PUBLISHER: Topaz, 10/1996
ORIGINAL PUB: 1980
GENRE: Fiction/Historical Romance
SETTING: England, 1810
STEPBACK: link
RAPE? Yes
MY GRADE: B
SYNOPSIS: Justin Deverill is a military man strong, shrewd, stubborn, and very handsome who has just become the Earl of Strafford. He must wed his cousin Arabella, though, to reap the full legacy of his title. But faced with an order from her father s will to marry Justin, Arabella rebels. Since her father is dead, the only available target is Justin himself. Arabella has finally met her match and the pair sets off fireworks both in their anger and their passion.
The Heir is a reworked and expanded edition of the author's 1980 Signet Regency Romance novel Lord Deverill's Heir. The Heir is 156 pages longer than the original. The Signet Regency Romance series ran from 1979-2006. The novels are shorter in length, under 300 pages.
MY THOUGHTS: Timespan is short, maybe a month. Rape, incest, a villain, oh my!
I really like Arabella. She's eighteen. She's a very strong character. She hates Justin with a passion, is very angry and hostile towards him thinking he's out to get her inheritance. When she realizes he's not, her attitude changes completely, which I didn't like. It's like a switch was flipped and she became someone else. It should have taken some time for the change to happen.
Justin is nine years older than Isabella. He's a very distant cousin and they look very similar. I dislike that. They have the same black hair and gray eyes though she doesn't have a cleft in her chin like he does. He looks like he could be her brother. He thinks she's done him wrong before they wed so he rapes her on their wedding night (p. 72 in original, p. 133 in rewrite) but doesn't see it as rape because he "used cream." It's clearly rape, which he realizes at the end of the story and all is forgiven.
I'm happy to say there's a villain in this, twenty-four-year-old Gervaise de Trecassis, cousin to Arabella's half sister, Elsbeth, who's twenty. He's out to get a certain something that's revealed near the end. Also revealed is a family secret involving him, which devastates him.
There are a few typos in this and two of these three sentences don't make sense, from page 141, "Arabella rather hoped that he would rot, in addition to hell. He deserved to rot. He deserved every bad thing that could happen to him did happen."
Some things I didn't like, I just didn't see the need for Arabella's mother, Ann, to be so involved, and her doctor beau, Paul Braynon. There was also another pointless character, Suzanne Talgarth. A paternity secret was discovered near the end too and how they figured out what was going on with that isn't really believable, just based on what was written in a note.
I don't like the stepback for this either because Arabella looks at least ten years older than she is and the larger photo of them looks nothing like the smaller background image of them. Justin has a cleft in his chin but not in the photo.
About the 1996 rewritten version- Every chapter is longer and some dialogue has been reworded or expanded. The rape and incest is still in it, incest is p. 97 of original version, p. 178 in rewrite. One difference in the rape scene in the rewrite is that Justin uses lube ("cream".) In the original version the American author chose to use British spellings for certain words (color/colour, labor/labour, just two examples) but in the rewrite they're spelled the American way. In both versions Justin admits to raping Arabella (from original, page 208, "Yet, when I raped you, I felt loathing for myself.", from rewrite, page 358, "He saw Arabella on their wedding night, her face alight with anticipation until she had recognized his rage, until he had forced her, humiliated her."
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