Delight may be a slight exaggeration, but I just really wanted to use that title. This last of the Hathaway family romances is a brief one, probably almost a hundred pages under the others in the series. I've read all but the first and I've enjoyed them, and to be honest I'm not surprised Beatrix's story is a bit of a flop. Throughout the antics of her brother and three sisters Beatrix has been a sweet, fun secondary character but she's a little too one dimensional to be a true heroine and far too sweet and naive to be a true vixen. In the other siblings stories her animals darted in and out giving comic relief, unfortunately they all must be tired because they're no where in sight. The story, reminiscent of Cyrano de Bergerac with her odd love of animals being the handicap she hides when writing to a hero in the Crimean War is good and interesting, until he comes home. Aside from the expected conflict of revealing herself as the woman he feel in love with via the pen there is an element of post traumatic stress involved (I'm getting flashbacks to Elizabeth Hoyt's Four Soldiers series) which makes our hero unpredictably violent. Then there is the late stage, out-of-nowhere assassination attempt that is both random and unneeded.
All in all it was okay, it lacked the charm of the usual Kleypas fare and was dry, but it wasn't actually a bad book. If you came for the series stick it out but on its own Love in the Afternoon is forgettable and not exactly a delight by any stretch of the imagination.
