One of the joys of reading a book for the first time is not knowing precisely what lurks within its pages. Sometimes, in fact most times, if I am being honest, the plot unrolls smoothly and predictably, and that’s fine, too, but sometimes – oh, a glorious few times! – it veers off into unexpected territory. And so it is here.
Here’s the premise: Harold (or Haro) Emison has, at the tender age of twenty-three, come into his inheritance as Earl of Anglesford, only to find that the coffers are empty. The options are to sell the ancient family home or… what? His younger brother Torin proposes the time-honoured solution – marry an heiress. And within days, Haro has set about doing just that, betrothing himself to the elegant person of Arabella Hastings, only daughter of cotton mill owner William Hastings. There’s only one snag: Haro was on the brink of an engagement to his distant cousin who lives with the family, Eda Swanycke, who takes the new engagement in very bad part. When the Emison family and the Hastings decamp to the ancestral home, the atmosphere is somewhat soured by the subtle sniping between the two women.
Now, at this point, it was perfectly possible that this would turn into a variant of Georgette Heyer’s A Civil Contract, as Haro and Arabella got to know each other better and reached an accommodation. So, just another marriage of convenience story, then. But this is not that story, happily, as relations between Eda and Arabella turn to open warfare, a French architect turns up set about remodelling the ancestral home into a modern Palladian masterpiece, and Haro finds himself caught in the middle, trying desperately to keep the peace in order to save his family from ruin.
And then there’s a murder. Oh. I wasn’t expecting *that*. The book now veers off sharply into murder mystery territory, complete with the eccentric detective (a Bow Street Runner, in this case), one Jacob Pevensey, whose eccentricity consists of sketching the suspects instead of taking notes. This part of the book is note perfect, the events leading up to the murder being gradually revealed, and a last-minute revelation which makes everything clear to Mr Pevensey (although I’d spotted a key point earlier). And then the romance is wrapped up, along with another reveal which wasn’t too hard to predict, either.
I see from the reviews that a lot of people disliked the two part plot, some feeling the romance was unsatisfactory, and some the murder mystery. For me, I loved the whole book, and especially that it was (to me, anyway) totally unpredictable, and I just love a book that takes me by surprise. Highlights include the sparring between the two rivals for Haro’s affections, and I liked the slow but relentless uncovering of Arabella’s unpleasant nature. I liked, too, that Haro finally realised what he needed to do to be true to himself. Some reviewers thought he was too much of a doormat early on, but I really admired the way he tried his hardest to keep everyone happy and only gave it up when he realised that it was never going to work. A terrific read. Five stars and I’m straight off to the next book in the series.
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