About the best thing I can say about Tempted at Every Turn is that it starts out badly and gets better. Improving from uber-lame to just average is not exactly something to write home about, but it’s better than the alternative – staring out as average and then taking a spectacular nosedive.

Willow Mabsen is part of a mystery solving club, The Ladies’ Amateur Sleuth Society. She and her bookish friends enjoy discussing and solving current cases around London, and two of her friends have solved cases (and found husbands, because the two seem to go hand in hand) already. Now it’s Willow’s turn. She meets her love interest with the help of her already-happily-married friend Amelia. Amelia’s husband is friends with James Sterling, an arrogant aristocrat who works for Scotland Yard. Coincidentally, Willow is familiar with his work. She’s secretly been writing letters to him for months, critiquing his techniques and pointing out all of the rules that he breaks. Needless to say, he’s not overly fond of her. When he meets her, he quickly realizes that she is his mystery critic when she makes a comment that is very similar to one of the points she made in a recent letter. Annoyed, James literally throws down the gauntlet: he challenges her to a mystery solving contest. He’ll share information on his next case, and they’ll see who is the better mystery solver once and for all.

The next case comes along fairly quickly. A photographer known for taking portraits of wealthy ladies is found murdered in his home. Willow and James investigate the scene and discover that he was hit with a heavy brass vase. They delve further and discover that he also had a lucrative side business selling risqué photos on the black market. As they work on solving the case, James makes a somewhat damning discovery: The photographer’s diary indicates that he was well acquainted with Willow’s mother.

Though they are supposed to be solving a mystery, it quickly takes the backseat to the romance that is blossoming between them. Willow has never intended to get married. Her rigid adherence to the rules of society is rooted in her own past. Her mother is mentally ill, and her illness first manifested as free-spirited eccentricity. Willow is afraid that if she sets one toe out of line, she’ll be on the way to becoming her mother. She also feels that the burden of caring for her mother would preclude a relationship in the first place. Even though she has a brother and father who are willing to help, she is convinced that she can never marry or have a family. James also doesn’t intend to marry, but his reasons are less compelling. More or less, he doesn’t want to marry because he is the hero of a romance novel, and he’s not supposed to want to marry. Naturally, the two are attracted to each other almost immediately. After he fantasizes about Willow’s lush figure for awhile, he realizes that there’s only one honorable way for them to be together. Willow takes a lot more time to reach the same conclusion, and must be convinced that she is entitled to a life of her own. As she navigated through the beginnings of her relationship with James and attempts to solve the mystery on the side, her friends from the sleuthing club are there to help her.

I’ve spent plenty of time railing against characters who form clubs, mostly because they often seem childish and silly to me. Deciding you are never going to marry when you are seven and forming a club with like-minded friends that you still carry on with 20 years later has always sounded impossibly juvenile to me. That said, the Ladies’ Amateur Sleuthing Society is a cut above that kind of thing. While I found some of their methods hard to believe, at least it was a club with a purpose beyond avoiding marriage, and the members seemed to be fairly intelligent as far as heroines go. I liked them all better as the book went along, which again, is saying something.

Willow also improves markedly. I was inclined to dislike her on sight, mostly because of her initial interaction with James. I found it hard to believe that anyone would consider writing to a stranger and telling him how to do his job. It might make some sense if one of his cases had affected her personally, but her only connection was a cousin in Scotland Yard who let private information slip. I thought Willow’s criticism was completely out of line, and it took some time for me to get past it. Fortunately, she eventually realizes that her behvior was not appropriate, and that she didn’t have all the facts in hand. And while the explanation for her behavior smacked of modern psychology, at least it kind of made sense. I ended up liking her much more at the end of the book.

The problem is that even with these improvements, the book is really just average. You’ve read books like it before, and you’ll read more like it again. The relationship between James and Willow is predictable, and follows several turns that anyone can see coming a mile away. When exactly did it become obligatory for the hero to sleep with the heroine, propose in a non-romantic way, and get rejected? When nine out of ten historical romances follow this same pattern, it gets to be old pretty fast. Similarly, the mystery that set out to solve is just not all that interesting, and the reader never cares much who killed the photographer or why. The more interesting mystery is one about a gentleman thief that the sleuthing society is working on the side. Even though I’m pretty sure I know who he is already after one book, he’s definitely more interesting than a dead guy with a penchant for pornography.

With that in mind, I’d advise giving this one a pass. Even though it improves as it goes along, Tempted at Every Turn mostly just evokes that all-too-common “been there, read that” feeling.