A game of patience Book

This review contains spoilers, but to explain why I am so disapointed in what starts off as a promising story it is necessary to reveal some of the increasingly annoying and ridiculous plot.
This story is full of anachronisms! For example the heroine (Patience) is constantly alone with men, who are not close relatives all the time, with nary a chaperone in sight and in the city too, not the country where rules of propriety amongst family friends were more relaxed. She even attends a funeral, when women in those days ( certainly not aristocratic ones anyway) did not, most especially when it was the funeral of a prominent man, her father would never have countenanced such a public breach of propriety.
As well as anachronisms the book is peppered with various annoying romantic novel tropes. The heroine is portrayed as intelligent, but like so many heroines in similar tales she is unable to see that the man she is infatuated with (Pip) is a selfish, immature, unkind and deceitful rakehell. Yet she knows he thoughtlessly dismissed a very young servant because he tired of the novelty he offered and she knows he is a poor friend to their loyal life long friend Richard and she also knows how callous he can be about others suffering.
Added to this she knows he is a poor loser and that he keeps close company with Lady Wilmington an attractive woman married to a much older man, yet foolishly she imagines that it is their mutual friend Richard who is attached to this woman (despite his denial of this) and not that Pip is in fact the woman's lover.
No one could be as blind to Pip's faults as she is, or as ignorant of Richard's affections for her and of course she never comes straight out and asks either of them if they love her! Not even when her mother asks Patience if Richard is in love with her.
Her confusion and silliness would work in a broad farce, but it is misplaced in what is supposed to be a serious Regency romance.
The scene where Lady Wilmington explains Pip is in love with her and Richard is in love with Patience could be a scene straight out of a rather unfunny comedy, the heroine totally believes she has been told the opposite of what the other woman actually means.
The heroine is young to be sure, but she's not stupid except where Pip and Richard are concerned and the seduction scene between the heartless Pip and the obliging heroine near the end of the book, only moments after he has told her he is marrying Lady Wilmington is the height of poor taste and full of clumsy, crude, yet supposedly sexy seduction lines, which frankly make Pip sound like a randy school boy, not a sophisticated. Regency gent, or alternatively (now I come to think of it) they both sound like characters in one of the weaker 'Carry on' movies. Instead of the naive Patience and dashing Pip, their dialogue leads me to picture a lascivious Sid James and a young Barbara Windsor in full on Dollybird mode.
The reader just ends up disliking Patience for being so shallow and playing Doctor's with the pretty boy Pip before she presents her somewhat 'ruined' self to Richard, whose only major flaw is loving the unworthy heroine.
Yet another rather badly plotted element of the tale is the revealing of the two 'villains', it happens only because of an extremely hard to believe decision by the female villain. She rusticates for months so she can secretly give birth to a baby and then having gone to the great trouble to remove herself from London society and distance herself from the baby she birthed she then has the child transported to London, no doubt in one is the family carriages!
Once transported to the metropolis she then sends said baby, in the care of one of her liveried servants, to be deposited at a foundling home in London, one that her fiancé has been persuaded to patronise! Not only an amazing coincidence but very strange, perhaps she does this because such places aren't actually scattered about all over the country? Perhaps, only London had orphans and unwanted children in Regency times!
It's such a disappointment, if the the heroine acted more like a real person, if the maddening anachronisms were absent, and the plot less holey and if the nasty seduction scene was not included, it might actually have been quite good, but it's not.