When Matthew first sees Grace, she is drugged and strapped to the same table on which Matthew spent much time restrained and tormented by quack doctors and his two “handlers” – sadistic pawns of his uncle who can barely stop themselves from raping Grace before they hand her over to Matthew, who initially assumes that Grace is in league with his uncle. Matthew is tormented by the very conditions of his physical containment, but he is equally hard on himself, clinging to what small freedoms he has been able to carve out within the capacities of his own intellectual and emotional resilience. Also there is the small issue of his sanity, which Matthew fears will one day leave him, even though he has been free of the feverish fits that we readers understand were the product of physical, not mental illness. Restless and unhappy after eleven years of imprisonment and two failed escape attempts, Matthew has never had the pleasure of a woman, so his uncle decides to bring him an expendable woman to distract him from his captivity.įor a man like Matthew, autonomy means everything and is everywhere absent, except in his botanical work, which consists of grafting roses, conducting various experiments, and writing scientific articles under a pseudonym. Thus the elder Lansdowne needs Matthew alive to keep his guardianship of the future earl’s fortune (if Matthew dies the title will not go to Lord John), so the world thinks the young marquess a madman, even though he has long since regained his wits.

Having lost his parents as a child, and not seen in society since he was fourteen, Matthew is a prisoner of his greedy and conniving uncle, Lord John, who uses a fever Matthew contracted at fourteen to have him certified as a lunatic. Impoverished in widowhood and banished from her wealthy and titled family, Grace Paget is kidnapped on her way to meet her uncle, mistaken for a common prostitute and nabbed for the pleasure of Matthew Lansdowne, the reclusive Marquess of Sheene. Claiming the Courtesan is a book that hit much more often than it missed for me, while Untouched is a book with more misses than hits. And because of that, perhaps, when something in your book misses, it really misses. At your best, your work brings out the best of both past and present Romances, because you are often examining some of the more provocative elements in the genre, making them both larger than life and relatable at the same time. I realized reading your new release Untouched that for me your books are fundamentally a revisiting of older Romance motifs, with both retro and current elements. Janet Book Reviews / C Reviews Category / C+ Reviews captivity narrative / forced-seduction 15 Comments

Untouched by anna campbell