Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Ever since he was a child, Alec John Landers, Earl of Sherbourne, has made annual visits with his mother to Gilmuir in Scotland to spend time with his grandfather, who is laird to the MacRae clan. When in Scotland, they don’t acknowledge his English side; instead, he’s known as Ian MacRae and allowed to run wild with all the other MacRae children. Along the way, he develops a boyish tendre for the beautiful and feisty Leitis MacRae. Then on his eleventh birthday, his mom pulls classic Too Stupid To Live shit: she goes off riding alone, despite warnings of recent raids by the rivaling Drummond clan. Of course, beautiful Moira Landers nee MacRae is found dead that same day, presumably killed by the Drummonds. In a fit of pre-pubescent angst, Alec disowns the Scottish side of family and declares hatred of all things Scottish forever.

Fast forward to July of 1746. It’s only three months after the extremely bloody Battle of Culloden. Alec is now a highly regarded colonel in the British army, decorated by none other than the Duke of Cumberland himself. And just as Cumberland was known as “Butcher Cumberland” (and not for his love of a good cut of steak, if you know what I mean), Alec has earned the sobriquet Butcher of Inverness. The Disarming Act is being reinforced with great zeal in Scotland (although I think Ranney might’ve meant the Act of Proscription, which wasn’t enacted until August 1746) and Scots can be jailed for playing the bagpipes, wearing a kilt or a tartan, speaking Gaelic, or expressing any other features unique to Gaelic culture. And oh wondrous fate, Alec finds himself assigned to head the brand-spankin’ new fort that’s been built right next to Gilmuir Castle.

Things are a mess on MacRae land. The clan, which used to number hundreds of people, is now down to a few dozen starving members. Alec’s childhood sweetheart, Leitis, is alone in the world except for her cranky uncle Hamish. And Hamish isn’t much help or comfort: he stubbornly insists on doing assheaded things like play the bagpipes, which inevitably sends a swarm of English soldiers down from the nearby Fort William to punish the whole village for harboring a criminal. Alec arrives at the village just as the English soldiers, headed by the suitably villainous and ugly Major Sedgewick (they’re always ugly, if they’re not they end up reforming and getting their own sequel), are burning the houses down in an attempt to get the people to reveal where Hamish is hiding.

Alec is sickened by the destruction and orders the fire put out, then has Leitis put under his protection under the guise of using her as a hostage to guarantee Hamish’s future good behavior. He doesn’t dare reveal that he’s really Ian MacRae and no longer quite as fervent in his hatred of the Scots. As for Leitis, she thinks he’s OMG hot and vaguely familiar-looking, but also an Evil Swinish English Oppressor. But dammit, he keeps doing nice things like saving the village and treating her well while she’s under captivity. What’s a poor romance novel heroine to think?

And here’s where the plot gets a little bit silly: Alec decides he needs to do more to help the MacRaes, so he dons a nifty little half-mask, wears all-black clothing, calls himself the Raven and with Leitis’s help starts stealing army supplies from under the soldiers’ very noses and distributing them (the supplies, not the soldiers’ noses) to the village. Besides the rather mind-boggling risks they take and the incredible incompetence the English army shows, one can’t help but wonder why romance heroines (and superhero girlfriends) are so susceptible to being hoodwinked by the flimsiest disguises. But to Ranney’s credit, she quite convincingly portrays how Leitis is fooled. Leitis also can’t quite shake the feeling that the Raven is somebody familiar to her, so she’s not completely brain-dead.

Of course, all hell breaks loose when Leitis finds out who the Raven really is. But the resolution to all the troubles and dilemmas they face (both as a couple, and as a clan) are worked out satisfyingly by the end, and I was very pleasantly surprised by the solution that Alec came up with.

Ranney pulls no punches in describing the privations the MacRaes suffer, and this is probably one of the best features of the book. You get a pretty good sense of how horribly the Highlanders suffered under the British regime after their defeat at Culloden. Some reviewers on Amazon.com complained about how this aspect interfered with their happy fantasyland, but those people are pussies, don’t listen to them. Oh, and nobody in the book speaks in an idiotic brogue. Big, big props to Ranney for avoiding that particular pitfall.

