The Last Hellion by Loretta Chase

Narrated by Kate Reading

What a treat it is to get the entire Scoundrels series in audio format read by the incomparable Kate Reading! If you loved Lord of Scoundrels, I predict you will love The Last Hellion. Chase used the same wonderful techniques to create this story that made Lord of Scoundrels (LOS) such a favorite – incredibly witty, rich, layered writing that had me grinning and laughing out loud all the way through the book. Even the dog is funny in this book!

The hero is the Duke of Ainswood, friends with Dain of LOS: you may remember him as the one who called Dain’s wife Jessica a whore on their wedding day and whom Dain beat to a fare-thee-well because of that comment. Ainswood is all things bad – the last of the hellions in his family. He should never have inherited the title – it went through so many male relatives, down to his cousin Robin, the 6th Duke of Ainswood, who died of diphtheria at age nine after having spent six months traveling with Ainswood.

Lydia Grenville is a blue stocking, spinster journalist – she is a sort of muckraker, plus she also writes a serial romance under a pen name for the same newspaper. She’s not high born but suspects her mother was somehow related to Dain, based on a diary Lydia discovered as a child. She is hot on the trail of a well known whore who abducts young girls for the trade when Ainswood thwarts her and their first sparks start to fly.

Ainswood manages to continue to thwart her do-gooder efforts – not really in order to stop her but just because he’s intrigued and follows her. She goes through a number of disguises in order to find justice – passing as a young man in a gambling club and a gypsy on the street, but he manages to see through them all. He decides he must offer marriage in order to get what he wants, but she’s too independent for that, so he challenges her to a race – if he wins, they marry; if she wins, the prize is money in the form of dowries for her assistant and contributions to her favorite charities.

Lydia has the most wonderful dog – Susan is a huge mastiff with lots of opinions – and Susan takes a shine to Jessica’s brother Bertie Trent. Ainswood has two young wards, Robin’s older sisters, that he has been neglecting, and they become the focal point near the end when they run away to attend the wedding and find themselves in need of rescue.

So we have mystery, suspense, humor, love – all wrapped up in wonderful writing, and now available with wonderful narration! Kate Reading brings all the characters to life – Bertie Trent returns for his own HEA in this book, and Dain and Jessica are featured, even the villain Francis Beaumont from Captives of the Night has a cameo appearance. She uses a number of regional accents in this series – Tamsin from Cornwall, the various street characters with their distinctive patois – to great effect. One thing I noticed this time that she does so well is interrupt (herself)! Her performance is so natural, with excellent pacing, and to be able to stop as though interrupted and continue with a different character voice is something many narrators get wrong. And she does an excellent “grrrrrr” for the dog as well. I love this narration!

Melinda

Narration: A

Book Content: A

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence: Fighting

Genre: Historical Romance

Publisher: Loretta Chase

The Last Hellion was provided to AudioGals by NYLA for a review.