Earthly Delight

I was really pleasantly surprised by this book. I'd never heard of the author and I didn't know what to think at all, but since I'm a big geek I always take a chance with the geeky heroines - and Victoria Broadridge is a collossal geek. She's a paleontologist and on the cusp of discovering and correctly identifying dinosaurs. The hero was just masterful. I really admire an author who can make a hero pretty appealing from the beginning but also include a significant amount of character development. The hero, Gabriel, was kicked out of Oxford before he could begin a promising career in the sciences and, with the kind of vengefulness so characteristic of the immature, decides that the best reaction is to utterly ruin his life. So as the book begins he's a wastrel; much more down on his luck than the average rake, he's about a hop skip and a jump away from debtor's prison, or, more likely, a broken kneecap. So the book follows Gabriel's redemption, Victoria's slow discovery of the person Gabriel was and could be; the search for mysterious gigantic lizard bones and a jealous professional rival. Some of the murder mystery part is a bit overwrought, but for the most part it's very well done: genteel and sneaky, as you'd expect from a bunch of overeducated academics. The development of Victoria & Gabriel's relationship is very believable and well-crafted. The writing is mostly very good, although I occasionally thought that the author made her characters a bit more pedantic than is really necessary. There is very little explicit sexuality; I don't mind a novel that is low on steam if it's good, and this one was, but you might want to be prepared.