The Untamed Bride (Black Cobra Series #1) Book

There's this evil club in India known as the Black Cobra club, and they're killing more people than the British government is comfortable with. So this group of Manly Men is tasked with beheading the snake or something. 42 page prologue later, and 4 Manly Men are still alive (one wasn't quite Manly enough, seriously) and they have Important Evidence and must make it back to England before Shit Goes Down.

Del is the hero. He's a colonel; he's tall and handsome and authoritative. Deliah is the heroine. She's a Ruined lady; she's tall and beautiful and stubborn. Because of Lust, he ends up taking her along on his ~mission and they have torrid, overly-descriptive sex and eventually fall in love.

1. I legitimately laughed out loud when Del & company showed up at the Cynster's house and the bunch of them were described. How dreadful for Laurens, to line up all your various characters throughout the years and be able to sum them up as all tall and handsome and authoritative! How ridiculous that in the 7? 8? 10? couples present in the final chapters, none of them stand out at all. I couldn't even keep the hero straight from the rest of them once Demon and Devil and Dave and Dexter were thrown into the pot. Come on.

1.5. On a similar note, the ladies. None of them looked the same, but they were all "confident, assured and assertive, not afraid to state their opinions and make their wishes known." Which--great? It's ... forward thinking (for the time period) and whatever, but it's also so dull. I kept wanting a Milly to offset all the Strong, Determined Women.

Ultimately: I love Strong, Determined Women, but when I can't tell one wife from another (except by their ridiculous names), there's something immensely flawed with your characterizations.

2. The prose needed a thorough revision. While I get that sentence fragments are ultimately a stylistic choice, there's style and then there's beating your reader over the head with them until they forget what a subject-verb agreement looks like.

3. Didn't care about the sex even remotely. I scanned all the sex scenes looking for dialogue tags and ultimately realized that no, the hero wasn't about to ~tell the heroine how he felt--he was going to bang it into her. Repeatedly. Forcefully. Authoritatively.

Gross.