Zebra, $7.99, ISBN 978-1-4201-4720-9
Historical Romance, 2019

Scandalous is the third entry in Minerva Spencer’s The Outcasts series. Given that I can’t remember a thing about the previous two books, and I can follow this one just fine, I think I can safely say it stands alone pretty well.

Hey, give me a break. I couldn’t find the focus to read a physical book during the lockdown years, and I’m only now starting to catch up.

Having said that, while I can follow this one just fine, sadly, I end up following it right down into the ditch.

On paper, the premise sounds interesting.

We have Martin Brouchard, a runaway slave that could never return to America unless he has a death wish. Never mind, he channels his inner demons into being a British privateer, taking it out on slavers that attempt to do that human trafficking thing to the southern states. He encounters the heroine when his ship Golden Scythe seizes the ship on which our heroine is one of the captives.

Sarah Fisher is the daughter of American missionaries in some part of Africa. Now an orphan, she didn’t have the means to return home, so she continued to stay with the village that had been her home since birth. Well, then the slavers came to sack the village and seize choice people to be human cargo, and she found herself dragged along with them. She sees her chance at saving herself and the others when the captain summons her to help tend to his illness, but before anything can be done, Martin’s crew has captured the ship.

At first, I like Sarah. She seems resourceful, she grabs a pistol when she has the chance, and she is steely enough to negotiate and parlay with the bad guys.

Then, it happens. She also turns out to be the inconveniently bleeding heart type that cannot, cannot stand the idea of anyone getting killed, even the bad guys, and she will make this clear by shrieking at Martin, threatening him when everyone knows she has no power, and more. All this because he wants to kill those responsible for putting her and her fellow villagers on a slave ship to be sold away like cattle.

She ends up offering herself to Martin if he would spare the lives of those scummy slavers, and she is the only one shocked when they aren’t appreciative of her martyrdom. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that letting them live means allowing them to get another ship and do more human trafficking, but by that point, I realize Sarah isn’t very smart.

Actually, she’s not smart, period. She doesn’t trust Martin, but she has no problems admitting to him right away that she can never shoot anyone with a pistol; she can only wave it around to threaten people.

Martin only has to give her some drink and food, and she would have put out to him right there and then if they hadn’t been interrupted. Yes, boys, all those things about Catholic girls are totally true.

Fortunately, the bad guys, the ones that Sarah made Martin let go, later die off before Sarah has any more lives on her conscience. The story then becomes another Couple on a Pirate Ship romance, with Sarah being doted on by the nice men of the crew, while Martin calls her all shades of ho whenever he feels that she’s not giving him enough love and attention.

Then the story moves to England, and I realize there is never going to be any exciting, swashbuckling moment despite the story starting out the way it does. In England, Martin continues to find reasons to call Sarah all kinds of ho ho ho, while Sarah keeps insisting that she’s not good enough for him or he surely won’t be interested in her.

The whole thing is so stupid, and I don’t know why the author bothers to have her story start out the way it did when she’s only going to turn the rest of the story into one annoying purity test that the heroine must pass to be worthy of the hero’s likely diseased pee-pee.

Now, you can say, well, Martin was a slave, so of course he has trust issues to the wazoo. Ah, but see, this is where the author using her character’s issues as a plot device versus as a developmental arc comes in.

Here, Martin never has to actually work to overcome his issues. Instead, his trust issues are used by the author to generate “You! Whore! Whore! Who-ooo-re!” conflicts that become increasingly repetitive and tedious the more it keeps coming up. The time that is spent on Martin being an asshole could have been used to show how he’s getting over his issues, if the author had been using the hero’s issues as a means to catalyze his character development. What I get here, instead, is his issue being used to both perpetuate his nonsense and later, to justify why he’s really not that bad a person despite acting like a jerk and a bully so often.

It doesn’t help that his rabid dog antics are aroused by the smallest things, such as his belief that the heroine is accepting gifts from other men. I guess he thinks only prostitutes do that? He doesn’t think, much less check out the situation first—he just lashes out at Sarah there and then.

Yes, this is another story in which the hero’s behavior is never creepy or disturbing because he’s hot.

It’s the same with Sarah. At one point, a character lectures Martin, and hence the reader, that it is in Sarah’s nature as a missionary’s daughter to forgive all that have harmed her. However, this aspect of her character is slapped onto the pages in a one-dimensional manner. She forgives everything and everyone, because the author wants this to be a conflict that causes Martin to condemn the heroine more and more as the ho of all hos, all because she is still nice to the captain of the ship that she and her villagers were dragged onto in the beginning.

Everything here, therefore, is a plot device to have Martin foaming at the mouth over imagined scenarios of Sarah playing the town bicycle. Sarah is, of course, the perfect wife for him, as she will forgive everything and everyone, even those that own ships that sell slaves, because, you know, it’s not her place to judge other people for their sins.

So, this lunatic can do anything and everything to her, and she will forgive him. Now that’s a happy ending indeed!

Scandalous is like an old school romance, without the rape and the physical abuse, but also without the exotic locales and action that usually made those romances interesting to read. The story wastes little time moving away from the sea to an overused, boring locale for tedious, circular games of who’s the ho. All the negatives of an old school romance, without any of the positives, in other words. One may as well read one of those old school romances instead!

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