I’ve loved everything Jenny Hambly has written and this is no exception, but I have to admit this one fell a little bit flat and meandered into the weeds at the end. Even so, with two likable protagonists, a fascinating array of side characters and a genuine dilemma for the heroine, this is still a cracking read.

Here’s the premise: Captain Charles Bassington survives the carnage of Waterloo, only to fall ill with an inflammation of the lungs. While he recuperates in rural France, with communications difficult, his neighbour and friend Lady Selena is so mad with worry for him that she sends his friend Lord Carteret to find him and bring him home.

At this point, Selena’s heart is painfully obvious to everyone. She’s been in love with Charles for years, and her worry for him is too great for her to dissemble. But there’s a wrinkle. Charles has been writing to her from France (a bit naughty when they’re not betrothed), and he’s suggested that Lord Carteret would make her a good husband. She’s had an unsuccessful season in London, partly through shyness and partly because she just doesn’t want anyone but Charles, but now she has to face up to reality. She’s twenty years old, Charles is not going to marry her and it’s time she left her childish dreams behind and started looking seriously for a husband.

Almost at once, two suitors pop up. One is the same Lord Carteret recommended by Charles. The other is an older man (all of 37! Mr Knightley territory), Lord Ormsley. Both of them are eligible, gentlemanly and attentive. And here is the dilemma of all sensible Regency women – should she settle for one or other of the two, or should she hold out for the man she really wants, with the risk that she might never marry? It was a serious problem at the time, and waiting for love to happen along wasn’t a good idea outside the pages of a novel.

While Selena is weighing up her suitors and Charles is recovering from his illness, there’s a bit of a mystery thrown into the mix, with the discovery of a body and a necklace in the local lough (lake). The necklace belonged to a local girl who disappeared a few years ago after suffering an unrequited love affair, so it seems an open and shut case, but is it?

In the background are a whole array of minor characters. I loved that both our main characters enjoyed warm, loving families. Not without the odd irritation, of course, but generally they’re normal folks, and not the evil, overbearing relations so often encountered in a Regency romance. In fact, Selena’s stepmother epitomises the deftness with which the characters are drawn. Lord Sheringham has only recently remarried, just nine months after the death of his wife (Selena’s mother). We first encounter the new Lady Sheringham in London with Selena as she tries her best to find her a husband, and there’s a certain tension between the two. It looks as if Lady S is going to fall neatly into the trope of wicked (or at least deeply unpleasant) stepmother, especially as she has a daughter of her own to marry off.

But back home in the north, she is gradually revealed as being rather an insecure person, unused to being part of a loyal and affectionate family and unsure of how far to unbend in her dealings with the tenants. She slowly relaxes her stance towards Selena and is revealed as a much more nuanced and frankly interesting character. I very much enjoyed this miniature character development going on alongside the main story.

Some grumbles (because what would a review be without a few grumbles?). Firstly, the characters. There are a huge array on display here, and I never got them straight in my mind. Selena’s family confused me. How old was Gregory, her brother? Or Eddy, another brother? He was never seen, owing to some illness from India (malaria, possibly?). I never even knew what the family name was. If any of these details were mentioned, I missed them. There were a bunch of local families that I never quite sorted out, including Cedric, who turned out to be quite important to Selena’s history. He was mentioned once or twice in passing, but I never got the impression that it was a big deal, and Selena always seemed so composed that it was hard to believe she’d had a traumatic experience. She was supposed to be shy in company, but that didn’t come across to me particularly well. And Lady Sheringham’s horrible parents appeared out of the blue, with no warning of anything untoward in her history. Maybe I read too quickly to spot the clues, or maybe they were just too subtle for my brain.

The mystery of the body in the lough was resolved in the most unexciting way imaginable. I liked the idea of it, and it felt very plausible, but it seemed like too much of a coincidence, the way it happened. It would have been more satisfying, I think, if the discovery of the body had triggered the resolution instead of it just happening (trying not to reveal anything here). But I was glad it wasn’t as black an event as it seemed at first.

