by Amanda Quick
My rating: 4,8 rounded up to 5 stars.
I loved it!
(Here on the left the new paperback cover, below the old one)
A historical mystery-romance where both the mystery-investigative part and the romantic and sensual part are equally well developed and both have the same weight in the story.
___THE PLOT IN SHORT__ The story begins with Elenor's sudden change of fortune: the greedy and hateful step-father has lost everything due to a bad investment and while he died of a stroke, his stepdaughter finds herself thrown out of the house by creditors , with only her clothes in an old trunk of her actress grandmother.
The only chance of survival is to roll up your sleeves and find a job through an agency.
The rich Arthur, Earl of St. Merrin, fresh from a year of gossip about the escape of his girlfriend with another man, has decided to find a fake girlfriend, turning to an agency that employs desperate women looking for a job as a companion. In fact, at the moment he is not interested in falling in love, because his goal is to find his uncle's killer.
Elenor will prove to be much more than a banal cover for his investigations, with her intelligence, in fact, she will help St. Merrin in unraveling a tangled mess of secret identities and harmful obsessions.
_______________________
Like many romances, the "historical" setting is purely superficial.
In fact there is no historical part with historical references and events, the reader only knows, thanks to some elements, that we are probably in the Regency era, but after the defeat of Napoleon or in the Victorian era, before the advent of electricity..
I consider it a "point against" because I love historical references, however the narration was so compelling in the two themes it focused on (the love story and the solution to a mystery, as well as the capture of a killer), that I turned one page after another with great enthusiasm.
I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised, I didn't expect it.
This is not the case, indeed this author managed to enthuse the reader on both fronts: investigative and romantic.
It's truly well-crafted and suspenseful mystery and the love story offers just as many twists, with funny scenes alternating with sensual moments.
It's my first book by Amanda Quick and if you need a light but engaging read, I recommend it.
___ THE CHARACTERS ___ I liked both main characters, because the author managed to balance the emotional traits that characterized them well.
Perhaps a woman who always thinks of the good of others seems a little far-fetched, but this is the only thing that is a little over-emphasized.
Other characteristics such as stubbornness and decision, willpower and resilience, anger and playfulness in speeches, feelings of altruism and passion, intelligence and business sense, are never too intense or too forced either in Arthur or in Elenor and this is important because otherwise they might have been unpleasant.
Then there are Bennet and Margaret, two positive secondary characters who support our heroes and add lightness and joy to the story.
A swirl of other minor characters, whose attitudes serve to describe what life was like for both high society and poor workers in the 19th century.
The whole story is made more interesting also thanks to the fact that the killer is not the only "bad guy" in the story. In fact, even if in a more subtle way, over the course of events, a couple of really mean characters will contribute to complicating things.
Nothing of what happens is taken for granted and during the narration there are various small mysteries that are revealed.
This makes the reading lively and encourages the reader to go on to read the next chapter.
The language is fluent and is clean, but there are at least 3 sex scenes, described in detail, but not vulgar, nothing that an adult doesn't already know.
Happy ending guaranteed in all respects:
no villain goes unpunished and every good person gets his reward.
---> I put both the NEW PAPERBACK COVER and the OLD PAPERBACK COVER.
???? Which one do you like best???
In my opinion neither of the two does justice to the story... the first makes you imagine something boring, the second leads you to imagine something too frivolous.
ONE CURIOSITY OF MINE: How much weight do book covers have on your read choices?
I admit that the cover is the first thing that attracts me, I value it highly and it affects my enthusiasm in selecting a reading. If, by chance, I hadn't read the enthusiastic reviews of this mystery-romance, I would never have chosen it because the covers didn't entice me (for the two reasons I wrote above).
Thank for reading my review and please forgive my English, it's not my native language.
Join me on FB Tizi Cozy Corner page to be always updated on new posts
No comments:
Post a Comment