The Lady Loves Danger by Anabelle Bryant | ARC Review

Series: Maidens of Mayhem, #2
Traits & Tropes: mystery; government work; illegitimate hero; class difference
Publication Date: 05.31.22
Genre/Setting: Historical; Regency; London, England, 1817
Heat Level: 2
Rating: 2/5

Lady Delilah Ashbrook has been devoting her time and resources to finding Oliver, the son of her lady’s maid and friend, who disappeared while in her care. Afraid he’ll be sold, Delilah accepts the help of the Maidens of Mayhem when they approach her to offer their aid. Her efforts also bring her into contact with Sebastian St. Allen, a mysterious man who’s also trying to locate missing and stolen children. Given his access to many more resources than Delilah has, she accepts his help but not his attempts to keep her on the sidelines of the search.

Sebastian's attempts to help the children of the street are personal for him and he uses his experience to seamlessly navigate London’s seediest streets and grandest ballrooms. Having always eschewed personal relationships, he finds himself unprepared for his own reaction to Delilah. Her headstrong independence infuriates him as much as it attracts him, and he can’t help but want to be closer to her. As they work together to get to the bottom of things, it becomes clear to both of them that they’ve come to need each other as well.

I wanted to love this book, especially since I really enjoy some mystery and suspense in my romance, but sadly this one just didn’t work for me, for several reasons. Mostly, I found Delilah to be absolutely infuriating. She did and said a lot of things in the name of being an independent woman that were just nonsensical. She was annoyed at having to accept help from a man when she should’ve just been grateful to have help at all, especially after she ruined his investigation. She’d also already been turned away by Bow Street and hadn’t even yet met the Maidens, so I would’ve expected her to just be happy to take any help she could get. Delilah also gets very repetitive in her arguments that Sebastian is trying to protect her and is thereby excluding her. She realizes how vulnerable she really is and how much she needs to learn, and yet she somehow still thinks she can help the Maidens of Mayhem. She has all these inner monologues about her self-reliance and such, but I never actually saw any examples of her being self-reliant without getting into some sort of trouble or life-threatening situation. Delilah talks a good game about how bold she is and while that was true, she often confused boldness for simple foolhardiness. She’s prepared to fight but since she’s an aristocratic lady with no training, I could never figure out how this was supposed to work. It was almost as if she was meant to have some sort of training in her backstory and that just got left out.

This is a bit of an unrelated quibble, but I was also quite confused about Delilah’s backstory. She says she’s only gentry, but for her to be styled as Lady Delilah (not Lady Ashbrook as she’s often referred to in the ARC and which will hopefully be corrected), she has to be at least the daughter of an earl. Along these lines, I also wanted more information on how the maid has a son who’s such an accepted part of the household. Oliver’s father or how he came to be are never mentioned. I was also very confused about how we have an aristocratic household with only a cook, a maid, the aunt, Delilah, and the maid’s son. It just didn’t quite all add up. It might’ve made slightly more sense if the maid was a companion instead but even then, I’d still be scratching my head about how all these genteel ladies are living alone without even a footman.

These little complaints aside, Delilah was just a puzzle to me in general. We’re told all these things about her character and convictions, but not much backs it up. When she’s threatened, she doesn’t tell Sebastian the most pertinent facts about the intruder, despite her supposed intelligence and even though Sebastian has done so much to help her, but she tells the Maidens despite that they have accomplished nothing demonstrable. This definitely hurt the romance for me, and it already wasn’t very strong.  In her activities with the Maidens, Delilah just seems like she’s out for a lark, never taking the risk seriously and mostly just getting in Sebastian’s way and either undoing his investigative work or causing him to come to harm, but somehow, she never sees this as a problem. I also wasn’t a big fan of the attempt to throw in some other woman drama here, especially given that it was resolved like an afterthought, and I was left wondering what the point was and wanting Sebastian to put her in her place more firmly. The same is true of much of the mystery aspects as well now that I think of it. The solution becomes fairly obvious fairly quickly, but I was still left feeling like some things were unresolved and given that the case was the basis for nearly every conversation between Sebastian and Delilah, their feeble romance suffered.

The connection between Sebastian and Delilah didn’t really grab me and he mostly seemed like just another lark to her, a bit of rough and something different from the few lords she’d met in her short time in London. She often jumps to conclusions and doesn’t display the intelligence she’s purported to have. Delilah is often so fixated on not being dependent on a man or ceding her perceived control that she habitually makes poor decisions, disregards safety, and the classic, jumps to conclusions about her man’s behavior around other women. This last is slightly understandable given the lack of depth in the conversations between herself and Sebastian, but I’m still not a fan of this plot device in place of mature communication, which we never really got. Mostly, she just proclaims about how capable she is but none of her actions back that up. If anything, she shows Sebastian time and time again that she needs to be rescued and/or can’t help herself, and her expectations of her own capabilities aren’t remotely realistic. She’s only just moved to a new city, much larger than any she’s dealt with before, and yet we’re supposed to believe that she can navigate even its worst areas with no problems, and I just didn’t buy that. She comes off as a spoiled young aristocrat engaging in a rebellion, rather than actually accomplishing anything and I don’t think that was the intention. Even in the end when the mystery was solved and the danger had passed, I still never saw much in the way of romance or a connection between Delilah and Sebastian. Instead, they were just rather flat and there was a lot of telling here but not much in the way of showing. Sebastian mentioned his hesitancy to connect with anyone on a deeper level, but he felt differently about Delilah, which was great, but I wanted to know why. I wanted to see the emotion and why he felt that way and it was never really demonstrated very well.

I’ve read and loved this author’s writing previously, but this book just didn’t fit that mold for me and had too many things that annoyed me enough to pull me out of the story. I may continue the Maidens series, but I’m not sure as of now.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4296848751
https://www.bookbub.com/reviews/376990132



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