It’s not often that you can pinpoint the exact page that a previously entertaining book goes horribly wrong, as is the case with Manda Collins’ How to Dance With a Duke. Boo, page 142! That’s where a fun, slightly campy, kind of romp-ish book becomes a cliched TSTL-Girl-in-Pants story.

Cecily desperately needs to get inside London’s Egyptian Club to search for her father’s journals from his most recent excavation trip. All was well when her father departed, but in Egypt his secretary, brother to a duke, disappeared, and on the return trip her father suffered a near-fatal stroke. Since her father can’t defend himself from the gossip that he murdered his secretary, Cecily needs the journals to prove his innocence.

Upon being bodily ejected from the club, as single ladies are not allowed inside, Cecily runs into the duke, Lucas Dalton. When Lucas refuses to discuss the situation with Cecily, she conceives a plan to get into the club without his help – by marrying a member. She allows her stepmother to perform a makeover and goes to a ball that very evening in order to begin her campaign. Fate seems to smile upon her when she finds the misplaced dance card of a celebrated beauty and uses it to coerce Egyptian Club members into dancing with her. At this ball she encounters Lucas again.

Lucas had a change of heart almost immediately after he refused to talk to Cecily outside the Egyptian Club and is pleased to see her at the ball. He realizes what her plan is almost immediately, and approaches her with the intent of making her see that she’s making a terrible mistake. But he doesn’t count on her stubborness or his own attraction to the new, made over Cecily. Instead of disuading her, he ends up making a pact with her to help one another solve the mystery of his brother’s disappearance.

This is not the most believable book, even prior to the infamous page 142 (in my ARC), but it is entertaining reading at first, with engaging characters and well written dialogue. The main characters are both very smart and witty, and their exchanges made me smile several times. But then Lucas decides the only way to get the journals (and save Cecily from a loveless marriage) is to break into the Egyptian Club and steal them. When Cecily insists on tagging along, and wearing boys’ clothes to boot, you can almost hear the trombone…wah-wah-waaaahh. The book goes from bad to worse after that, with a pretty transparent mystery villain, bad-timing sex, and a puzzle solved by simple coincidence. Lucas “forgets” that he holds vital clues, even though his brother told him to go to Cecily if anything untoward happened, and the revelation of the journals’ location made me want to kick something.

That said, there is promise here. I like Cecily’s cousins and would not reject later books, in order to find out what happens to them. A little bit of foreshadowing indicates that at least one of the cousins will have a future book dedicated to her story, and I like the character that will probably be the hero. You can (maybe) count me in. But I’d advise you to pass this one up.