The two main characters are quite well-rendered, Alec more so than Leitis in my opinion. We see how his feelings about the Scots evolve from his impulsive, childish hatred to something a lot more compassionate and complex. Leitis is a pretty standard Feisty Romance Heroine, ready to defy death for the sake of her pride and sassing the hero every chance she gets, but hey, she didn’t annoy me too much, which is a lot more than I can say about most Feisty Romance Heroines.

So anyway, if you like Ranney’s books but you were feeling nervous about the whole Scottish aspect, don’t be—she doesn’t disappoint. I, for one, really enjoyed reading this book. Even the sillier aspects of the plot are treated with some depth and respect. On the other hand, if you like romances that are all love and bunnies and roses or Scottish protagonists who say shit like “ye ken, wee lassie?” all the time, this might not be your cuppa.

Notes:
The Highland Lords novels, in the order in which they were published:

One Man’s Love
When the Laird Returns
The Irresistible MacRae
To Love a Highland Lord
So In Love

Why do romance novel titles suck so hard?

The Unsung Hero has four stories entwined in the plot – yup, you read that right. Four. The main story is the romance between Lieutenant Tom Paoletti and Dr. Kelly Ashton. Paoletti spend key moments of his badass teenage years prior to his enlisting in the Navy living on the Ashton estate outside of Boston. His uncle, Joe, was Kelly’s father gardener, and young Tom had it bad for Kelly, who had it equally bad for him. After a hot and horny kiss and an invitation to meet later in the treehouse (and how on earth that would be comfortable is beyond me) Paoletti smells the coffee before he climbs that treehouse ladder, realizes that young Kelly is jailbait, and hightails it out of town, joining the Navy and spending the next sixteen years ascending through the ranks to commander of an elite SEAL team.

In the beginning of the novel, Lt. Paoletti sustains one mother of a head injury and is placed on a month’s medical leave pending psychological evaluation. As he flies into Logan to spend his leave with his uncle Joe on the Ashton estate, he thinks he sees an international terrorist in the baggage claim, and is convinced that either he’s just seen the impossible, or his head injury has rendered him utterly insane.

Now, as an aside, I completely believe that there are terrorists in Logan airport. Hell, two of the September 11th flights took off from Logan, and one from Newark, the airport I fly in and out of regularly. So there was no suspension of reality required on my part that a terrorist would be claiming his luggage at Logan, though in this novel, the idea that Lt. Paoletti may or may not be non compos mentis is part of the tension in the plot.

Dr. Kelly Ashton has come home to live with her father, Charles, who has been diagnosed with “cancer of the everywhere,” and is trying to reconnect with him emotionally as he lives out his last weeks. Charles is in the midst of a doozy of a fight with his gardener and best friend, Joe Paoletti, Tom’s uncle. The 50th anniversary of the Fighting 55th Regiment’s battle in Nazi-occupied France is being celebrated by their town the following week, and Joe is participating in a newspaper interview about the heroic rescue of the 55th, made possible by OSS spies living and hiding in the occupied French town of St. Helene.

Kelly and Tom don’t know what to make of the ongoing battle between Joe and Charles, who have been friends for 50 years any more than they know what to make of the electric attraction between them. Neither was aware of Joe and Charles’ roles in the battle that marked a turning point in WWII, or that Joe and Charles had even been in France during the war. Neither man is speaking about it, or speaking to each other for that matter, leaving Tom and Kelly to try to manage Charles’ health, Joe’s sudden temper, and their own emotional storms. As the novel progresses, Joe and Charles reminisce about the events leading up to the 55th Regiment’s battle with the Nazis, and the reasons why neither man ever spoke of the war after they returned to Boston together, Charles to his ancestral home, and Joe as his newly-hired gardener and already-established best friend.

