Seeing a Regency Romance with the title The Madcap Marriage, one might logically expect a light and funny farce like those Barbara Metzger writes so well. But if a reader buys Lane’s latest thinking to settle down and laugh, she’ll be very disappointed. This is a dark and often violent book with characters who are complex and not easy to like.

Helen St. James is an only child and heiress to her late father’s immense fortune – her uncle Steven only inherited the title. Steven is insane with jealousy and hatred and, as the book begins, he attempts to force Helen to marry his evil son Dudley. He has her trapped and is beating her, but Helen evades him, jumps out the window, and escapes with cuts, bruises, and a nasty lump on the head.

Meanwhile, Rafe Thomas is fighting bitterly with his father, Lord Hillcrest. The man is bound and determined that Rafe will marry the neighbor’s daughter – and Rafe is just as determined not to marry the girl. Rafe swears he will marry the first woman he meets on the street and storms out. He gets drunk, he runs into the injured and distraught Helen, and they marry. She needs rotection and Rafe wants to get back at his father (and he’s drunk).

Now, isn’t that a fine way to begin a relationship? But I’ve read books where the marriage begins under worse auspices so I read on. Rafe tries to connsumate the marriage, and Helen is willing, but she screams from the pain in her head (and remember, he’s drunk) so they postpone the matter. Next day they begin on a relationship which is half suspicion, half lust that lasts for most of the book:

Helen: “He’s just a fortune hunter, he only wants my money. But he is so handsome, and I want his body now!”

Rafe: “She has money. My mother had money and my father hated her for it. But honor demands I go through with the marriage. But she is so beautiful, and I want her body now!”

The above is not directly taken from the book, but you get the idea. The secondary characters are all intertwined with Rafe and Helen. Her cousin Dudley fought Rafe at school and left his cheek scarred, her first suitor Alex is the man from whom Rafe won 10,000 guineas, which he used to build a fortune about which he has not bothered to tell his father or the ton. (That little plot point is still totally inexplicable.) Rafe’s best friend Lord Alquist, who just died under suspicious circumstances involving Steven, is/was Helen’s guardian, and Lady Alquist is Rafe’s aunt. Even the servants have connections. Now, I don’t fuss too much at coincidences, but what are the odds that two total strangers would have so many mutual connections? Acquaintances, perhaps – the aristocracy was a small world – but this was too much for me to swallow.

This is a book filled with violence, something you don’t come across every day in a traditional Regency. Both Dudley and Sir Steven think nothing of beating Helen, and calling her a bitch. When Rafe introduces Helen to his father, the man spits in her face and calls her a whore. Rafe is attacked, knifed, and shot. Helen fights back as well, and does not flinch at shooting a man. There is so much fighting, I felt at times I was in Gentleman Jackson’s salon. When Helen and Rafe aren’t fighting off someone, they are alternately glowering with suspicion or smoldering with lust. I could have understood their constant suspicion if it hadn’t been for the fact that they do talk, to each other and the Alquists, and they know each other’s circumstances, but they stubbornly persist in believing the worst about each other.

I have read almost all of Allison Lane’s Regencies and for the most part I have enjoyed them. Her Regencies are dark in tone and treat Society as a great monster ready to pounce on and destroy the innocent. Her characters often begin their relationship under less than favorable circumstances and spend a large part of the book suspicious of each other (The Rake’s Rainbow). In the short, traditional Regency format, this is not usually a problem, but this is a longer Super Regency and I got tired of the distrust. Had this book been a shorter Regency, I might – just might – have been able to understand Rafe and Helen, but the misunderstanding and suspicion between them went on and on and on till I half believed I would turn the page and find them fighting, spitting, calling each other names, and then it would be pistols at dawn.

Even though the distrust between Rafe and Helen droned on and the coincidences piled up, Allison Lane’s storytelling abilities remain in evidence. The book is well paced, exciting, even, until toward the end when she piles on surprise after surprise. Helen and Rafe are a passionate couple, and if only they hadn’t stayed so darn pigheaded for so long, I know I would have liked them very much.

This book by far is not an example of Allison Lane at her best, but if you would like to try her as an author, I can recommend The Rake’s Rainbow, or her trilogy about the Seabrook family, The Notorious Widow, The Rake and The Wallflower, and The Purloined Papers. Those books give a good example of her talent for telling a Regency tale on the dark side of the genre.