Now, none of this would matter a bit, but I confess to being a bit disappointed at the way the romance ended. Here we have a dashing captain, a leader of men who knows very well how to be decisive, and we have a sensible, intelligent and spirited heroine who knows her own mind. She also has the shining example of two friends who seized control of their own destinies by setting out to snare their chosen husbands. Even if she decided not to use their precise methods, I would have liked to see Selena seize control of her destiny, too. Or that Charles would decide to be brave and snatch her from under the noses of her two suitors. But no. He has to be talked into it by half his relations and hers, and negotiate with his father first, which is very correct but (for me) infuriating. What I want is for one or other or (preferably) both the protagonists to be swept away by passion in the end, overcoming all obstacles, real or imagined. I was also hoping that Charles would turn out to be rich in his own right. His brother-in-law was managing his prize money for him, but although it was mentioned in passing, nothing further was said about that, and Charles had to beg his father for financial support.

As always, though, the book is beautifully written. Here’s a lovely quote: ‘There could be no comparison between Lord Carteret’s cool, grey gaze and Charles’ warm, laughing blue eyes, just as there was no comparison between a still, wintry morning and a glorious summer’s day.’ For almost the whole book, I was utterly enthralled, and couldn’t put it down. Only that somewhat unfocused ending keeps it to four stars for me. 

Jenny Hambly has become one of my automatic buys, and I loved the first book in her new series, Marianne, so I was thrilled to discover this follow on. It was a bit of a surprise, however. Marianne introduced three very different pupils at Miss Wolfraston’s Seminary for Young Ladies, and naturally I expected the second book to follow the pattern of the first, and feature another one of the three. And it does, in a way, for here is timid Miss Charlotte Fletcher, venturing outside the Seminary for the first time in years. But accompanying her on this momentous journey is teacher and friend Miss Sarah Hayes, the daughter of a baron who lost all his money, forcing her to leave behind the glamorous world of London society and hide herself away as a teacher. Charlotte would have been a difficult heroine to root for, but luckily it’s lively, somewhat tempestuous Sarah who’s the star of this tale.

Charlotte and Sarah set off from the Seminary to spend the summer with Charlotte’s Aunt Augusta, Lady Carstairs, recently returned from India. Also bound for the Carstairs’ house is Lord Seymore, Charlotte’s guardian and a former admirer of Sarah’s when she was briefly the star of the London season. So the stage is set for the two to rediscover each other, but there’s a whole heap of history to be sorted out first.

For the first few chapters, it seems as if the history is all being dumped on the hapless reader at once, and some of it feels a little disconnected. What was the point of the death of Lord Seymore’s aunt in London, for instance? Apart from delaying him, it seemed to serve no other purpose in the story. Fortunately, after several chapters laden with much backstory, we emerge into sunlight again and the story proper begins.

I was delighted to meet again one of the most charming characters from Marianne, Sir Horace Bamber, a man who might be seen as a brainless buffoon (even his own brother, the local vicar, makes gentle fun of him) but is actually a very kind, gentlemanly man, who emerges from the shadows of minor-character-dom as a rather splendid hero figure. In fact, all the minor characters are well rounded and interesting in their own right. I particularly enjoyed the gloriously eccentric Lady Carstairs and her doting husband.

Never mind that, what about the romance, I hear you say? Well, no worries there. Sarah’s a lovely, sparky heroine, and Lord Seymore’s a suitably heroic sort of hero, a thoroughly pleasant chap. Right from the start, it’s clear these two are made for each other, and our hero, at least, is in the mood for marriage. ‘When the apple is ripe, it will fall’, one of the characters says, and that is just the state Lord Seymore is in. Sarah should be ready to leave behind her dreary life at the Seminary and return to proper society. So what can possibly go wrong? Well, not much, frankly. She’s weighed down by her father’s death and her own reduction in circumstances, and prejudiced against him by his seeming neglect of Charlotte over the years. He’s hampered by the idea of her as a social butterfly, and thinks a quiet country mouse would suit him better. None of this really holds things up much.

