The Heir [Unabridged, Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

Catherine Coulter (Author), Steven Crossley (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1997

New York Times best-selling author, Catherine Coulter, has earned enduring popularity for drawing lush historical settings in her richly layered romances. Rewritten for the 90s, The Heir is a scintillating tale of a couple's love amidst treachery in early 19th century England. When the Earl of Strafford dies, he leaves startling instructions in his will that will force Justin, his distant nephew, and his headstrong daughter Arabella to marry. Their fiery union of convenience mires them in a web of deceit that threatens to destroy them and the love that is beginning to spark in their lives. With a masterful touch, Catherine Coulter creates heroes and heroines that burst from the page, filled with life, excitement, and emotion. Add Steven Crossley's stirring narration, and this moving tale becomes a breathtaking experience.

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Recorded Books, LLC; Unabridged edition (1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0788706551
• ISBN-13: 978-0788706554
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,262,970 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Catherine Coulter is the author of the New York Times-bestselling FBI thrillers The Cove, The Maze, The Target, The Edge, Riptide, Hemlock Bay, Eleventh House, Blindside, Blowout, Point Blank, Double Take and TailSpin. She lives in northern California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not a romantic romance..., July 3, 2002

By 

bookjunkiereviews (India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Heir (Coulter Historical Romance) (Mass Market Paperback)

The best part of this book was the secondary romance between the heroine's mother and the physician. There were some memorable characters - the mysterious French count, the spotty viscount (Lord Greybourne), the Talgarths, and of course, Elspeth who gradually moves from almost unbelievable naivete to a genuine love with a decent man.

What I hated were the hero and heroine. If you like Catherine Coulter in general, you will not like this review. I am not writing for the Coulter fans out there, but for readers who read other Regency historicals and who are trying out Coulter as a new-to-them author. I used to love Coulter back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her sensibilities are more in tune with that period, and she herself admits it in more than one review. What I don't understand is the profusion of re-releases of older works. [I do understand that they bring in a lot of money to publisher and author, but not why these re-releases are so popular].

I am not fond of ultra-alpha heroes who taunt and then rape their wives, or of conversation that consists largely of "damns". Re-reading THE HEIR again, Coulter sounds like Amanda Quick to me without the humor and wit, and with far more swearing from everyone.

I gave this one star not because the hero and heroine are so unlikeable, but because the story is more of a marriage that is basically a rape and founded solely on mercenary considerations plus mistrust and hostility on the part of the husband. We have a hero who jumps to conclusions, perhaps with some justification, but who does not change his mind about his fiancee's infidelity (Arabella was not even his wife when the supposed infidelity occurred). He continues to accuse her of adultery even after discovering that she is a virgin. When she charges him with rape, he does not answer that it is impossible for a husband to rape his wife (a legal reality back then) but that he did not rape her. He used cream. Yeah, right. And he continues in this train of thought for the whole book, more or less. Only the proof that someone else was with the French count is what changes his mind. Nothing that Arabella or her mother can say will do it.

Arabella herself is hard to like. She has a real attitude problem at the outset. She is blindly devoted to her father, a man who was abusive (physically and emotionally) to his young wife. She is completely unaware of the fact that her mother's marriage to him was a misery. Until the hero points out the examples of her father's infidelity, Arabella will not change her mind. In fact, she mentally calls her mother a trollop and an adulterous wife after learning that her widowed mother plans to marry within months of the late Earl's death. I can understand Arabella's love for a father who indulged her, I can understand her pain and shock that her mother would remarry so hastily, and I can even understand her suspicions that her mother has been unfaithful. What I cannot understand is her general attitude.

Yes, Arabella does stand up to the hero, her husband the new Earl. Yes, she is the only person for him, obnoxious that he is, the only person who can challenge him and keep him on his toes. If there had not been Justin's attitude through the novel and other clunkers, this book might have rated 3 stars.

Rated: 0.9
Recommendation: Avoid, unless you are turned on by a hero who almost puts Othello to shame, and by constant fighting between hero and heroine.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Secondary Characters Are More Interesting..., May 13, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Heir (Coulter Historical Romance) (Mass Market Paperback)

Sometimes Coulter wins and sometimes she misses. The H/H were not intersting to me. I was not rooting for them to be together. The heroine begins by being an a#% and then it becomes the hero's turn. The fact that the heroine idolized her jerk of a father made me hate her. And of course he comes out smelling like a rose in the end. I don't care what he did for his youngest daughter, but the way he treated his eldest daughter was unforgivable and made him a monster. That being said, I was more interested in Elspeth and Gervaise (It's really bad when you feel sorry for the villian) than the H/H. The fact that it got me to "rant" gave the book 2 stars.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing and annoying - definitely not romantic, February 22, 2006

By 

Helen Hancox "Auntie Helen" (Essex, England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Heir (Coulter Historical Romance) (Mass Market Paperback)

I wanted to like this book. The flyleaf made it sound interesting - young lady's father dies and she has to marry his heir, the new earl, who is her second cousin; a strange French relative appears on the scene with unusual consequences. All sounded reasonably positive and I settled down to read a good yarn.

I didn't get it. What I got was a very disappointing, abrupt story supposedly about miscommunications being resolved and some lost emeralds and a possible murder. It started off well with our heroine, Arabella, meeting Justin who she thinks is one of her father's bastards, not realising he is actually her second cousin and the new Earl (her father had withheld from her that there was any surviving male in his family). Arabella is a feisty, tomboyish young girl of eighteen and she's great fun.

From this first major scene it all goes downhill. Arabella and the earl marry according to her father's wishes but he decides she has slept with the French comte staying with them and he virtually rapes her on their wedding night. No matter how much she protests her innocence he doesn't believe her. What seemed like it might be a light, delicate book ends up discussing sodomy and with incest taking place too. Decidedly uncharming.

Arabella is very hard to understand. Her new husband treats her appallingly yet she falls in love with him. He seems an incredibly un-rounded character - perfect in every way except that he believes his wife has previously been unfaithful, and is semi-violent and threatens to strangle her. Why is he so thickheaded about that? It doesn't fit at all.

The sub-plot of Arabella's half-sister Elsbeth and her fling with the comte (who turns out to be her half-brother, thus the incest) doesn't work too well. There's another romance, between Arabella's mother and the local doctor, which DOES work - although Ann (the mother) seems to recover remarkably quickly from an 18 year dreadful marriage.

The dialogue between the characters is very strange. It's all done in short sentences. Nobody says anything complex. They all want to strangle each other. Or kill the comte. Even Arabella. The earl threatens to strangle Arabella. She doesn't seem to mind. Do you get the picture?

Overall this book was a missed opportunity. The whodunnit aspect wasn't even very gripping and by the end of it I was just glad it was all over. The expectation that they would all live happily ever after seemed distinctly unlikely to me.