I was looking forward to Written on Your Skin, Meredith Duran’s third novel, after having read and enjoyed her first two. This one didn’t work as well for me, unfortunately. I hasten to add that my view is an outlier: most reviews of WOYS have been very very positive. This will be a brief post.

Blurb:

Beauty, charm, wealthy admirers: Mina Masters enjoys every luxury but freedom. To save herself from an unwanted marriage, she turns her wiles on a darkly handsome stranger. But Mina’s wouldbe hero is playing his own deceptive game. A British spy, Phin Granville has no interest in emotional entanglements…until the night Mina saves his life by gambling her own.

Four years later, Phin inherits a title that frees him from the bloody game of espionage. But memories of the woman who saved him won’t let Phin go. When he learns that Mina needs his aid, honor forces him back into the world of his nightmares.

Deception has ruled Mina’s life just as it has Phin’s. But as the beauty and the spy match wits in a dangerous dance, their practiced masks begin to slip, revealing a perilous attraction. And the greatest threat they face may not be traitors or murderous conspiracies, but their own dark desires….

I found reading this book to be a very strange experience. It’s hard to explain, but it felt very “jerky” to me. I kept thinking the Kindle formatting was wrong, that paragraphs or pages were missing. It did not flow smoothly for me at all. I would read lines like “he had routed her”, and I would think, “huh, what?”, and have to go back and see how exactly this had happened.

Much of the book takes places in Phin and Mina’s heads. They both have haunting pasts — him as an unwilling spy for the British government and her as complicit in her some way in her mother’s abusive marriage. He starts off the book as a classic self-loathing tortured hero (“every inch of his skin prickled with self-contempt” etc.), with an opium habit (although this dour identity, including the opium and panic attacks, pretty much evaporates without explanation), and she … well, she was never easy for me to pin down. A brash American business woman? A scared mamma’s girl? Or, as Phin sees her for much of the book, a doll or a child? (Frequent references to Mina as a wriggling child, a doll, a brat, whose cheeks he wanted to pinch, etc. made me uncomfortable)

Phin and Mina don’t trust each other. Their relationship is gamesmanship, with sexual overtones, at first. And when they figure out they are on the same side, they have to deal with those ghosts of their pasts before they can develop a relationship. I didn’t feel I had a good handle on either of them, or when I did, the characters sort of changed in unexpected ways, preventing my investment.

Everything — I mean, the slightest movement of a head or finger — was written as deeply significant. But when you don’t feel that invested as a reader, this doesn’t have the intended effect. There’s just this constant thick cloud of figuration and emoting that I found very distancing for me as a reader.

There were two things I liked about it.

One, there’s a scene when Phin and Mina are in the country and they dance. It was a really beautifully written few pages, and the only place in the book where I felt drawn, as a reader, to this as a love story. It’s inspired me to write a post on dancing in romance novels, whenever I get around to it.

Second, when Phin is talking about someone (a bad guy) he accidentally killed, he recognizes, “but someone had wept for him, no doubt. Someone always did.” Mina has a similar recognition late in the book. I like the ambiguity of viewpoint. From some point of view, everyone is good and everyone is tainted.

I picked this one up and put it down so many times over the past months. I am sure that contributed negatively to my perception of the flow of the narrative. I’m sorry I don’t have more to offer for this review. Definitely follow the links above for more enlightened discourse about this novel.