Generally, predictable with a jerk hero and a vaguely weak heroine. This one didn't capture my attention, but was well written. ( )

So-so story of English viscount finding out he's married to a beautiful young American who turns up on his doorstep. It should have been better but the hero bugged me.

http://ktleyed.blogspot.com/2012/01/married-to-viscount-by-sabrina-jeffries.html ( )

Married to the Viscount is, besides After the Abduction, the weakest of the Swanlea Spinsters books. The plot is overly contrived, its convolutions exacerbated by the hero's ridiculous hang-ups - which create some misunderstandings that are decidedly irksome. Thanks to his meddlesome brother, Spencer Law finds himself married to Abby Mercer, a girl from Philadelphia he had met months earlier when he and his brother had visited to look into buying her father's ailing medicine business. Without Spencer knowing, his brother marries Abby for him by proxy, and then disappears when Abby shows up in England thinking to be welcomed by her new husband. She and Spencer had gotten along nicely in America and so she thinks he's nice and wonderful and is half in love with him already. In England though, he’s a cold, remote viscount, and so she’s hurt and confused.

Spencer likes her a lot too, but, because of the aforementioned ridiculous hang-ups, he's sworn never to marry – if his marriage phobia/martyrdom is clichéd, his reasons are a little different at least. But he goes about trying to extricate himself from this unwanted marriage in the stupidest manner possible – always going back and forth and putting Abby through the wringer. He wants her, he doesn't want her. He treats her like crap. He shags her. He tries to get rid of her. He needs her so desperately he blackmails her (more than once) to stay. The stupid man doesn't know what he wants and Abby suffers for it. For more than half the book she labors under the misapprehension that the hero doesn't like her, that he disparages her and is ashamed of her because she's a lowly gauche American. So she tries to become the perfect English lady for him. She presents a bit of a quandary, because you would think her sad efforts to please him would mean she has no backbone. But she does, more through words than actions I guess. And when she finally understands the nature of Spencer's overblown trust issues, she sticks to her guns and won't let him dictate everything.

I find myself smiling through their flirting and their fighting. At times they're like randy teenagers and are too cute for words. At other times Spencer's treatment of Abby borders on the dark and twisted, if you can believe it. I feel like Marriage to the Viscount can't decide what kind of book it wants to be. The plot is all over the place. And it's obsessed with children - the desire for children is the deal breaker of their marriage. Which is all well and good, but the way it's handled turns the issue into another one of Spencer's stupid hang ups - and they are stupid. The book admits it and tells us so. It gets worse when we find out at the end, thanks to some simple explanations that would have spared us this silly story, that Spencer had nothing to worry about in the first place. He duped himself, and the reader in the process, and, even though it's pretty obvious where the story is going from the beginning, I don't take kindly to the attempted duping. Married to the Viscount has some nice moments interspersed throughout, but the hero's actions, the heroine's passivity and lack of character, and the contrived, overly elaborate plot overwhelmed those few enjoyable scenes. And what a bizarre cover! Especially considering there's never any episode like it that I can recall. ( )

The fourth book in a series, The Swanlea Spinsters. The book really stands alone as really loosely related to the other books in the set. A unique story, however, and Sabrina Jeffries is always excellent. ( )

This book, while enjoyable, is not one of Sabrina Jeffries' best. The plot is good enough, and the characters are not cardboard cut-outs, but there just wasn't very much from this book that stayed with me. Abigail is supposedly half Native American - this is introduced but then she does very little with it, which was a bit dissapointing. Spencer is a good enough hero - and I like when the heroes of books are actually involved in politics - but I'm not really sure his "dark secret" is dark enough to be the basis for the conflict in the book. Anyway, it's a good enough read, and enjoyable. ( )