{"id":2947,"date":"2020-10-01T16:22:05","date_gmt":"2020-10-01T16:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/?p=2947"},"modified":"2020-10-01T16:22:05","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T16:22:05","slug":"review-a-respectable-house-by-jan-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/2020\/10\/01\/review-a-respectable-house-by-jan-jones\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: A Respectable House by Jan Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"A fantastic story! Two damaged people brought together by circumstances and learning to trust again, a wonderful, if unconventional, romance and a whole heap of danger threatening, all set during race week at Newmarket. This is book 6 of the Newmarket series and book 2 of the Furze House Irregulars series, and although it helps to have read the earlier books, it isn\u2019t necessary.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the premise: seven years earlier, Catherine (Kitty) Bowman eloped to marry Simon Eastwick, and quickly discovered she\u2019d made a hideous mistake. Simon is a crook through and through, and caught up with the evil underworld boss known as Flint. Now Simon\u2019s dead, but Kitty\u2019s nightmare isn\u2019t over, because Flint is after her. With the aid of her sister and friends, she escapes London to hide away in Newmarket.<\/p>\n

Helping her is cynical rake Nicholas Dacre, living a privileged life as a gentleman but also taking risks uncovering crime. Helping Kitty opens his eyes to a different, much less privileged, world without a multitude of servants at one\u2019s beck and call. And of course Kitty opens his heart, too.<\/p>\n

I liked both hero and heroine. Kitty\u2019s resourceful and down-to-earth. Despite her upper-class upbringing, she\u2019s spent years struggling to manage with little money and a cruel, negligent husband and she\u2019s lost any pretensions to gentility. Her story is utterly heart-breaking, but her spirit isn\u2019t broken in the least. Nick\u2019s the dependable man she\u2019s never known, but he has his own tragic history. The way these two circle round to an accommodation is brilliant. It\u2019s unorthodox, but it\u2019s perfect for their characters and histories.<\/p>\n

Along the way, there are some lovely minor characters to spice things up. I particularly loved Molly (a respectable house, indeed!) and Kitty\u2019s young daughter. The villain was pretty obvious from an early stage, but the denouement was still deliciously dramatic. My only complaint, and it\u2019s a very minor one, is that there are a huge number of characters from previous books in the series popping up throughout. I couldn\u2019t remember much about them, and would have liked perhaps a sentence or two more about some of them to remind me. However, there\u2019s a full list at the front of the book and my leaky memory didn\u2019t make any difference to my enjoyment of the story.<\/p>\n

One word of warning: there\u2019s nothing terribly graphic here but there\u2019s quite a lot of off-screen sex going on outside of marriage, prostitution and some discussion of sexual and physical abuse. This is entirely in keeping with the characters\u2019 connections with London crime rings, but this is not a fluffy traditional Regency of ball gowns and marriage prospects. It is, however, a very realistic look at the darker side of Regency life, a story that\u2019s less often in the spotlight and although parts of it are very moving, it\u2019s not at all a grim, depressing read. I loved every minute of it, the romance is wonderful and Jan Jones\u2019 writing is, as always, word perfect. Five stars.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A fantastic story! Two damaged people brought together by circumstances and learning to trust again, a wonderful, if unconventional, romance and a whole heap of danger threatening, all set during race week at Newmarket. This is book 6 of the Newmarket series and book 2 of the Furze House Irregulars series, and although it helps […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[105],"class_list":["post-2947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-jones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2947"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2951,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2947\/revisions\/2951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}