With an interesting premise, this story seemed to promise an exciting adventure with just a touch of magic. However, the story requires enormous patience to get through the boring parts – enough to make this a less than stellar read.

Widowed Lady Alethea Vaughn-Channing has been haunted by visions of a man her entire life. Most of these visions have been benign, occasional peeks into his everyday life, but her latest vision of him is a troubling one: she sees him being killed in the very near future. Seeing no reason for delay, she instantly goes to London, determined to stop his murder.

After she describes the man’s appearance to her uncle, she finds that the man is none other than Lord Hartley Greville, a mysterious man with a very rakish reputation. When she finally approaches Hartley and tells him what she sees, he has no choice but to accept her words as truth, for there is simply no other way she would know what he has only begun to suspect. Unfortunately, she contacts him at the worst possible time; Hartley is actually a spy who has been trying to seduce an evil Frenchwoman named Claudette for the sake of king and country. He believes Claudette holds many secrets, including the whereabouts of his sister’s two children, both of whom are trapped in France. When Alethea and Hartley are together, it is impossible to hide the connection between them, and Claudette immediately becomes suspicious, leading to complications that put everyone’s safety on the line.

I enjoyed the secondary characters; Alethea’s quirky family is a particular source of entertainment, and I even liked Hartley’s friends. The main problem I had was with the main couple themselves, who are truly boring as heck.

Hartley is supposed to be a dastardly rake, but this turns out to be a partially concocted story to give him a useful cover. There’s a lot of talk about him being surprised at his feelings for Alethea, including thoughts about the “m” word, but this seems less of an epiphany to the reader because from the start he is introduced as a very upstanding, straight-forward fellow. There’s no big gasp about him being a reformed rake because he doesn’t ever seem particularly rakish to begin with – merely commitment-phobic. He tends to overanalyze in terribly long paragraphs.

With that said, the rate at which he falls in love with Alethea is preposterously fast. Of course some of the work can be attributed to their special “connection,” but really; one minute he’s super suspicious of her, and the next he’s grabbing her and kissing her. In fact, every time she gives him some pertinent bit of information, he kisses her in gratitude – like giving a doggy a treat. Early in the book, after he and Althea share half a conversation, he announces to his friends that he wants to woo and marry her. I was baffled.

Alethea as a heroine is disappointing; I expected her to have some sort of internal conflict re: her constant peering into Hartley’s life, some sort of learning curve to adjust her mental picture of Hartley to the man he really is. But besides her astounding gift of visions and the ability to sketch them out in remarkable detail, she is rather flat. She sees Hartley, wants Hartley, and therefore takes Hartley any way she can, whether it be an affair or a marriage of semi-convenience. She takes everything so in stride that she leeches out the excitement from the story. One note to the editors: discrete does not have the same meaning as discreet. Discrete was used instead of discreet throughout the entire novel, even multiple times on one page (pg. 89), and it was severely distracting.

I have enjoyed Ms. Howell’s writing in the past, but there was an utter lack of chemistry between Alethea and Hartley. Too much entering the characters’ minds and reasoning out their actions made the story sluggish. Ultimately, If He’s Wild is a very average read, and if you’re new to Ms. Howell, I’d start with a book from her Highland series.