Disturbing Stranger is not a romance. Our H, Randal, semi-forces innocent h Laura to marry him because he wants her body. Randal is obsessed, ridiculously possessive, jealous, completely gobsmacked with lust for Laura. Laura loves and thinks she’s in love with doctor Tom Nichol, her second cousin once removed who is a cross between brother, substitute dad, best friend, a caring, gentle man who intends serve the truly poor via the World Health Organization. (Book written in 1978 before WHO lost credibility.)
Randal knows Laura loves Tom and he’s going crazy thinking she’ll marry Tom and sleep with him. Randal chases Laura for months, kisses her enough for both of them to realize they both are attracted to each other. Eventually Randal catches Laura’s feckless father embezzling from him and blackmails Laura to marry him.
Laura enjoys their honeymoon; it’s passionate and Laura realizes Randal is kind, generous and can be fun. A couple scenes however show a different, fraught side. First scene is in Antoinette Bell’s Venetian palazzo. Antoinette takes Randal’s arm and leads him off, and Randal lets her, leaving Laura trailing behind. Antoinette tells one of the young men to dance with Laura. Randal eventually dances with Laura himself and is very jealous of the young men she met. When she mentions one of them in their hotel room he gets nasty.
The second bothersome honeymoon scene is their last morning when they are lying in bed and Randal is “sensuously engaged in his ceaseless exploration of Laura’s body”. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. When Laura says they should get up he threatens to “take you again to teach you a lesson you won’t forget.” More ugh.
The first night they are home in England Laura wakes up at 4 am and Randal wakes up too and rapes her, tells her he wants to hurt her. At the story’s end he tells her he wanted to hurt her, wanted to rape her, wanted to make her know she belonged to him and only to him. But it’s ok because he didn’t enjoy it either. What a guy.
In the denouement (I won’t call it a happy ever after) Randal says he fell in love with Laura at sight and was terrified that she would turn to Tom, that he was taking the biggest gamble of his life. He worried she would hate him for forcing her to marry him.
That’s the story in a nutshell. Although we shouldn’t forget that Randal and Laura have the second floor of his folks’ house and that his dad expects them to be prompt at meal times and that his mother tells Laura what to do (masked as suggestions of course). His mother thinks it would help Laura get used to running a house if she lives with them and learns from her, forgetting that Laura had been responsible for her own parents’ home, cooked most meals and took care of her own mother.
I don’t see this as a romance. Yes both characters claim to love the other but it’s a shallow, possessive type of love, a taking not a giving, driven by lust and jealousy. I’d call this more the prequel to murder.
Nonetheless, Charlotte Lamb almost makes this work. She is an excellent writer with a knack for making the most incredible jerk’s into heroes.
I don’t have to necessarily believe the happy ever after or love the characters to like a book, but it sure helps.
3 Stars
I got my paperback copy on eBay and you can usually find copies on Amazon, eBay, Thriftbooks and other used book sites. Mills and Boon reissued Disturbing Stranger, which was published originally in 1978, in 1984 in their “Best Seller Romance Line”.
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