I don’t require pinpoint historical accuracy, but I have a hard time getting into a book if people keep doing and saying things that are completely out of character for a period. A 15th-century legendary Robin Hood-like figure with a 1930s radio serial name like the Midnight Shadow? A heroine named Bria, a future noblewoman, who is allowed as a child to run off to play in the woods, unsupervised – in a time where the woods still held dangerous animals? And whose grandfather later teaches her how to ride like a man and fight with a sword, with no apparent motivation for doing so? These were all pushing my “yeah, right” button before I was thirty pages into the story.

Bria knows nothing about Lord Terran Knowles, the man who has showed up to claim her as his bride, based on a childhood betrothal. She does know that he is thought of by his serfs as a cruel overlord, he is rumored to have killed his first wife, and his sheriff and right-hand man is the nasty Kenric, Bria’s childhood foe. But Terran doesn’t know much either – for example, he has no idea that his new wife is the same Midnight Shadow who has been stealing the tax money and eluding every trap set for him.

There are a lot of threads with a good bit of potential in this story. Terran thinks of himself as very much in love with his first wife, who apparently committed suicide over him. Terran is responsible for the death of one of Bria’s dearest friends. Terran is, indeed, a bad feudal master whose neglect of the peasants in his care has brought on the current situation. The unwinding of the truth of any of these matters, and the emotional changes that Bria and Terran go through as they learn more about each other, could have made for a compelling story.

Unfortunately the author settles for slapdash, overly simplistic storytelling, substituting a lot of action scenes and arguments and Big Misunderstandings and huffing and puffing for any real exploration and development of the characters. I especially disliked Terran from the first time I saw him; he’s a whiny athlete in retirement who finds being the leader of a bunch of peasants to be tedious and boring. He marries Bria for selfish reasons (to raise money for his estate), refuses to believe that she doesn’t have a lover (another “she’s a slut, oops, she was a virgin after all” deflowering), and goes from lugubrious mourning for first wife Odella to deciding he didn’t love Odella after all in about three pages, right after his first glimpse of Bria.

Yet, although the reader never sees Terran change, by the end of the book Bria loves him, he loves Bria, all is forgiven, and the peasants even help him overthrow the real villain, Kenric. Since he’s never done anything to prove himself worthy of either Bria’s or his serfs’ respect, it’s hard to see why.

And Bria didn’t thrill me either. Although she does grow up more than Terran does over the course of the story, she still manages to have her head turned by Terran’s questionable charms to the extent that she forgets for pages at a time that she is trying to rescue her best friend from Terran’s dungeon. And her spunkiness tips over into too-stupid-to-live behavior a bit too often, especially in the first part of the book.

There are some fun moments, however. It’s amusing that against all evidence to the contrary (even Bria’s own confession), Terran and Kenric continue to believe that Bria has a lover, or at least a male friend who is the Midnight Shadow. Their assumptions that a woman couldn’t do what the Midnight Shadow does work humorously against them, as Bria comes and goes under their very noses.

If you like a book in which many swashes are buckled with much hullabaloo, that reads more like a Ren-fest skit than a novel, then you may like Midnight Shadow. But if you like your medieval tales with characters who actually act like they are from another century instead of somewhat spoiled, self-indulgent modern folks, you’ll want to give this one a pass.