A review by mzdeb
Duchess of My Heart by Maya Banks

3.0

Upfront: trigger warning for sexual violence and domestic abuse. Like, really uncomfortable in spots for what was implied with Lucas, Jillian's husband, and in one part, as it was actively happening.
I listened to this as an audio book because I was looking for everything Tim Campbell narrated that I was willing to listen to, and he's always great with the various voices he does. I don't think I would've read this otherwise.

I think we all could kinda suspect what an ultimate plot point was going to be
SpoilerLucas isn't dead, and has been following Jillian all this time, out to make her life miserable
, but I didn't like the extreme it reached
SpoilerJ&J head for Justin's estate, then when she's shot at they come back to town, then they leave and take on secret identities, staying unmarried in Cornwall--but Lucas was like Jason from Friday the 13th, kept coming back, just when they thought they were rid of him. It started breaking the book up into too many parts.

I appreciated that Justin wasn't like the cretins around him who, even though he had stances on propriety (which is why he initially takes issue with Jillian dressing and acting provocatively), didn't believe that men had the right to brute force with the women in their lives. There's a heartbreaking moment when Jillian runs out of Justin's house, because she thinks the anger on his face when she tells him what she had endured is aimed at her, and he has to come to her and say God, no, it's at the people who did this to you, I want to kill them. Because even in the 21st century we still have people who think that way, that a woman is in an abusive relationship because she was asking for it or deserved it or likes it. I don't think Justin finding that abhorrent makes him too modern; I think it just makes him a human being.

Also weird was reading enough about other characters that it felt like breadcrumbs were being dropped for other books in the series, and yet turns out each book in this series is with completely different characters and stands alone. (Couldn't we have gotten a book about Justin's brother, Chase?)