"Drax frowned his dark, arrogantly slanted eyebrows over an equally arrogant aquiline nose"

Last month when searching for helpful pieces of advice for the upcoming New Voices competition we took the advice of Penny Jordan, legendary Mills & Boon novelist and author of some two hundred romance books (including Passionate Protection and Passionate Possession) in a prolific career spanning five decades. As part of her Arabian Nights series Jordan offered up excitement in various forms, such as first love with a sheikh in The Sheikh's Virgin Bride, pleasure with a sheikh in One Night with the Sheikh, passion with a sheikh in Possessed by the Sheikh, sexual harassment with a sheikh in The Sheikh's Blackmailed Mistress and sand everywhere in Prince of the Desert. Bewildered Heart preferred the feel of the more mysterious sheikh, rattle and roll of Taken by the Sheikh, a modern romance with a very modern twist on what exactly Penny Jordan believes a sheikh to be, and where exactly Penny Jordan believes a sheikh comes from.

Welcome to the sultry, exotic lands of Dhurahn, an oil rich Middle Eastern state governed by Prince al Drac'ar al Karim and his brother Vere. Drac'ar al Karim, Drax to his friends (Hi, Drax!), has returned from a business trip to London when he learns some frightful news from the leaders of Dhurahn's neighbouring states. The Ruler of Zuran wants Vere to wed his youngest sister, while the Emir of Khulua wishes Drax marry his eldest daughter. While the twin brothers are both thirty-four they are not yet ready to settle down in matrimony, even if it will strengthen the ties between the three countries. There is only one way to resolve this problem and save them from a marriage of convenience. How about, Drax proposes, a marriage of convenience? They will find two innocent, virginal ladies glad to wed and foolishly compliant enough into accepting a quickie divorce without any sort of financial compensation. The sooner they find their prospective brides the sooner they can decline the Ruler and Emir's proposals without causing offence and accidentally creating an international incident. Do women such as this still exist, asks Vere. Did they ever exist, asks the reader. Furthermore, where will you find such a creature, lost, confused, penniless, local, a virgin, and willing to sacrifice all of the virtuous personality traits that made her that way for a misogynistic sheikh with arrogant eyebrows and a suspicious job offer?

Meanwhile, in nearby Zuran City, capital of Zuran, Sadie Murray has been fired from her vague job description by the cantankerous Madame al Sawar. It seems Sadie was unwilling to trade sex for business agreements and her employer's company was solely successful because clients were rewarded with sex for agreeing to business deals. Sadie is thrown out without pay or the means to return to her home in the United Kingdom. Things look bleak for intelligent, morally responsible, virginal and selfless Miss Murray when who should walk through the gate but the Madame's noble and kind husband and his friend, the devastatingly gorgeous and overwhelmingly masculine Prince Drac'ar al Karim. Sadie has never felt physical attraction before, but suddenly her womanly senses are tingling and her throat is dry for a reason besides the humidity. She does not recognise Drax, of course, because the reader can only assume she is as politically ignorant as the writer has made her well-educated and politically knowledgeable. She hurries away, bound for the city airport or British Embassy, defeated by Madame al Sawar's cruelty and reluctant to accept Professor al Sawar's help. None of this goes unnoticed by Drax, however. His manly desires are stirred by Sadie's silky hair, reminiscent of his horses, her honourable pride, reminiscent of his falcons and her other features, probably all comparable to an animal Drax owns.

With only the merest few touches of contrivance all the pieces needed for the plot implied in the prologue have been laid within the opening two chapters. Drax quickly gallops after Sadie in his luxurious, yet unassuming, town car and finds her walking on the dust that passes for pavement in the State of Zuran. In her rush to escape Madame al Sawar Sadie dropped her passport and forgot her hat, rendering her with a nasty case of heatstroke and the embarrassment of reaching her destination with identification. Fortunately for her, the hunky piece of royal goodness has found her passport and has an unopened bottle of cool water in the car. If only Sadie would climb aboard with Drax she could reclaim her valuable documents and not die as a result of dehydration and over-exposure. Drax has an entirely different kind of exposure in mind for this pale beauty and he will stop at nothing to convince her to stay, including refusing to return her passport and locking all the doors once she is in the car. With her attention now finely tuned to his passionate sexiness and in-no-way-revealing dishdasha Drax lays out the whole truth over hurried mouthfuls of thirst-quenching water.

