Sometimes I’m tempted to come up with a Letterman-type top ten list when I’m reading a book for review. Something like “You know it’s a bad sign when…” I’m sure you could fill in the blank with any number of romance clichés. Maybe because I had hoped for something else, Mary Reed McCall’s latest surprised me because I found all too many of them in The Crimson Lady. And that’s not even the problem. Many romance authors reuse plot elements. In this case, it’s not just that she uses them, each and all; it’s that each is used in an entirely predictable and heavy-handed fashion.

Fiona Byrne is the titular character, better known as Giselle de Coeur, the Crimson Lady and “the most desirable courtesan and notorious thief in all of England.” She grew up in the stewes of London and at the age of 15 was sold to Kendrick de Lacy, Lord Draven, who forced her to become his lover and a faux prostitute (more on that later). After several years with Draven, she escaped, joined Will Singleton and his band of thieves, and after saving enough money, gave up her life as the Crimson Lady to become Fiona Byrne, a shop owner in London. That disguise fails her when Braedan de Cantor shows up on her doorstep and demands her help.

Braedan’s father was a sheriff for the King. After he died, Braedan’s uncle arranged to have Braedan declared a traitor and outlaw. Now Braedan is on the run and determined to find his foster sister, Elizabeth, whom his uncle sold off as a prostitute. He believes the notorious Crimson Lady is the only person who’ll be able to help in his search, tracks her down (don’t even get me started on how easily he does this) in her shop, and blackmails her into not only helping him get ready to search for Elizabeth, but into funding the expedition as well.

I initially liked the idea of Fiona’s character. She’s described as a former courtesan and I thought what a nice change it’d be to have an experienced woman as the heroine in a historical romance. A few pages into the book and I realized that my initial hopes would be dashed. Yes, Fiona was Draven’s mistress for a number of years, but that’s the extent of it. She never slept with any of the legions of men in her past. Instead Draven dosed the men with a secret sleeping potion. As Draven wanted to keep her all to himself while making money on the side, each man only thinks he had sex with the famous courtesan.

A disappointing scenario, not because I wanted Fiona to have slept with hundreds of men, but because it was such a romance cliché way of getting the character out of it. She’s a wildly experienced heroine. Ah, but not really. She’s really an innocent led astray by the evil villain and eleven years later is still thinking things like “sooner or later she would once again need to face the man who had stolen her innocence and corrupted her beyond redemption” and “some unfettered part deep inside screamed out in the agony of it, mourning anew all that she’d long ago given up hope of having for her own.”

Which leads me to the second part of the disappointment. Draven treated her badly, very, very badly. But Fiona thinks and acts like such a victim, and I’ll repeat, it’s 11 years later, that any empathy gets lost in the mire of her “woe is me” attitude. Couple that with Braedan’s unnecessarily nasty treatment of her (the woman who is helping him and endangering herself in the process) and for a good part of the first half of the book and I was ready to begin my Top Ten list.

Other items on the list would include an over-the-top villain who is mean and nasty just for the sake of being mean and nasty, Braedan’s unbelievably convoluted plan to find Elizabeth and revenge himself on Draven (which, coincidentally, allows him to meet and fall in love with Fiona), the scene where Braedan could solve all their problems but doesn’t because his honor won’t allow it, the scene where Fiona makes a choice anyone could see is forced and Braedan believes it, the climactic scenes where all is resolved in farfetched fashion – and the list goes on.

By the time I finished reading The Crimson Lady, I was extremely frustrated and impatient. There were, however, enough scenes between Fiona and Braeden (after he stops being nasty to her and before a ridiculous misdirection) that showed the couple as something other than Medieval, cookie-cutter characters that the book never hit the wall. But there weren’t enough of these moments to make this more than a chore to read.