If you read a lot of short books – either Regencies or Series Romances – you begin to see just how difficult they are to write. How do you find a story that can be told perfectly in about 200 pages? The Wily Wastrel, April Kihlstrom’s latest Regency, illustrates this problem. The characters are inventive, and the plot is intriguing. But there’s really too much story here for the limited number of pages.

James Langford is known in the ton as a gambler and something of a dandy, but actually he is neither; he is a successful inventor trying to hide this “ungentlemanly pursuit” from his overbearing older brother. One night at the ball he and his friend notice a very unattractive young woman, Juliet Galsworth, dressed head to toe in frills and ruffles. Then James sees her smile and somehow cannot help himself, so he asks her to dance. While he dances with Juliet he realizes that she is intelligent and has a sense of humor, but he resolves to think no more about it.

However, two days later he finds himself calling at her home and inviting her for an outing. They go to a lending library, and James is astounded to discover that Juliet is looking for a mechanical text. Juliet is equally amazed when James, a man she thinks of as a mindless dandy, says that he has the text in his home. In order to prove that he is mechanically inclined, James takes Juliet to his workshop, where they become so engrossed in his inventions that they stay through the night and into the morning! When they arrive back at Juliet’s home her entire family and James’s older brother George are all waiting for them. The solution is obvious: James and Juliet must marry.

While neither had really thought much about marriage, they are both thrilled to find a sensible mate with similar mechanical interests. But all does not go smoothly. James is called upon by his brother to invent a system for sending signals across the English Channel, so he packs his bride off to Dover for a faux-honeymoon. For some reason he decides he can’t tell her about the experiments, so their relationship becomes strained as he goes off every night (to look at the stars, he says) and she follows him to see what he’s really doing. Eventually he realizes that she can be of help to him, and they come to an understanding about their relationship.

I really liked these characters, especially at the beginning. Juliet is interesting as she tries to hide her unladylike interest in things mechanical to appease her mother. Her mother hoped for a different sort of daughter, and still insists on dressing Juliet as if she were a petite, simpering miss, which of course she’s not. After she’s married she gets better clothes that suit her figure and coloring, but interestingly, she wears one of her beruffled nightmares whenever she wants people to underestimate her. James is also quite intriguing; I really liked the idea of a man who hated gambling trying to pass himself off as a wastrel in order to explain his substantial income from his inventions. The early interaction between the hero and heroine is very amusing, and the scenes where they discover the physical charms of marriage are fun.

The problem here is that Kihlstrom is really trying to tell two stories, and once they get to Dover, the book is altogether different. That’s not to say it’s bad, but the length of the book simply doesn’t support both the early comedy of manners plot and the later action/intrigue/war plot. Neither is quite adequately developed, so the book has a somewhat choppy feel to it. It would have been a better book if Kihlstrom had just chosen one plot or the other rather then trying to cram them both in.

This book is second in a trilogy about three brothers, but you don’t need to have read the first book to understand this one. However, the book does seem a bit like a bridge between the first and last stories, since the Dover/war plot is obviously a set up for the third brother’s story. It could be that if read together all the books are better, but I couldn’t help feeling that this one would have worked better as a full-length historical.