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Tempting Danger*
Interesting Story and Characters, But…
Even though this is the sixth book of the series, I hadn’t read any of the previous Raven and Sinclair novels or any book by Wendy Vella. One thing in this book’s favor is that I did not feel lost not having read the other books; I was able to understand it and the characters completely without reference to any of the other books. I found the complex story and the couple at the heart of it to be fascinating to follow. The hero and the heroine are quite opposite, she a somewhat strident and sassy innocent and he a reforming rogue. Some dialogue and inner monologue were humorous at times.
But I definitely had some issues with this book. First of all, I absolutely hate it when I see an egregious grammar error in the first paragraph of the book. Since I had received an ARC copy, I looked at the first 10% on Amazon to make sure that this and other errors I was seeing in that section were in the published novel, and unfortunately, they were. This author ranks highly in historical romance and has so many published books, so I find myself disappointed that she either doesn’t get professional editing or has chosen a team that is not as well versed in proper English grammar, punctuation, and usage. Comma splices were all over the novel. The comma often required before a coordinating conjunction was either not used when it should have been or was used when it should NOT have been. Later in the book, even some spacing was wrong, as I found a contraction with a space after the apostrophe, which is just never done. I found these errors to be enough in number to be distracting. At times, I felt like I was just watching for the next mistake instead of enjoying the story. I am a copy editor, so this may be a hazard of the trade. I also thought that the dialogue was an odd combination of a somewhat stilted mimicking of Regency mixed with occasionally too modern phrases. So the dialogue quite often read awkwardly in my inner ear.
All in all, I liked the story and characters, but the other problems with the book detracted too much from my enjoyment of it.
