ARC Review: Hero of My Heart by Megan Frampton

Hero of My Heart is the debut romance from Megan Frampton. It is a sweet story of love and redemption in which two damaged people forge an unlikely romance. Most of the action occurs during a road trip in which they experience a wedding, a dead body, stealing, a shooting and more. All the while our hero is fighting an opium addiction as they are both running from troublesome relatives. This sounds like the story is a wild romp, but it is more of a story of two souls moving toward each other.

Our lovers meet when Alasdair Thornham, Marquess of Datchworth, rouses himself from his opium induced stupor long enough to rescue Mary Smith who was being sold to the highest bidder by her drunken brother­ in­-law. Alasdair knows he is no one's hero, but he devises a plan for them to go to Scotland and get married. He would then end his life with opium and leave his property to her. Mary agrees to marry him thinking it will eventually get her to London where she wants to find the mother that abandoned her.

There were a number of things I liked about Hero of My Heart. It was a compelling story which I read quickly because I was anxious to see what would happen next. Frampton has a knack for writing witty dialogue with clever comments and rejoinders. Both characters displayed a surprising sense of humor. The major problem was even though the author did a good job of setting up the various conflicts, she did a very poor job of resolving them. If a writer makes the reader completely believe in the issues confronting the characters (which I did) then there must be an equal amount of effort put into corresponding solutions. Alasdair's addiction was well described at the beginning, but the withdrawal symptoms seemed to stop easily at a certain point. Problems with her brother­in­law and his brother were also resolved with little effort. Even when Mary meets the mother she has never known things just easily move on. Some questions were never explained. Some of the characters' emotional responses were illogical and Mary was a bit too sexually confident for an innocent young woman.


**ARC copy provided by NetGalley**

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