The Temptation of the Night Jasmine by Lauren Willig

#5 Pink Carnation
Copyright: 2009
Publisher: NAL
Genre: Fiction
Pages: audio
Author's Website
My rating: 3/5

Simple Description:
It's almost Christmas and Charlotte's Grandmother has invited several suiters to the manor house for the celebration.  To her surprise, very pleasant surprise, Robert shows up out of the blue.  Robert is the Duke of Dovedale and he ran away to India 15 years ago with the then Duke, Charlotte's Father, passed away.  Charlotte liked Robert then and now that she is older and a grown woman, she finds she still likes him.

Robert, however, didn't come back in order to take over Dovedale and do his Dukely things, instead he came back for vengeance.  He must somehow be invited to join the Hellfire club in order to figure out who the man was who killed his mentor in a fight in India.  He knows it was murder, he knows it was a spy, but he doesn't know who it was.

Robert finds that the more time he spends with Charlotte, the more he likes her.  This just confuses him because he doesn't believe he should be the Duke and he doesn't think he is good enough for her.  He pushes Charlotte away but somehow they end up crossing paths and both being involved in a situation with the King and the spies.


My thoughts:
I've long been a fan of this series and while this book wasn't my favorite I still thought it was good. In fact, this is my least favorite of the series so far.  I've been trying to figure out why though.  I don't know if it's because the narrator was different from the other audio books I've listened to for this series.  I think it threw me off because I was expecting a different voice, not that it was a bad thing though. Justine Eyre is the narrator for the audio version of The Temptation of the Night Jasmine.  I believe she did an excellent job as narrator and wouldn't hesitate to listen to author audio books she has read. It's just not the voice I was expecting.

This book also seemed to be different in that the first half mentioned that Robert was after a spy and he was doing a bit to find it, but mostly it dealt with the budding romance between Robert and Charlotte. I think the others are more even in the spy/romance thing.

I don't want you to get the wrong impression though, I still thoroughly enjoyed this novel.  To me, there was just something different about it that kept me from liking it as well as I have liked the others.  I'm still very much looking forward to the others in the series.  In fact, I have The Mischief of the Mistletoe at home already. It's not the next book in the series, but since it's a Christmas read I'm going to go ahead and read it later this month.


This audio book was rented from my local library.