Format: E-book
Read with: iBooks for iPad
Length: Novel
Genre: Historical Romance
Series: Standalone
Publisher: Escape Publishing
Hero: Samuel Biggs
Heroine: Colleen Mary Malone
Sensuality: 3
Date of Publication: December 1, 2013
Started On: January 13, 2014
Finished On: January 13, 2014

His Convict Wife by Lena Dowling is loosely tied to The Convict’s Bounty Bride published in March of 2013. His Convict Wife tells the story of quite the unusual couple, a recently widowed Samuel Biggs who makes his way to Australia to make a new life for himself and a convict bride.

It is during a moment of desperation that Colleen makes an attempt to impress upon Samuel to take her away from the hell she has to live in, not because she is looking out for herself but rather for the baby that she carries in her womb, whom she would not be able to keep if she were to live out the rest of her sentence in prison.

Samuel wants to stay true to the memory of his beloved wife but Colleen proves to be someone who is much more than the person she seems to be, something that makes it tough for Samuel to ignore her and designate her to the safe role of the companion that he wants her to be. Colleen sets out with one goal in her mind when she starts to seduce her husband with every trick she had learnt at the whore house, that is to secure a father’s love for her child. But what Colleen in the end gets is more than what she bargains for as feelings she had never encountered before makes themselves known, something that becomes harder to ignore as the days pass on.

Although I believe that the premise of the story and the characters were quite adequate for the story, I just felt that there were loose ends that needed to be tied up to make the story more wholesome than it ended up being. I liked Colleen’s character, her gumption and her attitude even under the most trying of circumstances. The life that she had been subjected to would have made a bitter woman out of someone with lesser character and I would say the woman she turned out to be earned her my admiration in spades.

Samuel was a bit tough for me to fall for. I felt that he was a bit too rigid at times, too judgmental of everyone and everything. The conflict that pushes Samuel and Colleen apart was one that was understandable at first but I felt that everyone involved didn’t truly get the closure they deserved. Perhaps it was the author’s way of keeping the story realistic because it is seldom in life that anyone gets the proper sense of closure from events that take place. However, I believe that perhaps an epilogue or a chapter that shows the couple somewhere down the line in the future would have appeased readers like myself, knowing that all that the couple had gone through had not been in vain.

One thing that I did like was the subtle heat that existed between Samuel and Colleen. The aspect of Colleen being way more experienced in carnal pleasures was a bit of a novelty when most novels that we come across tends to tell stories where the hero is the one who has a mountain of experience when it comes to women.

Though The Convict Wife could’ve been much better, I still managed to enjoy what the story had to offer. Recommended for those who love romance novels in an Australian setting.

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