Reviews for The Untamed Bride (Black Cobra Series #1)

The average rating for The Untamed Bride (Black Cobra Series #1) based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-11-15 00:00:00 Hubertus Peter Cue rant... I've just finished reading Stephanie Laurens' new book - The Untamed Bride - book one in the Black Cobra series. I really enjoyed it, like the premise of four heroes each racing back to England with important information that must reach the Duke of Wolverstone (aka Daziel from the Bastion Club) aided by characters from the Bastion series and all of the Cynster cousins. Talk about putting all your apples in one cart! But it worked, mostly. I don't know if it's just me, but I do like historical accuracy in my Historical Romance novels, as in any other historical novel I read - and in this one, Laurens' for me, dropped a clanger. It probably won't mean much to the majority of readers of her books, or indeed to this review, but her main characters, Del Delborough and Deliah Duncannon both hail from an area known as the Wolds, he from Middleton on the Wolds, which is great I thought, it's not far from where I live! Then she dropped the clanger by consistenly saying it was in Humberside - all throughout the novel this jarred, and I admit if I hadn't have been enjoying the plot, I would have chucked the book away in disgust - it's sloppy research. Humberside as an administrative county only existed between the years of 1974 and 1996, until then and indeed afterwards it has always been in the East Riding of Yorkshire! In 1822, the year in which the novel is set, Humberside wasn't even used as a descriptive for the area around the Humber, it was either Yorkshire or for the south bank Lincolnshire! As I was reading the novel I then started to question the rest of the historical geographic information, so far haven't found any other clangers there. I was reminded of the other time Laurens sloppy research annoyed me, it was in one of the Bastion books, and they were trying to find out who the bad guy was, they had a name but nothing else - so what did they do, but go to St Catherine House to search for his birth! No, no, no. This book was set in 1816, general registration in England didn't start until 1837 - before that births were only recorded if someone was baptised, and that information in 1816 would still be in the individual churches, so I can see whey Laurens did it - and St Catherine's House as the deposit for birth registrations didn't start until 1970, before then they were held at Somerset House on the Strand in London from 1837-1970. - Sorry, I'm a genealogist, so that misinformation really annoys me!! I mean, I accept that for HR novels, the characters, usually members of the British Aristocracy are made up, the Dukes of St Ives and Wolverstone weren't real Dukedoms, and I accept that, they are fiction. But it's were historical accuracy is needed is around the period that the books are set in, so if a book is set in 1816 or whenever, then only those places that existed historically in 1816 etc. should be mentioned, etc. Anyway, rant over!

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-11 00:00:00 Johnny Tpoau 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.