Book Review: Slightly Sinful by Mary Balogh

Synopsis: Slightly Sinful is the fifth novel in Mary Balogh's Bedwyn family series of regency romances. This is Alleyne's story. He's the youngest Bedwyn brother and he's just embarked on a career with the British embassy in Brussels. On a mission to deliver a letter from Wellington at the front lines of the battle of Waterloo, Alleyne is shot. He falls from his horse and lay unconscious and dying, stripped naked by pilferers, in the woods outside Brussels. It is there that orphaned lady's maid Rachel York finds him.

Rachel has her own set of problems: She, along with a group of kindly prostitutes she has been trying to help, has been swindled by a man posing as a charitable man of the cloth. The villain has cheated them of all of their savings and fled to England; the women want their money back (and some revenge) - but first they have to get hold of enough money to get them back to England. Since she has been denied access to her inheritance by her uncle, a man she has not seen since childhood, Rachel has no money or family of her own. The women decide (along with half the city's population) to loot bodies in the aftermath of the battle in order to gather enough money for passage to England. However, Rachel finds that she doesn't have the stomach (or conscience) for the job. When she comes across Alleyne's unconscious body in the woods, she brings him back to the brothel and nurses him back to health.

When Alleyne regains consciousness, he finds that he's died and gone to heaven: he's being nursed by four whores and one beautiful angel (our Rachel). The only trouble is, he can't remember who he is. A warm friendship forms between the ladies and their handsome patient, and they all end up concocting a scheme wherein Rachel and Alleyne pose as a married couple in order to deceive Rachel's uncle into giving them her inheritance. But pretending to be married is more difficult than they first realize: their feelings for one another grow and they find themselves longing to make the marriage a real one, only Alleyne still has no idea of who he really is or whether he is already married to someone else.

The action in this book overlaps that of Morgan's story in Slightly Tempted. All the time Morgan thinks he is dead, he is really just a few blocks away, convalescing in a house of ill repute. I really enjoyed this book. I liked Alleyne's character from the previous books - he was the handsome, fun-loving, jokesy Bedwyn. I have always thought the amnesia plot device is pretty cheesy and very soap opera-esque. However, I was able to take it in stride in this book - probably because Mary Balogh is such a good writer. I actually got caught up in it. It was hard to see Alleyne so unhappy in this book, struggling to figure out who he was and how to deal with his feelings for Rachel when he was really not at liberty to make a commitment to her.

I liked Rachel also. Probably what I liked most about her was the changes she went through learning to let go of her feelings of hurt and bitterness toward her uncle. She comes to love him in spite of herself. The secondary characters of this novel were pretty entertaining, although I thought the concept of four "hookers with a heart of gold" a bit of a stretch. Everything worked out a little too neatly with one of them being a master cook, one a master gardener, two of them passing off as gentle ladies, etc. However, romance novels are a kind of fantasy and it is still satisfying to see everything tied up in a neat little package at the end.

Another interesting thing about this book is that Alleyne pretty much falls in love with Rachel at first sight. I don't always buy into that kind of thing, but in this book I think it worked pretty well. At first, he falls in love with her as a sort of savior/angel and then they develop a true friendship over the weeks of his recovery. He finally comes to love her more fully as they spend time together as a "married couple."

My favorite parts of this book, though, were the scenes at the end when Alleyne regains his memory and returns home to Lindsey Hall. The romance in the story was nice, but I felt that the entire novel was really moving toward the final point of Alleyne's reunion with the Bedwyns. There was an overall feeling of anticipation throughout the entire novel, growing more intense toward the end, when he is finally reunited with his family. And, yet again, the best bit was when Wulfric sees him again for the first time and hugs him.

I gave this book 4 stars in my LibraryThing catalog.