The Duke Gets Desperate

Quincy (The Marquess Makes His Move) launches her Sirens in Silk series with an overstuffed Victorian romance. In 1886 Yorkshire, Anthony “Strick” Carey, Duke of Strickland, has been disinherited. The entail having lapsed, Castle Tremayne, the Strickland family seat for 400 years, has been bequeathed to Strick’s stepmother’s cousin, Raya Darwish, an Arab-American businesswoman from New York. Ducal finances, already under stress, threaten to disintegrate unless Strick, who still owns the land around the castle, can come to terms with the interloper (“neither of us can exist without the other”), whose eye for “crass” profit is trumped only by her luscious curves and virago’s mouth. Quincy surrounds their Taming of the Shrew dynamic with stock bits of suspense—was the stepmother murdered? Is Raya next?—but these plot points are strewn erratically, quashing potential tension. Meanwhile, romance is too often reduced to lust: Strick, contemplating marriage with Raya, thinks, “The prospect of lots of good sex overcame the numerous obstacles.” It’s hard to swoon at such an observation. The Arab-American heroine, meanwhile, is a welcome face in a still overwhelmingly white genre, but she’s underserved by cookie-cutter characterization. The prospect of a series based on this setup is not encouraging. Agent: Kevan Lyon, Marsal Lyon Literary. (Sept.)