When does a book cease to become an ambling, paced read and start to become a slow boat to nowhere? I’m not really sure when it happened here, all I know is that I began this book with interest, but rapidly lost all concentration and will to finish it after the first third. Excessive violence, purple prose, and even gratuitous, skanky villain sex didn’t help matters.

Rebecca Neville has attended an exclusive school for young ladies for many years, supported by a mysterious benefactor. When she tries to make her own way in the world as a governess, her stunning beauty works against her, and after only a month in the employ of a lecherous man, she ends up coshing him on the head and fleeing into the night. As she escapes, she meets a frail woman who has just given birth. The woman pays Rebecca’s passage to America, but ends up dying en route, leaving Rebecca as the guardian of her infant son, James.

Ten years later, the past comes back to haunt Rebecca when a solicitor shows up on her doorstep in Philadelphia. It turns out her son is heir to an earldom, and his father wants him back. Although Rebecca fears that someone in England will recognize her as a murderess, she feels that returning to his father would be the best thing for James. She accompanies him, wondering throughout the journey how she will ever get up the nerve to tell him that she’s not his real mother.

The Earl of Stanmore is everything Rebecca suspected he would be: proud, handsome, stubborn, and cold. After a few preliminary arguments, they agree that Rebecca will stay at Stanmore’s home for awhile so he can get to know his son. He thinks she’s a little protective, but she is unwilling to abandon him to a father he has never known. Naturally, an attraction between Rebecca and Stanmore ensues, with Stanmore first professing interest in an affair, and then realizing his feelings extend far beyond mere lust.

This all sounds like it could be an interesting plot. The Georgian period is a favorite with me, and I could relate to Rebecca and her love for the boy she considered her son. But although at least one well-known author touts this book’s ability to “make history come alive,” I saw little evidence of that. The brief part of the book set in Philadelphia could have been set any time between 1740 and 1820 for all the detail the authors included. You would never know from this book that there were any kind of rising tensions between the colonists and their mother country. It’s not much different once the characters get to England. Every now and then the authors would mention that someone was wearing a powdered wig, which would remind me that I was reading a Georgian romance rather than one set in the Regency.

Although the very slow pace of the book quickly became tiring, I think it was really the writing style that made the book drag all the more. The authors are far too fond of the ellipsis, and they constantly. . .add them in. . .where a comma or dash would be far more appropriate. Too many of them come from Rebecca, and they make her sound like she’s a little slow on the uptake. There is even one peculiar scene where the authors combine an ellipsis and an exclamation point – twice…! I’d never seen such punctuation before, but a couple of my fellow reviewers tell me it’s common in comic strips.

Add in some purple love scenes (do writers still need to use the word “orbs?”), really revolting sex and threats from a villainess (who seems like she’s going to be a major part of the plot but fades away completely with little explanation), and plenty of vivid descriptions of slave beatings and torture, and you have a read that’s problematic at best. This book has some good ideas, but it just isn’t one I can recommend. And even though Stanmore has a best friend who is carefully positioned for his own book…I doubt I’ll be reading that either.