The Bargain Book

I enjoyed this enough to promptly go get another, despite my general preference for witty romantic comedy, of any era, over romantic melodrama. (Somebody needs to clone Jennifer Crusie.) This one definitely weighs in on the melodrama side, being a nice variant on the "convenient marriage" trope, where an heiress, in order to get control of her fortune, strikes a bargain with a dying British officer post-Waterloo. Unexpected consequences naturally ensue.

The reader coming over from other genres needs to be aware that Romance frequently uses a limited omniscient, not the strictly-one-viewpoint-per-scene third person they may be used to. Heyer is of course a master of omniscient, as are many other British writers. It is not head-hopping done by mistake, but rather, with deliberation, in pursuit of its goal of showing exactly how the relationship develops. In the Romance genre, the style may be used more or less smoothly depending on the skill of the writer. This was smooth enough for me.

Despite the book being a Regency, the author has an independent-enough voice not to seem like a Heyer pastiche that misses. (Heyer's style of wit tends to become twee or ponderous in other, later hands.) The style is straightforward without being anachronistic and, of course, the sex is explicit, not something found in earlier Regencies for, among other things, legal reasons of their times (which extended up through the 1960s - 70s, for those who came in late.) I rather approve the more modern mode, if not always its execution -- these stories are very much about women figuring out the mating dance, and sex is something that the female of the species, in my experience, does have to learn.

(I read the e-version of this.)