An enjoyable farce in three parts...or maybe more!

How to Capture a Duke (Matchmaking for Wallflowers #1) by Bianca Blythe

First have yourself mistaken for a highway woman holding up a coach.

Secondly decide to kidnap the handsome occupant to serve as your pretend husband to be.

Thirdly 'let the games begin', or rather runaway from you with excruciating speed.

I loved the premise of the story. Indeed the opening misunderstanding of the Duke's coachman believing that they'd been held up by highway persons was excellent. The situation that developed and the lengths Fiona Amberly (our intrepid Blue Stocking amateur archaeologist)  kept being forced to go to, as one improbable situation piled up on to of another, was farcically humorous. But then something happened and the story fell into blandness. The hero, one Percival Carmichael, new Duke of Alfriston, become a tad dull. Ok, so his leg was plaguing him, but Golly Gosh Batman, couldn't he have been a tad more decisive. 

I found his brother Arthur annoyingly overbearing and somewhat of a buffoon in terms of Percival's dilemma. 

Fiona and Percival's story was plagued by the attitudes and plans of others, by bad timing and by Percival's annoying habit of giving in to others, accepting their pronouncements.

I am still wondering how these two ever achieved a HEA.

Despite my misgivings, I do want to read the next in the series.

A NetGalley ARC

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