I tried very hard to judge Lord Dragoner’s Wife on the merits of the story and not on the poor condition of the manuscript which I read (hey, my eyes can only take so much!). Even taking that into consideration, though, I discovered a couple of potentially fatal flaws: a hero so filled with self-loathing that his redemption seems improbable, and an otherwise appealing heroine whose attraction to the hero remains a mystery from start to finish. And while the book isn’t a page-turner initially, it certainly picks up toward the end.

Charles Everett, Lord Dragoner, has been resident in France since Napoleon’s soldiers caught up with him a few years back. Now, after the Emperor’s capture and exile to Elba, Dragoner’s former colleagues revile him for the deserter they believe him to be. Much as he would like to avoid it, he must return to England to take care of some unfinished business – seeing about getting an annulment of his marriage of convenience to Delilah Bening, daughter of a London merchant.

Charles’s parents arranged the match in the hope of lining their own pockets; in a trusting, childlike effort to please them, he went along, only to find they skipped town almost before the ink was dry on the marriage contract. He got drunk before the ceremony, then passed out, and took himself off to join the army the very next morning. He has not laid eyes on his bride since then.

Delilah may be married, but she’s still untouched. When her father proposed that she marry, she insisted on choosing her own bridegroom and picked Dragoner from a list of likely candidates. Now, as a condition to cooperating in Dragoner’s scheme to have the marriage dissolved, she demands that he spend a year with her. He’s in no position to quibble and reluctantly agrees.

First, though, he must return to Paris to complete his mission. In reality Charles is no deserter: he’s a deep-cover agent for Wellington, and he’s got to foil a plot to steal many of the valuable pieces of art Napoleon and his troops plundered from all over Europe. But Delilah follows him across the Channel, hoping to make him change his mind about the annulment, and she proves a lot harder to dismiss than he’d counted on.

The story, while based on a solid premise, feels flat for the first three-quarters. The interaction between Dragoner and Delilah is limited. I did enjoy most of Delilah’s character – she’s a real ’90’s woman, conducting the Regency equivalent of analytical research in her quest for a husband and single-handedly rebuilding Charles’s fortune in his absence. But the reader is left to wonder what it is about him that made her choose Charles: was it his good looks, or the evidence of a single public act of casual kindness on his part that she witnessed? Without a more detailed explanation, I found her attraction toward him mystifying.

Charles is so tortured and has such a bleak picture of himself, and his worthiness for the least scrap of affection, that I found his redemption unconvincing. I love a well-done dark hero, but this one was too much even for me. He was raised from the cradle in the craft of con games and deception, and his aptitude for espionage is understandable. Yet I could never make the leap of faith that anybody, even a generous, loving woman like Delilah, would be able to save him from himself.

It’s only toward the end of the story, when Dragoner and his wife find themselves in harm’s way, that things pick up. But the mastermind behind the villains is transparently obvious from his first appearance, and the denouement of the story is less than satisfactory. Overall, Lord Dragoner’s Wife is a workmanlike effort whose main flaw is a hero suffering an acute case of angst. If that doesn’t bother you as much as it did me, you may like the book. As for me, I’m willing to give Kerstan another try – as long as my eyes hold out.