Armory series continues with A Problem Princess, featuring a princess forced to marry and an intelligence agent who worries he’s way out of her league. Can their cross-class relationship last? It can when it’s this instalusty!

A newly-made Viscount, General Clayton Elliott has been tracking Scepter, an anarchist group, for the Home Office, where he works as an undersecretary. He’s come up in the world; his father was hanged for crimes which are spoilery, so I won’t reveal them here. Though Clayton been told more than once that the organization has disbanded, he doesn’t believe it – even more so when Her Serene Highness Princess Cordelia of Monrovia is attacked at a party.

Cordelia is in England looking for a spouse, and at this point she doesn’t care who it is, as long as she does her royal duty. She knows love will have nothing to do with it, and that moving through the ton is all about performance of perfection. Unfortunately, perfection is pretty unreachable for her at this point.

Clayton and Cordelia first lay eyes upon one another across a room – while a costumed footman holds a knife to Cordelia’s throat in the Prince Regent’s drawing room. Clayton manages to kill the man, but not before he hints that Scepter is behind his actions. Clayton also saves Cordelia’s life; she then names him as her new bodyguard. Together they work to figure out who wants Cordelia dead while she tries to fit into British court life. The attraction is pretty instantly there between them, but can it survive Scepter – and their cross-class attraction?

Well, of course it can, but only because Prinny made Clayton a Viscount first! A Problem Princess is filled with swash and buckle and derring and do, but the romance between our hero and heroine happens too quickly to give us much time to think about it. Ludicrous situations pile up like horse dung on the ground, and the heroine is a plot-dictated limp dishrag.

Clayton has wit and brightness to him; he has a couple of good one-liners and is quite brave. He’s resourceful and dry, kind of a Regency-ish James Bond without the humping around. He’s also possessed of low self-esteem due to his background. And of course, he takes Cordelia to a brothel to hide out for a night after another attack which, as in all romance novels – well, you’ll see. Of course he’s familiar with the madame in charge, and of course she makes jokes about size mattering.

Cordelia is snarky, wry and well-meaning but um…not bright. Example: a man has just held her at knifepoint in a party and Clayton literally has to explain to her that the guy wanted to kill her and not hold her for ransom. Why in the world would she not automatically presume that she wasn’t about to be murdered?! THERE’S A HAND OVER HER MOUTH AND A KNIFE AT HER THROAT!  She definitely overromantisizes the joy of being one of the “simple folks”, becoming very excited when peasants treat her poorly when she’s undercover as one because she’s tired of people deferring to her and not seeing the real her, as one does. She spends a lot of time in denial of Clayton’s pronouncements vis who the culprit of the crime targeting her is, compounding the annoyance and nearly getting her killed.

Aside from the instalust (and as in all Harringtons they are super horny for each other and nearly combust from UST before finally doing the deed), Cordelia and Clayton do have stuff in common, from an enjoyment of similar entertainment to having fathers with less-than-reputable pasts. He is forever rescuing her, however, and she is forever nearly getting shot or stabbed. I wanted her to turn the tables just once in the situation, but nope, he has to keep rescuing her and never the other way around.

While Harrington’s research into the Cato Street Conspiracy works – apart from the fact it happened in 1820 and this book is set in 1818 – she gets the unmarried Princess Sophia all wrong. I doubt she would have castigated an orphan child when she was known for her gentleness in all matters (and was actually a favorite of Princess Charlotte for this), and the known facts about her early life makes the portrayal of Sophia as a bitter, snobby, gossipy, dried-up old maid extra strange here. Perhaps the author based her version of Sophia on the person she was in later life; the person who was hoodwinked by Queen Victoria’s former tutor into working as something of a spy in Victoria’s circle for Conroy – but this didn’t’ happen until eighteen years after the events of this novel.

Even if you’re inclined to set the research fail aside, I still can’t recommend A Problem Princess. The romance is all insta-lust, the plot is ridiculous and the heroine is vacuous and annoying.