While Dhurahn enjoys a fair amount of wealth from its oil reserves the country's main resource has been the river that runs through it and its verdant, fertile land. Dhurahn's strongest industry is its produce, but the ambitious twin brothers have greater plans than this and yearn to create a financial centre within the country to rival those of New York, London and Hong Kong. Both Drax and Vere have been travelling regularly to England for the meetings necessary to create a financial centre worthy of competing in the money market, and Drax has learned that such a venture will require people with an understanding of financial services to work in the buildings he will eventually get around to constructing. Therefore Dhurahn has begun searching for suitable candidates for such a prestigious role, perhaps those with a degree and an MBA, who happen to be nearby and looking for a job. A likely story, thinks Sadie, who wisely deduces that when a man offers a woman employment it always turns out to be an elaborate scheme to trick her into an arranged marriage with his brother. She turns down the opportunity, finding Drax's claims to the Dhurahni throne incredulous, but Drax smartly reacts as any Prince would, with the offer of a ride on his private jet. There the third chapter ends, Drax convinced he has found Vere's bride despite his own inexplicable physical attraction to her, and Sadie unsure if heatstroke has reduced her to a gullible idiot with a degree and MBA.

With relations between Western opinions of Arab businessmen and Arab businessmen at an all-time high, as they were even back in 2007 when the world made sense, Penny Jordan struck and Taken by the Sheikh is classic Mills & Boon escapist fantasy, spoilt only by hackneyed plotting, ludicrous characters, inept sentence structuring and a worryingly blasé attitude towards Middle Eastern geography. Jordan rehashes the story of every previous Modern Romance with lazy similarities to the likes of The Billionaire's Housekeeper Mistress and the wager prologue of The Millionaire's Indecent Proposal. Not that Penny Jordan can be blamed, as those novels were written after this one, but the similarities to the former are glaring. The timid virgin fired by her mean-spirited bully of a boss only to be rescued by a suave billionaire who only offers a job as a means to seducing her. One of the many obvious faults with The Billionaire's Housekeeper Mistress is that Australian billionaires are less popular than Arab Princes and housekeeping will never be as appealing as business management. How have sheikhs proven so popular in romance fiction when they are nothing more than a means to produce a new series of books by swapping out billionaire, or cowboy, for sheikh and leaving the majority of the other words alone?

Nevertheless, the predictability of the narrative and the generic formula are no match for Jordan's amateurish writing style. Whereas the  unchallenging simplicity of many a Mills & Boon can infuriate for its lack of nuance and skill the authors are at least aware that they must maintain character perspective over lengthy passages, and not tally back and forth sentence to sentence. This may keep the reader on their toes, as Penny Jordan might believe, though angry at the assertion from an unknown weblog that she is mistaken, but while Bewildered Heart knows Jordan has written many books before we would counter that the effect is comical and slows the pace to so glacier not even the sizzling chemistry of the characters can melt the ice and drown the reader in a flood of emotion and competent writing.

Vere would have his own story told a year later in the series, so we can rule out his participation from Taken by the Sheikh. This leaves us with Drax and Sadie. One needs a wife and has been celibate for too long, while the other is a virgin who desperately requires a job and her passport back. For Drax the prognosis is obvious, he should sleep with Sadie and convince her to marry him to avoid the arranged marriage to the Emir of Khulua's eldest daughter, only to then fall in love with Sadie before she discovers there is no work in the financial sector and she is being used and lied to. Then Drax is merely one impassioned speech away from eternal happiness. For Sadie she is a handful of unlikely sequences away from hearing an impassioned speech and having a husband and a well-paid job in the financial sector of what is clearly a deeply-troubled and openly corrupt nation where the indulgent elite of two princes rule. We can only forlornly hope Jordan sees fit to develop a backdrop of topical and blood-thirsty revolution. With the chances of that seeming as incredulous as anything else that has happened thus far only one question remains, who will the titular sheikh turn out to be?