The third story operating between Kelly, Tom, Joe, and Charles is that of Tom’s niece, Mallory, who is followed in the park one day by a shy, geeky young college student named David Sullivan who wants to photograph and sketch Mallory for his graphic novel. Mallory is the daughter of the town ho, and as such is wary of anyone who shows interest in her, assuming the allure is her physique, a feature that she inherited from her mother, and the idea that she might be an easy conquest, a habit that she did not inherit from her mother. Since David wants Mallory to pose in a bikini with another attractive college student, Mallory is first suspicious, then intrigued. Their story is an adorable encounter of young love between two people who are just beginning to define who they are, and who they want to be.

The plot that pulls these three stories together is that of a terrorist possibly on the loose in a small Boston suburb. As Lt. Paoletti encounters this man several times over the span of a week, he begins to believe that his suspicious are correct, and a terrorist presumed dead for years has surfaced. But since Tom can’t pinpoint why this man has surfaced, what he wants, or why he’s there, and he can’t cull together sufficient evidence to convince his superiors that the situation warrants attention and immediate action, Tom is forced to both question his own sanity and ability to lead his team of SEALS, and to pull together a makeshift team of any and all available officers who are willing to sacrifice their time off to come to his aid.

And herein begins the story of Sam and Alyssa, which I first encountered in a later novel, after Sam and Alyssa had acknowledged and done some horizontal damage to attempt to alleviate the explosive attraction between them. Sam Starrett and Alyssa Locke are part of Tom’s assembled team, and watching the beginning of a relationship that I already knew would carry forward into the backstories of subsequent novels before climaxing in a novel of their own was both a pleasure in terms of the entertainment, and a lesson in how a good writer keeps the reader interested. I know novels like the “Outlander” series carry backstories forward into other works that focus on other couples, but this was my first encounter with a plotline that I knew would continue for several volumes, and seeing its inception was lovely. If it was indeed the inception of the Sam and Alyssa storyline – as I said, I found conflicting reports about which novel marked the “start” of the plot.

The terrorist story drives the Sam & Alyssa, Mallory & David, Joe & Charles, and Tom & Kelly stories sufficiently with enough pace and twisty turns to keep me interested, and I started this book on the airplane from the Dominican Republic on Friday, and finished it early Sunday morning, after tackling a botched pickup at the airport, and then coming home to a house with no heat, and a delayed trip to pick up the dog at the boarders. If I’d been on vacation still, I could have read through this book in an afternoon, not because it was easy, but because the plot was tough and scary and demanded my attention. I never got distracted or confused, even though names like “Tom,” “Joe,” and “Charles,” are rather bland and can easily get mixed up before one comes to know the characters.

However, the strengths of the plot are not enough to cover two flaws that prevent me from giving this book an A rating. One, too many romance novels rely on a “big misunderstanding” device to push the heroine and hero apart and then together again. Kelly and Joe suffer something of a “big misunderstanding” plotline in the late middle of the book, mostly because both people neglect to be honest about their feelings, even though they’ve been honest and downright forthcoming about other issues, including Tom’s possible sighting of a terrorist in town, and his fears that his head injury has scrambled his mental eggs.

Second, I could tell the minute the full plot was divulged exactly why the sighted terrorist might have found motivation to be in a sleepy Boston suburb, and I had a hard time accepting why Tom didn’t also immediately identify the motive. I mean, if this guy is smart enough to extract politically connected socialites form hostile countries with a Plan Alpha, and a Plan Beta, how’d he miss such an obvious reason for a terrorist to be in town? I won’t say more, but the fact that the hero, a military leader, had such a giant blind spot for the sake of plot development did not sit well with me. But then, I get pissed off when television show characters do things I find inconsistent with their personalities, and spend a lot of time yelling a the screen.

However, the themes of the novel, and the characters themselves were enough to ensure that, unlike some of the books I brought with me, this book came back home with me, and was not donated to the resort library. Brockmann’s exploration of love, risk, choice, heroism and bravery in everyday and in exceptional circumstances was fascinating, and I’m going to rearrange my BooksFree queue to include some of the other books in the “Tall, Dark, and Dangerous” series.