Michelle Place and Cheryl Zach are the relatively new writing team behind the pen name Nicole Byrd. I had never read any of their work before and was really hoping that I would enjoy Dear Imposter, particularly since I myself am part of a writing team. Regrettably, I didn’t.

Miss Psyche Hill needs to claim her inheritance so that she can live independently and provide her younger sister, Circe, an artistic prodigy, with a proper tutor. Unfortunately for Psyche, her father left her money in trust until she becomes engaged, and her uncle must formally approve the marriage. Her uncle is disinclined to do so unless she and her money marry his son, Percy. Since Percy is both encroaching and unattractive, this puts Psyche in an impossible situation. Still she looks for a loophole….

She hatches a desperate scheme to hire an actor to play her fiancé, the Marquis of Tarrington, for one night. Then he will fade into the woodwork and she can claim that she met the terms of the will – she got engaged. But the imposter she hires is not the man who shows up at her engagement party.

Gabriel Sinclair is on the run when he stumbles into an interesting situation. One moment he is evading attackers and the next he is on his way to a ball. He picks up right away on the fact that he is supposed to be playing a part, and as a seasoned gamester, he is used to bluffing his way through difficult situations. And this particular difficult situation has two things going for it. The first being a way to avoid the men who seek to kill him, and the second being the fair Psyche Hill herself. He decides to play along as long as she’ll let him.

Okay, so far, so good. It’s sounds kinda interesting, doesn’t it? Well, it would if there weren’t some big problems. First of all, Psyche is extremely stupid in pretending that her fake fiance is a Marquis, and this error comes to bite her on the proverbial butt almost immediately. I mean how hard would it be to check to see if there really is a Marquis of Tarrington? Flip through Debrett’s Peerage, and there you have it – mystery solved. Why she didn’t make him just a plain old wealthy Mr. from a good family is beyond me. The peerage is not a large group and its members would be well known, but no one but Percy denounces him. Even after Gabriel runs into some old acquaintances, some of whom have known him long enough to know for certain that he could never be the Marquis of Tarrington, this myth is allowed to stand. Unbelievable Point One.

Unbelievable Point Two is that Gabriel allows himself to be continually harassed and stalked by a nefarious sharpster he beat in a card game. Gabriel is certainly hiding something, but he is not without connections, including a friendship with an Earl. Why he doesn’t simply have this man arrested is again beyond my comprehension. There are other problems with this scenario including said sharpster’s motivation for pursuing Gabriel so ceaselessly.

Finally, even overlooking these and other problems, I couldn’t have liked the book because I just didn’t like the writing style. It was so extremely over-descriptive that reading it was like wading through a muddy stream. About half the description could have been cut, and it still would have bordered on wordy. An example of this is the masquerade ball that Psyche and Gabriel attend. In this scene just about everyone’s costume is described – Psyche’s, Gabriel’s, secondary characters’, the footmen’s, plain old passersby’s, everyone’s. It was so above and beyond what was necessary. I can’t begin to imagine why all this description was included.

The sole saving grace of Dear Imposter is that the two main characters are fairly likable. I thought both Gabriel and Psyche were kind and caring individuals, and that was why my grade is a D+ rather than a D, small consolation to the author, I know, but there you have it.

Dear Imposter occasionally touched on the original Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche; Gabriel calls her “Goddess” throughout and Psyche has to wait awhile to discover his true identity. I would have loved to have seen the story more closely follow the twists and turns of the original myth, but it doesn’t. Instead it contained the usual “chased by evil villains” fare with a strange and improbable resolution. It’s really a shame that this book wasn’t truer to the Greek story because I love that myth, but, unfortunately, I didn’t even like Dear Imposter.