Review: Too Much Time to Love
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 26, 2013
Author Elizabeth Chater takes her heroine Moira Lovelace - along with the reader - on a most eventful stagecoach journey to London. This is a lively beginning to A Time to Love.  The practical daughter of two impractical parents, the 24-year-old Moira is well educated in the classics by her bookworm father, Herbert Lovelace, the impoverished 5th son of the well-to-do Lovelaces. From her mother, Moira gets her beauty and a thorough grounding in French Cuisine (mamma was the daughter of a french chef).  But disaster struck in the form of a fire that killed her beloved parents and burned down their home. Thus, Moira is on the aforementioned stagecoach to London where she's been invited to stay under the wing of a cousin of her mother.The stagecoach is overloaded with luggage; the travelers are grumpy and uncomfortable; one military type peers at her from under his hat.  This situation is enlivened when the coach is about to pass an attack on an ornate coach, swords slashing at one lone man, which Moira cannot ignore.  Off she leaps to the man's rescue; the attackers run off; and the man is too injured to be transferred to the already crammed coach.  So the dauntless Moira announces that she will accompany him to his home in London and the peering man, Hilary Sly, agrees to help her.  When she wipes off the injured man's face, Moira exclaims "Adonis!" (what else does one exclaim upon seeing a man handsome as the Greek god). Before he faints, the Adonis snarls at her, "I might have guessed a woman was behind this!" (this was the third of a series of attacks on his life).  At this pivotal point A Time for Love stalls:  the potential 3-way romance (Moira is attracted to Adonis; Adonis continues to revile Moira; Sly is attracted to Moira) becomes somewhat of a drag.  Yes, there are questions to be answered:  who wants "Adonis" killed? Who is Sly? Will Moira ever convince "Adonis" of her innocence?  Whom does Moira love? Will the Lovelaces ever accept her?  But in this reader's opinion, too much time spent before all is resolved.