Review: The setting is Dartmoor, a dark place described as having devil's traps of quagmires whose mud sucks victims straight to hell.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 6, 2013
Handsome, brilliant Dorian at 20 is given to long bouts of dissipation and really believes his mother when she says, ‘like mother, like son”.  His grandfather, the Earl of Rawnsley, referred to as The Archfiend by Dorian, has spent years ruthlessly criticizing and physically abusing Dorian to keep him in line as he did all the other Rawnsleys, but he had little success with his grandson.  Dorian’s scholarship money enabled him to go off to Europe to study, and he returned only after finding out that his mother was dying in a madhouse. After her death, Dorian disappeared in London, without a penny, undertaking all kinds of physical labor that will keep his identity disguised, until he is struck down by a terrible illness and takes himself to Dartmoor accompanied by his solicitor’s clerk, Hoskins. When the headaches began as well as other symptoms like his mother’s (“like mother, like son”), Dorian awaits his own death from the incurable brain disease.  Ironically the tyrant grandfather has died and he, Dorian, is the new Earl, known to one and all as the Mad Earl.  Enter one Gwendolyn Adams.  Brainy, beautiful, scientific, level headed, she’s one of Chase’s splendid heroines.  Enter also the duc d’Abonville, fiancé of Gwendolyn’s grandmother who thinks Dorian should marry Gwendolyn to keep the estate in the family, so to speak.  Gwen is also cousin to emotional Bertie Trent, Oxford classmate of Dorian’s, and who is featured in another Chase book, Lord of Scoundrels.  And who but the doggedly teary Bertie could manage to convince Dorian to the marriage scheme.  But not so fast; before meeting his bride, Dorian saddles up and races into Hagsmire in the middle of a violent Dartmoor storm agitated out of his skull.  A demonic-looking woman on a great horse appearing out of the fog further unnerves AND unseats Dorian, and he falls into the greedy muck.  It’s Gwen to the rescue and from here on in – for many more pages of marvelous reading - she’s there to rescue him and his soul.