The Miser of Mayfair
Series: A House for the Season, Book 1
By: Marion Chesney / Narrated By: Lindy Nettleton
Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
WOEful Hero and heroine; desPICable Society; but I DID like the servants
Okay, so like, I ran into this, The Miser of Mayfair, cuz I LOVED The Poor Relation. I was jonesing, pining for a Regency romance series to start, hoping to dive in and dive in deep.
-AND-
Holy crap, what just happened? I know, because Audible has all of MC Beaton writing as Marion Chesney’s Regency romances as part of their Audible Escape free to check out, that Ms. Beaton misses more than she hits when it comes to the stand alone romances. She does better, is more entertaining, when she does her in-depth series jaunts, where characters get to be fleshed out, and they grow, develop, and you wind up caring about them and want desperately to get to their Happily Ever Afters.
So that’s kinda… sorta… the case here. The house where our jolly main characters work (the butler, a housekeeper, cook, footman, two maids, scullery maid, and the pot boy) is thought to be haunted. It’s bad news, and the servants suffer mightily because nobody wants to rent it out for the London Season. The Duke hanged himself there, a young woman whose family rented the place, was found dead in a park a few years later, such ghosts! Not to mention, the new Duke’s steward is paying the servants looooow wages even as he books it as higher wages (Pocketing the difference), and they can’t get jobs elsewhere as it’s hard to find work in London, and he has the dirty on Rainbird the butler, and Joseph the footman, and he swears he’ll blackball any of the others and give them poor references.
So it’s their extreme poverty that brings them together as they try to survive in a London that is unkind to the working classes. That’s what I liked. They’re clever, funny, and they run their own little society as a sort of democracy.
But then we come to the romance part, and the story is of a destitute and dissipated older man from Scotland who inherits no money when his older brother dies, but he does inherit his brother’s ward, a beeeeautiful young woman. And enter desPICable story point one: The man sees his way to fortune by thinking he can rent the house for cheap, pass the woman, Fiona, off as a lady, and he can marry her off to the highest bidder, no thought for her welfare. That Fiona seems slow and stupid only adds to this unfortunate mess when it comes to feeling for her as our heroine (And I really liked Lindy Nettleton’s narration, but her Scottish brogue for Fiona, her slow and measured way of speaking for her TOTALLY made Fiona seem like an idiot).
Then we have our Hero who is an out and out misogynist, says scathing things about her and other women, treats her horribly and, in a deplorable case of he didn’t get the memo that No Means No—We have a near-rape scene. But Fiona, saved by Rainbird in the nick of time, tearfully says it’s all her fault so, like, what? That makes it okay, Ms. Beaton? I’m sorry, but we all know I’m a prude and my toes curl when Passion rears, but since when does Passion mean Rape? And why does Fiona still love him as she, weeping and in torn clothes, wanders home on the arm of Rainbird?
Plus, everybody the old man and Fiona socialize with are backstabbing, conniving, deceitful toads (No offense to toads). The Miser of Mayfair is packed with horrid, horrid, people. Really, ‘twas only my desperation to wallow in a Regency that made me stick with it.
And it’s only that I really liked the servants and am hopeful that the next H and h will be more interesting, less hateful.
I dunno if you noticed it, but in my Listening to Now section for the coming week, I’ve added the second book in the series to my week’s Listening. I’m… hopeful?
-BUT-
I’ll be ready for a bleach-dip if things go desperately awry too…
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