In the background there’s an easily-solved mystery which Lord Carstairs, a former judge, sorts out with an aplomb worthy of Hercules Poirot. In addition, Sarah’s bothered by her unpleasant former fiance (who dumped her when her father lost his money, the cad) and there’s some business to do with salt smuggling, which was interesting but didn’t seem to have much to do with anything else.

The resolution of the romance, when it comes, is absolutely delicious, and there’s a sweet romance for shy little Charlotte, too, which was lovely, and a hint that the last of the three friends, Georgianna, will be the star of the next book.

As always, the author writes with assurance and a strong grasp of the Regency era. Fans of Georgette Heyer will find Jenny Hambly a worthy substitute, with sparkling wit, a full complement of strongly-drawn characters and even a sprinkling of Heyer’s traditional phrases. I loved it, and can’t wait for the next in the series. Five stars.

I thoroughly enjoyed the author’s previous book, her debut publication, so I looked forward to this with some enthusiasm and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a very different story, but that’s all to the good, and it features another spirited and independent heroine.

Sophie, the widowed Lady Lewisham, has just emerged from her year of mourning for her much older husband. It wasn’t a love match. He was in desperate need of an heir, and she was young, beautiful and available, with parents willing to accept a generous settlement to agree to the marriage. But this is not the conventional story of an unwilling bride and an unpleasant husband. Sophie was perfectly willing to do her duty to the benefit of her family, and Edward turned out to be a kind and considerate husband, who encouraged Sophie to read and expand her mind under his aegis. Even though the heir didn’t happen, he ensured that she became independently wealthy after his death.

So Sophie decides that she will continue to expand her mind by travelling to Italy with her companion, Miss Trew, and that was a pretty intrepid thing to do in those days, without a male or three to oversee everything. Naturally things go wrong as they travel, but luckily they encounter an acquaintance from London, Sir Philip Bray, who helps them out. And since he’s as handsome as she is beautiful… romance ahoy.

Needless to say, it’s not quite as simple as all that. Sophie is enjoying her independence (and her fortune!) and has no desire at all to surrender either to a man. And Philip is a confirmed bachelor and something of a rake. He’s happy with his succession of mistresses and has no intention at all of trading them in for a wife. And so the whole plot is the two of them inching towards their HEA, sometimes taking one step forward and two back, and sometimes veering off at a tangent, but always totally, utterly convinced that they aren’t heading for the altar. No way. Absolutely not.

In lesser hands this might have been rather dull. The interchanges between the two principals tended towards the grumpy, with only occasional bursts of romantic tension to counterpoint their wrangling. There are some minor side plots with an Italian family, resolved rather too easily, and a gentle little romance for Miss Trew, but none of that added much to the main story. Only Philip’s friend, Harry, added some much needed animation and humour to spice things up. But when our hero and heroine do break out of the grumpiness and allow the attraction between them to shine through, the result is breathtaking. There are some sublime moments of high emotion to more than compensate for all that crossness.

The author’s other great talent is in descriptive prose, and this book is superb in that respect, with its lush evocations of both the Italian countryside and the English. Her grasp of the Regency is sound enough to make the description of travelling through Italy perfectly believable. And for people, too, the author is able to create an image of a character in just a few well-chosen words. Wonderful stuff.

If I have a complaint, it’s that the romance is too straightforward. Or perhaps it’s the characters themselves who are too straightforward. They are both intelligent, sensible people without any real flaws (apart from grumpiness and an unwillingness to do their duty as hero/heroine of a romance). There are no real obstacles, except for their own personal resistance to the idea of matrimony, and after fighting against it for the whole length of the book, in the end they cave in rather easily when pushed and everything in the garden is rosy. I think I would have preferred them to take things more slowly and cautiously at this point rather than tipping straight into planning the honeymoon. Sophie needed to be absolutely sure that Philip would allow her to continue to grow as a person, and Philip needed to be certain he’d overcome his personal baggage. But I did like that they both seriously considered the idea of not getting married at all, but simply having an affair. A great instance of the author respecting the customs of the Regency, while also respecting the intelligence of her characters.

An excellent book, highly recommended, and I look forward to reading the irrepressible Harry’s story which I feel sure is bound to follow. Five stars.