I have glass-fronted box full of Marion Chesney/M. C. Beaton regency romances that bears the inscription: “Break In Case Of Flu”. *cough cough* The closest thing to being asleep is to watch Murder She Wrote, but reading Chesney’s books is a close second.
However, this is the worst book of hers that I’ve ever read. It’s also probably the longest of her regency romances? And that doesn’t work for Chesney at all, because her approach to structure is to just not have any: She establishes a situation, and then just goes through various permutations until she has enough pages (usually about 170) and then in the final chapter, the evil miscreants all die because of various misfortunes, and the protagonists get married. The end!
This is perfect for when you have a fever, because you don’t have to think at all. But in this book, Chesney just flounders — there’s about a dozen attempts on the heroine’s life, and the heroine and her intended break up about the same number of times. It’s just incredibly tedious, and I gave up on the book about reading three quarters of it, because I decided that I just didn’t care at all.
Indeed.
I do think that if you cut this down to Chesney’s usual length, it wouldn’t have been all bad, though — there’s some scenes here that are even more satisfyingly ludicrous than usual, and that’s saying a lot. Did Chesney feel that she had so interesting characters that she could do a Wodehouse and putter along amiably or something? Bewildering.
Regency Gold (1980) by Marion Chesney (buy used, 3.43 on Goodreads)