"The Valcourt Heiress" by Catherine Coulter - 2 Stars (***SPOILERS***)

Book description available via Amazon.

I think this will be the last Catherine Coulter book I pick up. Honestly, I'm not even sure why I bothered to finish this one. I've always hated Coulter's contemporary FBI series (couldn't even finish the first one I tried), but her historicals used to be very good. However, this book was mostly boring and far-fetched. IMO, the heroine definitely suffered from "too stupid to live" syndrome. In the beginning, she decides to run away even though she has no idea where she is going to go, no ready funds and limited skills to protect herself. After she is kidnapped (what a surprise), the hero rescues her (though he thinks she is a young boy at the time). Instead of accepting the protection he offers, she hides in the woods until he and his men leave because she doesn't trust him. Despite that, she follows him to his castle and decides to pretend that she has lived there all along. She starts wearing dresses again and decides that because she can read, write, and make lists, she will become the castle steward. This book takes place in the 13th century - how many female stewards would there have been then? Probably very few, if any. Also, is list-making all that useful of a skill? Apparently the author thinks it is because the hero, heroine, and Queen of England are all held up as examples of good list makers. Coulter talks about list making a LOT - that's probably one of the reasons I found the book to be so boring. The hero and heroine are both weirdly obsessed with soap, too, which is another thing that seems odd for the time period.  Didn't people in the Middle Ages think frequent bathing caused death?  The witchcraft plot with the heroine's mother was unbelievable and kind of stupid too. There were a number of other plot twists that seemed to come out of left field, which made it very hard to get into the story.

Aside from the general stupidity and seeming anachronisms, I was particularly bothered by the scene where the heroine loses her virginity because she essentially rapes the hero. Certainly he was not awake to give consent when she flung herself on top of him! Even after he wakes up and it's already too late to undo what has happened, there are a couple of times he says no. Then, all of a sudden when the heroine wants to stop because she's in pain, he wants to keep going. He later describes it as one of the best sexual experiences of his life. Are we supposed to believe that rape is okay just because the man is the victim?

It didn't help that I listened to the audio version of this book and found the narrator to be EXTREMELY irritating. I think she was trying to sound "posh" so she pronounced some words oddly and had an annoying habit of rolling her r's at the end of a word. I wish she would have just spoken normally - her regular speaking voice is quite nice, and I probably would have enjoyed listening to it more had she not jarred me out of the story every time she said something strange.

Overall, I'm generously giving this book 2 stars because I liked a few of the characters and there were a couple of amusing scenes. For the most part, though, I would not recommend this book.