When I saw that this book, like Meredith Duran's excellent Duke of Shadows, takes place partially in British India (modern Pakistan), I said "sign me up!" Unfortunately, this is not an excellent book.

Bryony Asquith and Leo Marsden grew up on neighboring estates and then found individual acclaim (him as an explorer and mathematician, her as a doctor and surgeon) before marrying. Though it starts as a love match, things quickly go south.  After a year of marriage, they agree to seek an annulment and go their separate ways. Three years later, they meet again in the wilds of Pakistan against the backdrop of a dangerous civil rebellion.

The first third (roughly) of the book serves mostly to drive the reader crazy with unfamiliar place names and, worse, to make both main characters as unpleasant as possible. Bryony is so cold and abrasive, I wondered if she was autistic. It's hard to believe her claims that she loved Leo once, because she seems so aloof and untouchable. Leo is an arrogant golden boy who uses absurdly florid vocabulary and appears to be all charm and no substance.

As the ex-couple make the difficult trek back toward civilization, a series of flashbacks and difficult conversations reveal that the lovers are more sympathetic than they appear and their attraction has not burned itself out, but it wasn't enough to make me root for their reconciliation.

One of the underlying problems in their marriage was sexual dysfunction: Bryony was cold and rejecting whenever Leo pressed his husbandly rights, so he started raping her in her sleep (because by the time she woke up, she was already too far gone to stop him), and he continued doing so even after she begged him to stop, until Bryony killed a patient due to sleep deprivation and finally physically barred her bedroom door to keep Leo out. (Note the lack of spoiler warning, there: I don't believe in hiding rape scenes. In fact, I think books should come with rape warnings the way many erotic books warn of consent issues, anal play, etc. -And, yes: what Leo did was rape, even though Bryony came, and the fact that she turns around and does the same to him (twice!) during their journey does not make it right.) Since they keep up with the sleep-rapes after reuniting, I had a really hard time believing all that was wrong in their original relationship was right in their second-chance romance.

The Pathan rebellion was not nearly as riveting and gut wrenching as the Sepoy Rebellion in Duran's Duke of Shadows, though it was obvious Ms. Thomas borrowed heavily from that book. Duran's story felt so real and horrible I almost felt like I'd been there--I knew what the battle smelled like, and I tasted Emma's terror--but Thomas seems to have concocted the Pathan uprising because she needed some outside drama to get her protagonists out of their own heads and into the sack. Once the lovers' impasse is resolved, so is the military siege. Both resolutions feel a little bit forced and a lot anticlimactic.

I am a history buff (I was a history major, actually), and I have a thing for sailboats. Ships, barques, brigs, schooners, ketches, cutters, sloops, and yawls, I love 'em all. Elizabeth Essex is a romance novelist with an MA in Nautical Archaeology, so she had me at "hello." I was predisposed to like this book a lot, and it did not disappoint.

Sally Kent is the only girl in a family of naval men, and so when her fifteen year old brother dodges his commission to become a midshipman on the Royal Navy's Audacious during the Napoleonic Wars, Sally-in-drag takes his place to preserve the family honor. (If you have trouble believing a woman could join Admiral Nelson's Royal Navy and successfully disguise her gender in order to serve along men, read about Hannah Snell, who is probably the best-known among several female sailors and soldiers of the era.) Upon reporting to her ship, Sally learns she will be serving under Lt. David Colyear, 'Col', a family friend who Sally has admired since he visited her home with her older brother years prior. Col soon sees through her disguise, but (conveniently) not before the Audacious has already set sail, when it would be inconvenient to return to port to put Sally ashore. Despite his misgivings, Col keeps Sally's secret because to do otherwise would shame her family, but she quickly proves her worth as a sailor, literally "showing the ropes" to the other new midshipmen with whom she serves.

Sally's masquerade sets up the romantic tension in the novel, because she and Col cannot act on their mutual attraction without giving up her secret. Because everyone on the ship believes Sally is a man, every lingering look, every casual touch, every minute alone together is dangerous, not because Sally is a single girl who may be ruined (though she is), but because an affair between men, and especially between and officer and a subordinate, is forbidden. Thus, in an interesting reversal from the romance genre norm, Col's reputation is as much at risk of ruin as Sally's, and the consequences of discovery would be even more significant for him, because the potential damage to his career could not be fixed by a hasty marriage.

Start Me Up is the best of the series, in my opinion. Lori Love's tragic history makes her one of the most fully realized characters I've come across in contemporary romance in a while. She was a gifted college student, on the brink of accomplishing her dreams to travel well beyond her roots in Tumble Creek, when a debilitating accident forces her to come home to take care of her dad and his auto repair shop. Ten years later, her father has finally succumbed to his injuries, but Lori is stuck: she can't sell the business because it barely turns a profit and she can't afford the cost of environmental cleanup necessary before she could sell the land.

Lori wants sex, but not a relationship (she doesn't want to put down roots in Tumble Creek since she's still hoping to escape, though the chances of escape fade with each passing year), so she takes up Molly's brother Quinn. Quinn's agreeable to the sex-without-dating deal because he sucks at relationships (his words, not mine): he's too absorbed in his work to pay women the kind of attention that relationships require. Despite the mutually agreed upon limits, the arrangement only makes Lori feel more trapped, because Quinn makes her feel all the more keenly what she has lost. He is brilliant and educated, while she had to drop out of school. He lives a glitzy, sophisticated life, rubbing elbows with the rich and famous in Aspen, while she works in shapeless coveralls and always has grease under her nails. He has been all over Europe and travels extensively for his work, while she hasn't left Tumble Creek since her Boston University education was interrupted by her father's injury.

There aren't a lot of romance stories involving women in traditionally male jobs (at least not blue collar jobs; female lawyers and doctors aren't too hard to find), and Start Me Up was refreshingly novel in flipping some of those gender stereotypes (for example, Lori rolls her eyes because Quinn doesn't know anything about his car and bought it mostly because he likes how it looks), while also exploring some of the tensions of being a woman in a man's job (as when Lori must take precautions to protect herself when she goes out alone to answer after-hours calls for tow service). The book also explores class tensions without the stereotypes and elitist value judgments so often inherent in books dealing with class divisions: Lori is blue collar, but she isn't trashy or stupid or crude; Quinn is comfortably wealthy, but not stuck up. At home in blue jeans drinking beer from the bottle, Quinn is just as comfortable in Lori's dingy and dated apartment over the garage as he is in his more posh pad in Aspen (especially since all either of them really care about, in either location, is the bed.)