The Wedding Affair

As a longtime sucker for Regency-era intrigue, I was skeptical *The Wedding Affair* would offer anything fresh—I’ve read one too many novels where the real scandal is the corset coming undone. But Leigh Michaels surprised me by eschewing the usual mopes and sighs in favor of something far sharper: a story where the wedding is less a ceremony and more a circus of bad decisions, bad reputations, and one particularly bad marriage proposal. The Duke of Somervale is a compelling mess, a man who’d rather bury his pride than his sister’s reputation, and his dry, exasperated narration of the chaos around him is a delight. The Virtual Voice performer captures his world-weariness with a voice like aged whiskey—smooth but with a sting—but stumbles slightly in differentiating the female characters, whose voices blur together in a sea of genteel vowels. The plot’s biggest flaw is its reliance on coincidence to tie up loose ends (seriously, a conveniently timed inheritance?), but the dialogue is so deliciously wicked it’s easy to forgive. The production is clean, if a tad sterile, which does the book’s snark no favors—this story deserves a little more rustle of silk and clink of crystal in the mix. Still, by the final act, I was hooked, not by the romance (which is, thankfully, minimal) but by the sheer audacity of its characters’ misdeeds. If you’re here for a love story, keep walking. If you want Regency high society skewered with a scalpel, this is your audiobook.