Nicole Rayburn 4

I finally got back to Nicole Rayburn's world of historical and present day mysteries. 

This one was my least favorite of the four so far. 

In the present day, a DNA test reveals Nicole's husband Kyle is not his father's son. He ends up getting the story of a drunken, post-near death experience hookup from his mom. She was a cop and this happened with her partner, who eventually became the police chief (or something). He spends a lot of time dealing with this, so the present day stuff is mostly him and less Nicole, which bored me. I like Kyle, but I don't really care about Kyle. 

In the past, we're in 1582. Lady Katherine Stiles has just lost her father and is dealing with learning that he left his estate and title to some random male cousin instead of her. She's got an uncertain future and it only gets worse when cousin Eustace arrives and he's an asshole. She turns to Luke, her childhood friend who worked for her father, and the two plot a bit, but she ends up taking things into her own hands and marrying her cousin. She's 14. He's an older cousin but not as much older as he could have been. It's just what was done back then, but this one is soap opera level. First, Luke discovers Eustace isn't Eustace. He's some actor who was Eustace's companion (yep, they mean that and that's why Eustace was kicked out of seminary school) and who killed Eustace and decided to take his place. Second, Kate is fucking Luke in secret, hoping to get pregnant so she can provide an heir and keep the estate. Maybe something can "happen" to Eustace. But Eustace is very abusive and the scenes with him are rage-inducing. Third, Luke is marrying the cook's daughter and Kate is jealous, even though she knows she can't marry Luke. So the day after the marriage, Kate slips Eustace some deadly nightshade and he gets sick and falls down the stairs, putting him out of commission for a few months. Luke at this point is in bed with both his wife and Kate. I think? Now I can't remember if they overlap. Anyway, Eustace is getting better over time and Kate and Luke fight over it with him basically condemning her to what she's gotten herself into. Kate goes to her neighbor and former suitor Lachlan, who's the only good character in this whole damn thing, and tells him what's going on. He's in love with her and on the unscrupulous side, so he agrees to off Eustace. He makes it look like he threatened him with revealing his lies and Eustace ran away to London, but Lachlan actually keeps him in a tower on his property and ends up killing him. Good. Kate bangs Lachlan and ends up having his baby. And if it couldn't get any more soap operaish, Kate and Luke's wife Hannah go into labor at the same time. Kate and Lachlan's kid is a girl, while Luke and Hannah have a boy, but Hannah passes out and the old nurse switches the kids so Kate can have her heir and never worry about having to marry. So Kate has to watch her daughter be raised by someone else, while she raises their kid as her heir. 

Eeyeah, it's a lot. It feels like just plain too much, especially coming from a 14-year-old. 

Kate is a wildly unlikeable character. I get that she's desperate, but if she'd given Lachlan a chance instead of being selfish and determined to keep her stupid estate, then she would have ended up in a decent and likely eventually happy marriage and still had a large estate. They could have outed fake Eustace and then maybe gotten the original estate, too. But noooooooo.  

So yeah, this is the first one of these I really didn't like. Shapiro needs to dial the plots back down to normal drama and leave the daytime antics to the soaps. 

The next book involves Dr. Quinn Allenby, who's the protagonist of another Shapiro historical mystery series. There are a whopping nine books in the Echoes from the Past series and all of them were written before Nicole Rayburn, so I'm taking a jump over to that series and then coming back for the Nicole/Quinn team up. They're also teaming up in the sixth Nicole book, but at least I'll have done the legwork already.