The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

 

By Lauren Willig

Eloise has come to Britain to track down the true identity of the Pink Carnation, a British agent who worked against Napoleon to gain important information about his war effort against Britain. Her search leads her to the Selwick family and she is given access to the diaries of Amy Balcourt, a young French woman who was sent to England as a child to save her life during the years of the French Revolution, when many of the nobility were put to death, including Amy's and her brother's parents. But her brother is now at home in Napoleon's court and Amy is traveling to France to join him. Amy is just as obsessed with discovering who the Purple Gentian, a famous British spy, was as modern-day sleuth Eloise is to discovering who the Pink Carnation was. 

The story mainly centers on Amy and her adventures in France trying to track down and discover the identity of the Purple Gentian, who she desperately wants to join in the fight against Napoleon's ambition to rule the world. Meanwhile, the Purple Gentian is right under her nose. Richard Selwick, is a scholar and antiquities expert who has been advising Napoleon on some of the artifacts that have been brought to France from Egypt. Amy has written him off as a traitor to his country, not realizing Richard is using his position in Napoleon's court to gather intelligence for England and that he is the Purple Gentian, the famous English spy and the most wanted man in all of France. 

This was an fair read, a bit silly and the subplot about Eloise too clearly the lead-in to a sequel. One thing I did appreciate was it was not a graphic story with explicit descriptions of sex acts. If that's what you are looking for in a romance, you won't find it in this story.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About

 

By Mil Millington

Pel and Ursula have been together for many years and have two kids to show for it. Pel works in the IT department of a large university and unexpectedly gets promoted to fill the absence of his old boss, who has gone missing. And, as Pel, later finds out, the supervisor of the whole department has also been missing for many years, her absence being covered up her boss, the Dean. Actually, everything is pretty fishy in the IT department and part of that involves foreign students and an international criminal gang.

Meanwhile, Ursula, seeing that Pel has suddenly gotten a promotion, decides it is time for them to leave their crime-ridden neighborhood for something a little nicer and also to quit her job because she can't get along with her coworkers. Actually, Ursula really can't get along with anyone, including the workers hired to make the repairs on the new house. She pretty much alienates everyone she come across, with the story ending with her mad vehicle chase after service workers in a van that she is convinced stole her broom. 

Pel is lazy but glib. Ursula is bonkers. The two of them argue about almost everything, which is annoying, unless you find that kind of repartee amusing. It can be tedious to wade through. 

But sometimes this story is really funny and entertaining. Pel faces problem after problem, mostly cluelessly, but still mostly able to talk his way through. Ursula should be in a home for the insane. Supposedly Ursula is based on the author's real girl friend, poor guy. 

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

The Seven Year Bitch

 

By Jennifer Belle

Isolde Brilliant not unexpectedly loses her lucrative job as a hedge fund manager. But since she is a getting a generous severance package, money is not going to be a problem. And since she also has a year old baby, maybe being a stay-at-home mom might be worth a try. 

But her idea of being a stay-at-home mom involves hiring a nanny to do the majority of the childcare, so most of Isolde's time is not devoted to her child, but to her social life and arguing with her husband, who quit his lawyer job to become a failed book publisher. And Isolde can also take the time to indulge in a mild flirtation with a man who has been infatuated with her since her college days. 

But don't worry. Nothing really happens except she has unprotected sex with her husband and ends up pregnant. Guess that will solve all her problems.

Call it sour grapes, but I don't really care about the problems of the wealthy. Boo-hoo, she lost her job. But she has a "golden parachute" that lets her not worry about money for years. Or worry being forced to sell their vacation home. Or even worry about not being able to afford a nanny. Or that she is basically supporting her husband's failure of a business.  Or paying for her nanny's fertility treatments. In fact, losing her job pretty much has no impact on her finances and has the benefit of giving her much more free time, which she mostly uses on herself and not the baby that she claims to love so much. Plus she has a handsome man who is worth hundreds of millions of dollars who is ready and willing to drop everything and marry her if she would only say yes.

