Review: Not True to Period
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 27, 2014
This would easily be a five star book if only the author had paid attention to the etiquette of the period. The characters are well developed and engaging, even though the heroine is somewhat bratty. The mystery is intriguing and the villain not easily guessed until the end. However, the author completely ignores appropriate behavior and those lapses do nothing to further the storyline. We are supposed to accept that our heroine - an extremely wealthy young woman raised by a single father who had her travel with him on his archeological digs - runs around London with only an occasional drunk for a chaperone. No maid. She blithely announces several times that the "needs air" and the hero (an Earl) allows her to leave without escort. In one instance he finds her in a secluded section of Hyde Park, they converse, and then he leaves her there alone. In a remote area of a park. Sure. And pigs do fly. There are many other examples, from the absence of a single curtsey in the book to morning calls lasting over an hour in defiance of the strictly observed fifteen minute rule. The author either doesn't know any better and was too lazy to perform this very basic research or she simply didn't care about historical accuracy. I'm not referring to minutiae but the guiding principals of social interactions of the time. These problems interrupted the flow of the work, taking me out of the story, and cost the book three stars.