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I’ve always found myths and legends fascinating. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table? Awesome. Dracula? Pretty darn cool. Heck, I’m even a fan of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, even though I’m a couple of decades too old for it. But there is one legend that I could never really muster any interest in: the Lost Island of Atlantis. I don’t know why, but I could care less about that sunken metropolis (Sorry, Plato). But having said all that, I was in the market for a new romance novel to read, so when I found Desire Me by Robyn DeHart, I decided to give it a try.
Set in nineteenth century England, the novel centers around Maxwell Barrett, the Marques of Lindberg. Seeing as how he’s a member of the nobility and therefore doesn’t need to actually, you know, work, Max spends all of his time treasure-hunting, even as a teenager. His particular area of interest is in proving the existence of the Lost Island of Atlantis. However, tragedy strikes his family while Max is searching for Atlantis, and he never fully forgives himself. The tragedy sets him even more to his course: if Max could find the lost island, maybe his family would be vindicated. That’s where Sabine Tobias comes in.
Sabine lives with her aunts, and the three of them sell beauty products to the wealthy ladies of London society. Their satisfied customers rave that the face cream is simply a miracle. That’s because the cream contains a tiny amount of elixir from the Fountain of Youth, which just so happens to have been located on Atlantis. See, Sabine and her aunts are all descendants of the lost city, but they are suddenly put into grave danger as a madman begins murdering people in order to bring about some ancient Atlantean prophecy. Sabine and Max must band together to protect her family and her heritage, but will they be able to stop the killer in time? More importantly, will they be able to resist their growing attraction to each other, or will they succumb to their desires?
I simply found the whole story to be a bit tedious. The dialogue was stuffy–everyone walked around speaking in long expository speeches–and the plot was so intricate that I had a hard time keeping everything straight. What was supposed to be Stargate: Atlantis meets Indiana Jones became muddled and boring. I found the love scenes to be interesting, though. Often in romance novels the heroine is a virgin, or at the very least inexperienced, but Sabine has apparently been around the block a few times. She approaches sex with Max in a detached, “only sex, nothing romantic” sort of way that is not very common in this genre of fiction. We don’t actually start to see any sort of romance from her until the very end, in fact.
I had hoped Desire Me would have helped spark some sort of interest in Atlantis for me, but that just wasn’t the case. It appears that this is part of a series, with other books by DeHart featuring other treasure hunters… but I don’t think I’ll be checking those other books out.
