Review: Good historical regency romance novella
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 28, 2014
I enjoyed this short story which was well written and well edited with a fearless heroine and a dashing hero. The plot was interesting, involving members of the ton and the criminal underworld in a jewelry thievery ring which is inadvertently exposed by our paid companion spinster heroine. When she spots her mother's unique commissioned pendant (complete with the scratch that she herself put there when she dropped it) around another woman's neck at a ball, Miss Jocelyn Renwick asks the woman where she got her beautiful necklace. Knowing that it was stolen from her home two years ago, she hopes for a clue as to what shop is selling stolen goods so she can alert the authorities, but only succeeds in being overheard and alerting the thief to trouble. Newly minted viscount and former police investigator, David Carlyle, happens to stumble into Jocelyn's personal investigation into this issue and catches her stealing back her mother's jewelry. She convinces him to help her and when he does, he realizes that they've opened up a whole can of worms, not to mention a serious attraction to each other that neither one expected to ever find.This was a fun short novella with intrigue, danger, steamy romance, love and (mostly) happy endings. There are some sexual scenes and mild profanity and some violence in this story. Although it's part of the "Secrets and Scandals "series, it is a stand alone story, with some of the characters introduced having their own stories later on.Heat factor hot.