Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm writing this review because I wish I'd seen it before reading this book. When Anne Stuart is good for me, she's golden. But when she's bad, she makes me feel traumatized and violated. I think it's a testament to her skill as an author that she makes me feel so intensely, but I also wish someone would silently point out the books that would traumatize me, so I could avoid them. I wish I could stop reading her altogether...but when she's good, she is too good. In order to explain this, I do have to give some mild spoilers for the end of the book. I won't do that in this review but I will write a comment that details them for the truly curious. I had a real problem with the hero of this book. Basically, it is this: in the very first pages of the book (this is not a spoiler: you can read the passage in the excerpt here on Amazon), he pays someone to abduct and rape the heroine and force her into marriage. First, it's quite clear when he discusses it with the man in question that he would have been perfectly fine if he had raped her, and so he gets full marks for the intention. But more importantly--even though the heroine says "It hadn't been rape," I quite frankly don't agree. In fact, that infuriated me hugely. To say that it wasn't rape just because she realized he was strong enough to make it happen anyway, so she didn't fight is just bull. He takes her against her will; she says no, repeatedly, he does it, and she decides not to fight because she doesn't think she has a choice and he's bigger than she is. That, in my book, is rape. And yet the heroine has almost no emotional reaction to it other than a general aversion because the oaf isn't very good at sex. I found the scene hugely traumatic. I kept reading, because it's Anne Stuart. And I know Anne Stuart does bad heroes--not like fake bad, but really bad. When it's good, it's great. But when it's bad, it's awful. And this was...awful. If the hero pays someone to rape the heroine, he is going to have to do something really spectacular at the end of the book for me to believe in it. But he doesn't. There's no hint of repentance. There's no grovel. The only thing that remotely hints at some kind of redemption has as a background something he plans to have happen to her that is so foul that it is irredeemable. And in my mind, "deciding not to do something truly foul" just does not come off as sufficient grovel. Especially considering that he is basically awful through and through. I loved her heroine--she was fantastic, which is why I've given the book two stars. But at the end of the book, I wanted her to shoot her husband dead and walk away laughing.