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A fascinating and highly original premise, an appealing hero and heroine, some interesting side characters and with a mystery thrown in, to boot – what\u2019s not to like? I tore through this in a couple of days.<\/p>\nA fascinating and highly original premise, an appealing hero and heroine, some interesting side characters and with a mystery thrown in, to boot – what\u2019s not to like? I tore through this in a couple of days.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the premise: Demetrius, Lord Thorverton, is happiest raising horses on his Devon stud farm, but an impassioned plea for help from his mother sends him hot-footing it to London to rescue his younger brother from another scrape. It seems he\u2019s fallen under the spell of the alluring lady known as the Black Widow. She\u2019s not actually a widow, but four times she\u2019s been either betrothed to or courted by men who died unexpectedly, so she\u2019s shunned by society as one who puts a curse on any man who goes near her. Demetrius quickly discovers that his brother, along with half the young men of London, are demonstrating their bravery and daring fate by dancing with the Black Widow.<\/p>\n
One glance tells Demetrius that Miss Meribe Prestwich\u2014 No, wait, let\u2019s talk about those names. Demetrius is acceptably classical, but his younger brother is Collier. Um, a viscount\u2019s brother is named after a coal miner? And whatever sort of name is Maribe? Good grief. I don\u2019t even know how that would be pronounced.<\/p>\n
Anyway, as I was saying, one glance tells Demetrius that Miss Meribe Prestwich is no femme fatale, for she\u2019s obviously distressed by her situation. He doesn\u2019t believe in curses, so he undertakes to protect her from the nuisance of foolish young men tempting fate and annoying her by squiring her about himself. Pure altruism, of course, and the fact that she\u2019s young and pretty has nothing at all to do with it. She reluctantly agrees, and things are humming along nicely when someone attacks Demetrius, and calls him by name, to boot. So not a curse, but not random accidents, either. This is about murder.<\/p>\n
From then on, the race is on to find out who is behind all these deaths, with the added bonus of trying to prevent Demetrius from becoming the next victim. Frankly, the villain isn\u2019t exactly hard to work out and the dramatic climax is brought about solely because, having worked out not only who the villain must be and deduced that there must have been an accomplice, everybody\u2019s brains apparently switch off and forget some of these important facts. And there\u2019s the usual does-he-love-me-or-is-is-it-gentlemanly-honour business before the hero remembers to tell the heroine that yes, he does love her, actually. And all\u2019s well that ends well.<\/p>\n
Not a perfect book by any means, and it\u2019s riddled with Americanisms (gotten, fall, visit with, stoop, and all the usual suspects), and there\u2019s that brain fade at the end, so I can\u2019t give it more than four stars, but it was still a cracking good read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A fascinating and highly original premise, an appealing hero and heroine, some interesting side characters and with a mystery thrown in, to boot – what\u2019s not to like? I tore through this in a couple of days. Here\u2019s the premise: Demetrius, Lord Thorverton, is happiest raising horses on his Devon stud farm, but an impassioned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[161],"class_list":["post-5731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-dolan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5731","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=5731"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5735,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5731\/revisions\/5735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}