What Wicked? What Sin?

Title: Wicked as Sin
Author: Jillian Hunter
Genre: Regency-era historical
Grade: D, but edible.
How Hot Is It? 3 chili peppers


What does this title mean? The hero--so not wicked. But maybe "wicked" is a code word for heroes who live hard and have some sexual experience. By THAT measure the hero is wicked. Or maybe the wicked is for the villain, who does sound like a piece of work; but the true villain of the piece dies before the story actually begins, which is disappointing, because I would have liked to see him slain in a duel. And sin? It must be a code word for another 3-letter word that begins with "s" (and ends in "x") because the book does have that. The main characters here and the development of their relationship is fine, but other parts of the story are kind of jarringly awful, like huge infodumps of emotionally charged information at the beginning, flashbacks that are hard to tell from the present-time scenes, a horrible sense of the Regency milieu (especially for aristocrats), plot threads that appear out of nowhere near the end of the book (it is a book in a series which may explain, if not excuse, some of this; but I've seen tie-ins done much more smoothly), and characters believing and acting on things that just don't make sense. Like at one point, the hero is given a Big Misunderstanding due to eavesdropping that the heroine may have been a prostitute at some time in the past, and because he loves her, talks himself into thinking he can forgive her if she needed to do it to survive. But she's the sister of a rich earl who has wanted for nothing in her life and he already knows this because he's known her since childhood. So, I can't actually recommend this one. Hunter gets a D and not an F because for some reason I liked the hero and heroine despite the clunky storytelling. I gather from other reviews that she has done better, but this book didn't leave me wanting more from the same author.

One of the questions I want to explore a little more is why a lot of these titles (and the content of far fewer) of these books attempt to describe the hero as "Wicked" or "Dangerous" when in fact someone really wicked or dangerous would be the villain of the piece, someone the heroine should and would run screaming away from. It seems to be some kind of code-word for a person who is not accepted by the really high sticklers of society because of a tendency to drink or gamble too much, get into brawls, or womanize. It's "wicked' in the sense that (to quote a commercial), "the concert was wicked hardcore" or "girl you are wicked awesome." Someone a little edgy, but not really a stalker/rapist/blackmailer/extortionist. You know, not really wicked wicked.