Review of Sarah MacLean's Regency romance, Wicked and the Wallflower: What is wicked, anyway?

 

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed Sarah MacLean's Regency romance Brazen and the Beast and said that I couldn't wait to read more of her books.  And I didn't!  Brazen and the Beast is the second book in the Bareknuckle Bastards series. I just finished Wicked and the Wallflower, the first in the series.  

Wicked was not quite as charming as Brazen.  The characters were not as well-developed, for one.  Felicity, the wallflower of the title, has little personality beyond a penchant for picking locks -- a hobby with no backstory.  When did she first begin to pick locks?  Why?  How did she learn?  She mentions that her family knows she does this and doesn't approve.  How do they know?  How do they express their disapproval?

My real issue with the book was Devil/Devon, the Wicked of the title. With his brother Beast from Brazen and the Beast, Devil runs an underground smuggling empire that has made them very, very rich.  How rich?  We are told rich enough to buy all of the real estate in the part of London where the fashionable people live.  I'm going to set aside the idea that their extremely work-intensive smuggling operation, in which they seem to be selling one bottle of brandy packed in ice at a time, is unlikely to be so lucrative.  Let's accept that they are the Jeff Bezoses of their time.  They are always bragging about bringing good jobs to the slum of Covent Garden. That's great, as far as it goes.  But instead of amassing huge wealth built on the backs of their apparently blindly loyal employees (who they occasionally kill or at least beat up), couldn't they spread the money around a bit more?  Raise wages?  Build some decent housing for low income people?  Maybe a playground or park or two?  

That said, I did enjoy this book.  I look forward to reading the next installment of the series, about a third brother who inherited a title by betraying the others and has regretted it ever since.