What Price Love?

By: Stephanie Laurens

Narrated by: Simon Prebble

Lady Priscilla Dalloway’s twin brother took a job as trainer to Lord Cromarty - and then promptly disappeared. For Pris, finding her brother means seducing notorious cad Dillon Caxton. Dillon claims to have set aside his devilish ways and forged an impeccable reputation as Keeper of the Register for racehorses. He resists all women, and lets absolutely no one view the information he safeguards. But Lady Priscilla Dalloway is no ordinary temptress and she means to work her way into Dillon’s books.

©2006 Savdek Management Proprietory Ltd (P)2010 Recorded Books

Mostly great!

The story was enjoyable. The secondary characters were all engaging and fun. I know this is a series, but I have read them out of order due to my preference of trying to primarily get books on sale. They were fune as stand alone books, but it is more fun to “visit” previous characters. There was one annoyance to me and it has to do with who the “bad guy” was.

(SPOILER: It was such a waste that it ended up being someone that had had nothing to do with the story at all. Just randomly came out of nowhere. Why not make a character!? (END SPOILER)

Simon Prebble did a great job. I don’t generally care for men narrators for romances, Simon is one of the two I like. (Tim Campbell is the other.)

All in all, though it wasn’t my favorite story ever, I did enjoy it, and it was well worth the 2 for 1 sale half credit I paid for it.

Dylan redeemed

Date: 1831 August
Chronology: set after The Truth About Love; before The Taste of Innocence.

Antecedents: Lady Priscilla & co are new, but Dylan Caxton first appears in March 1820 in A Rogue’s Proposal featuring Demon aka Harry Cynster and Flick aka Felicity Parteger.

Lady Priscilla Dalloway and family follow the trail of her brother Lord Russell to Newmarket to protect him and, hopefully, extract him from a shady situation. She tries to investigate while maintaining her anonymity but this just brings her to the attention of Dylan Caxton who is already investigating racing irregularities.
As a bonus, we get another appearance of Barnaby Adair investigating wrongdoing.
Yay! Simon Prebble narrating again!

I remember the first time Laurens wrote this book

Except it was called A Rogue’s Proposal, the hero was Demon, not Dillon, the heroine was Flick, not Pris, and the characters were engaging, not shallow, boring and tragically oppressed by their own devastating beauty. Horse races are still being fixed by nefarious villains, but this time I just didn’t care. I don’t mind formulaic books-that’s the reason I read historical romances. But I do mind when an author recycles an earlier book and publishes it as a brand new creation. If you want to read this book, I’d suggest saving a credit and re-reading A Rogue’s Proposal.

Simon Prebble was great, as always.

I like Stephanie Laurens and the earlier Cynster books. I’ll probably give the next one a try, and hope that this one was a blip on an otherwise enjoyable radar.

Almost exactly like the rest

After the previous two books, I thought maybe the author had fixed her problems of reusing the same basic hero and heroine. I sadly was wrong.
This book is so close to Demon’s book it’s silly. I did like both the hero and heroine more than Demon and flick (who was so dumb it was hard to finish).
But here again, the hero can’t say he loves the heroine or puts it off for some stupid reason and that causes issues. And ofc, the heroine is supposedly intelligent, but does one dumb thing after another. The author tells us she is intelligent, but then makes the heroine impulsive to the point of idiocy. Worst still, is the weird obsession the author has with making the heroine deny a proposal because she thinks it’s based on society dictates, but, ofc, she doesn’t stop to talk with the hero about it— she just preaches to him about it and says no without actually having a conversation. It makes it so frustrating. I wish the author would stop using the misunderstanding-because-we-refuse-to-talk-and/or-let-each-other-know-what-we-are-thinking-or-feeling trope. And stop making the hero emotionally stilted and afraid of owning his feelings (it’s so unsexy; don’t we read romance to hear the heroes confess and be open about their feelings. And stop making the heroines “smart” women who do stupid things over and over.
I enjoyed the previous two books the most (so far) because the hero and heroine were different and the plot wasn’t basically the same as the rest.
I hope the next book will have a less stale plot.
The narrator is fabulous with narration, but all his men sound like they are 50+ and the heroines sound nothing like women.