Debut author Michelle Marcos serves up a mixed bag with When a Lady Misbehaves. It has an original storyline with some good dialogue, but the improbability of the plot and the huge number of historical inaccuracies left me with an incredibly poor overall impression.

April Jardine is a brothel scullery maid with big dreams: dreams of having enough money to more than satisfy all her needs and of being accepted as a real lady. One day she comes across Madame's diary - written in French, but fortunately, April reads and writes both English and French. Quite a feat for a Whitechapel scullery maid, even if her father was a French chimney sweep. In this diary she discovers that Madame kept voluminous notes on her lovers and even had a child with one of them. April decides that her ticket out of Whitechapel is to approach the men named in the diary, each in turn, and claim to be their daughter. It works like a charm; each man is happy to give her money to go away, until she visits the Duke of Westbrook.

The duke surprises her, not by paying her off, but by welcoming her into his home as a daughter and changing his will to leave her a large legacy the very next day. Westbrook's younger son is also thrilled to have a sister and April quickly decides that this is what she really wants - not money, but a home and a family. She decides to stay, passing herself off as the duke's daughter and all is rosy until she meets Westbrook's elder son, Riley, the Marquess of Blackheath. Riley has studied law and is a judge, known for his strict adherence to the law and his fair rulings. He sees through April's charade the minute he meets her, seeming to be the only person to recognize that her feigned "posh" accent is not quite as posh as it should be.

Riley succeeds in exposing the truth to his father, and Westbrook is just as quick to thrust April away from his bosom as he was to clasp her to it mere days before, while Riley does a similar about face and is now attracted to her. A series of highly convoluted and incredible circumstances result in his introducing April as his ward and later, marrying her. These circumstances were clumsily written and felt completely manufactured to me. There is no way I believed that a smart, capable man like Riley could think of no alternative to making a brothel scullery maid the next Duchess of Westbrook. It is beyond Cinderella territory and I could not suspend my disbelief that far.

The last quarter of the book almost had me slamming it against the wall for its complete disregard for the practices of the time period. Without getting into too much spoiler detail, someone is arrested and put on trial the following day, only to be taken off the stand and a different defendant put into place. It was musical chairs there in the witness box, but the trial sailed right on and was concluded that same day. Please.

Add to this many touches that were Victorian, rather than Regency - for example, some of the slang used and the sounding of Big Ben (erected in the 1850s) in the distance - and you have an historical mess. Perhaps someone who isn't as much of a stickler as I am wouldn't notice or mind, but these kinds of things are so easy to check and get right, that when an author doesn't bother to do so, it smacks of laziness and a disdain for the reader's intelligence.

What did Marcos get right? I did sympathize with April's feelings of frustration with her circumstances and her desire for a better life. She took a risk writing a lying, blackmailing heroine, but while I sympathized with April, I had a hard time getting past her actions. There's some nice snappy dialogue between April and Riley, but I'm afraid that I never really felt any heat between them. In fact, while there is some heavy petting early on, the relationship is not consummated until very late in the book. Normally, this wouldn't bother me, but the fact that the only sex we do get is that of the villain - and, of course, we know she's the villain because the sex is skanky - only highlighted the lack of heat between April and Riley.

Let me put in a final word here about cover quotes. I know that they are tricky things, and are generically used from book to book, but this is Marcos's first book, so when Lisa Kleypas says, "Inventive, sexy and moving. Loaded with smolder and charm…I'll reach for anything by Michelle Marcos!", I have to think that she's talking about this book. I thought to myself, Oh, I love Lisa Kleypas, this bodes well. Well - it didn't. I started When a Lady Misbehaves ready to like it, only to finish with relief that it was over. I will never be drawn in by a cover quote again.