Up All Night with a Good Duke

Bennett (How to Catch a Devilish Duke) underwhelms in the Victorian romance that launches her Byronic Book Club series. The inconsistently characterized heroine, Artemis Jones, teaches at a finishing school by day and writes salacious Gothic romances by night. She views both gigs as stepping stones to her dream of opening a women’s college. However, when Artemis’s shy friend Lucy is forced by her father into looking for a husband, Artemis quits her job to return to the London society she’s shunned in support of Lucy. She falls in love at first sight with the Byronic hero of her dreams: Dominic Winters, “the Dastardly Duke of Dartmoor,” whom society believes to have murdered his wife as the result of a smear campaign by his wife’s brother, the cartoonishly villainous Guy de Burgh—who, coincidentally, is also the scoundrel who seduced Artemis during her first season. Artemis hatches a bizarre plot to avoid marriage by ruining her reputation, a half-baked scheme that ends with her in an engagement-of-convenience to Dominic, who wants Artemis’s help managing his rebellious daughter. There are some sizzling sex scenes along the way, but the story is loaded with subplots that go nowhere and illogical character beats. It’s a shoddily constructed, broadly drawn melodrama. Agent: Jessica Alvarez, BookEnds. (July)