Some authors can take the most bizarre, unbelievable scenarios and make them work. When you’re really involved in a story you can actually believe that a kidnapped woman could fall in love with her captor or that someone could walk through a mirror and emerge in another century. You have to be careful with outrageous plot-lines, though. When they work, they can be fresh and interesting. But when they backfire, readers spend the course of the novel shaking their heads in disbelief. Unfortunately, Like No Other falls into the “just can’t believe it” category.

Kate is a survivor, a young woman who has lived all of her life in orphanages or on the street. She uses her wits to get by – and her remarkable talent for thievery. But one fated night she picks the wrong pocket and is caught red-handed. Her captor is none other than a duke who takes her to his friend, Lord Alec Breckridge (an earl). He tells Alec that Kate is now his special charity project.

Kate is both scared and angry, but she soon realizes that Alec means her no harm. Even though his snooty butler sneers at her, Alec gives her a warm meal and carries her up to his spare bedroom when he falls asleep at his table. When she awakens in her sumptuous new surroundings, she is halfway in love with him already.

The rest of the plot proceeds in a predictable, if unlikely, fashion. We discover that although Kate has been forced to steal in order to live, she really has a heart of gold. She is taught to read by one of Alec’s servants. Alec gives into his passion and sleeps with Kate, then figures he will ask her to be his mistress. Before he can get around to doing that, an evil man captures one of Kate’s closest friends from her street gang and she is forced to steal from Alec in order to win her friend’s freedom. Alec bemoans his fate, and wonders why he was so stupid as to trust a thief like Kate in the first place. Will he ever really fall in love with Kate? Can they overcome the huge class differences that separate them?

Of course they can. The question is, will the reader be able to believe it when they do? Probably not. Kate is not a high-class, educated lady thief. She speaks in a cockney dialect (throughout the book), and until she comes to Alec’s home she has never had a real bath. She doesn’t even have a last name. But by the end of the book she is married to an earl. I would have found such a scenario hard to believe under any circumstance, but Melanie George doesn’t even make an effort to make the reader believe this unlikely match. Kate spends some time pondering her inadequacies, but Alec’s tumble into love is completely effortless. There are many books that handle class issues better than this one, most notably Mary Balogh’s One Night for Love.

Even if you are willing to believe in Kate and Alec’s unlikely match, there are other problems. The first is related to the class issue. Alec hops into bed with Kate without a thought to the consequences. He knows she has no angry papa who will force him into marriage with her, because she’s a young woman living on her own on the streets. He never really asks Kate to be his mistress (the reader just hears him thinking about it), but that is definitely what he has in mind when he sleeps with her. He knows that a life as his mistress is a real step up from living hand to mouth on the streets. Such behavior may well be realistic for the time period, but it’s hardly heroic. Men who take advantage of younger, powerless women – sleeping with them without considering the consequences – are the stuff of newspapers, not romance novels.

There is also a pacing problem. The first half of the book literally covers about thirty-six hours of time. It moves slowly and it’s not very interesting. The pace picks up after that, but because of the aforementioned problems, the book never quite recovers.

There were some promising parts of the book. Some of the dialogue is humorous and well-timed, particularly the interaction between Alec and his ducal friend. There is also an interesting relationship between Kate and the friend she must save, but unfortunately this relationship is not developed to its full potential. Ultimately, these few elements of interest can’t save this book. If you think you can accept the premise of an earl and a beautiful street urchin you might want to try this book, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.