Julia Reviews Duke of My Heart by Kelly Bowen

Title/Author: Duke of My Heart by Kelly Bowen

Publisher/Year Published: Jan 2016 by Forever

How I got this book: I received a review copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Why I read this book: The summary really intrigued me. How could I not want to give it a try?

Rating: 5 stars

Summary

Captain Maximus Harcourt, the unconventional tenth Duke of Alderidge, can deal with tropical storms, raging seas, and the fiercest of pirates. But he's returned home from his latest voyage to find a naked earl—quite inconveniently deceased—tied to his missing sister's bed. And he has only one place to turn. Now he's at the mercy of the captivating Miss Ivory Moore of Chegarre & Associates, known throughout London for smoothing over the most dire of scandals.

Miss Moore treats the crisis as though it were no more serious than a cup of spilt tea on an expensive rug. As though this sort of thing happened on the job every day. Max has never in all his life met a woman with such nerve. Her dark eyes are too wide, her mouth is too full, her cheekbones too sharp. Yet together, she's somehow...flawless. It's just like his love for her, imperfect, unexpected—yet absolutely true.

Review

I have a problem. I am really, really picky on my historical romance novel authors. I rarely try new ones, and when I do the hook has to be good. When I read the summary for Duke of My Heart, I knew I had to give it a shot, and I am glad that I did.

Max and Ivory were super interesting characters. First, you have a hero running away from his lot in life, and coming back to everything in shambles. Then you have Ivory, a woman who built herself from the ground up and continues to adapt and shape her life regardless of what twists and turns life has thrown at her. They meet in the most odd of circumstances, in his sister’s room with a dead naked man tied to her bed and the sister missing. I mean that plot thread right there is enough to get me to want to read on.

The story takes place around finding out what happened to the Duke’s sister. It moves through this at a good pace, though I will say it seemed at times there was a lot going on. At one point you are following thread A and now all of a sudden thread F comes out of nowhere and we are on that train now! But honestly that was a minor quibble and wasn’t enough to distract me from liking and devouring this book.

I really enjoyed the characters, especially the fact that they didn’t lose their sense of themselves as they fell in love. It sometimes frustrates me when the hero or heroine makes a complete 180 by the power of love. I like to see how they grow and change, and grapple with the things that are happening. We get that here.

This was my first book by Kelly Bowen, as I mentioned, and I definitely want to pick up the next in this series

Thanks to Forever and Netgalley for the review copy of this book.