It's hard to like a story when you don't really like the main characters.  And the ending was a very ho-hum. It's an OK read, but very forgettable.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

 

By Alan Bradley

Flavia is a precocious preteen child who loves chemistry, who is in a perpetual war with her two teenage sisters, who lives in an ancient mansion in Britain and who discovers a dying man laying in the cucumber patch in the family garden, the same man whom she overheard arguing with her father the night before. Naturally, she takes it upon herself to figure out what really happened to the mysterious stranger, an investigation that will that take her clear back to the schoolboy days of her aloof and austere and only parent, her father. 

This was a fairly good mystery story, set in the early (?) 1950s. I guess my main problem with it was I don't really enjoy stories about genius-level children. They just don't seem realistic. Are there people like that? I suppose so, but I have no experience of them. 

In stories, precocious children often come off as brats and Flavia certainly seems to fit that description. The cop uses the letter P as code for Flavia in his notes but refuses tell her what the P stands for. I am guessing Pest or possibly Pill or perhaps Pain-in-the-ass.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Duplicate Death

 

By Georgette Heyer

Mrs Haddington has finagled an introduction to London society through her association with Lady Nest Poulton.  Lady Nest is one of the leading figures of London society, the perfect person to introduce Mrs Haddington's stunningly beautiful teenage daughter, Cynthia to the world.

Mrs. Haddington's desire is to see her daughter established in London society by marriage to a man of wealth and breeding. Unfortunately, Cynthia is smitten by Lord Guisborough, who, though he is a member of the peerage, is not wealthy and is a Communist besides. Mrs. Haddington's sights are set on Timothy Harte, a wealthy, personable young barrister. What Mrs. Haddington doesn't know is that Timothy has fallen in love with her secretary, Beulah Birtley, a young woman with a mysterious past.

In order to throw Cynthia and Timothy together, Mrs. Haddington holds a bridge party, inviting as many upper class bridge players to her home as its rooms will hold. But during the course of the party, one of her guests ends up dead, strangled with a length of wire while taking a phone call in another room. 

The victim, Dan Seaton-Carew, had close connections to Lady Nest and to Cynthia Haddington. His position in society is strange but it becomes more understandable when the police discover he was a drug dealer, providing illegal drugs to people like Lady Nest.

Some of Mrs. Haddington's guests may have had reasons to murder Seaton-Carew. There's Mr. Poulton, Lady Nest's husband, who may have discovered his wife is an addict. There's Sidney Butterwick, who desperately loves Seaton-Carew and who had a heated argument with him at the bridge party. And there is Beulah, whose mysterious past may have given Seaton-Carew some kind of hold over her.

Georgette Heyer was better known for her historical romances. But she also wrote several mystery novels. Her mystery novels were not as popular as her romances though. I have read a few of the mystery stories and they just don't seem to have that light humorous touch found in most of her romances. Another thing is that the characters are generally more crass, more unpleasant, more unappealing than those in the romances. That is certainly true of this story, starting with the heroine, Beulah, who spent time in prison for forgery. 

This book was written in the early 1950s and the language used concerning Stanley Butterwick may be quite unpleasant for modern readers. However, it is how people thought and spoke back then. 

Lots of times, when I am reading a novel, I will just skip over passages of boring descriptions or of speeches that seem to be filler. But with Heyer's books, I virtually never do that. Every word is worth reading, every word builds the story and never feel like a chore to wade through. So even though I don't enjoy her mystery stories as much as I do her romances, I still found this one engrossing and worth reading.

Lady of Quality

 

Georgette Heyer

A Regency Romance.

Annis is fortunate in that she is young, beautiful and wealthy. She is also very independent for a woman of her time and station and, at the age of twenty-nine, is living in a home of her own with an older female relative as a companion. 

Since she has enough money to live as she chooses, Annis never felt the desire to get married. She had plenty of suitors and offers of marriage but turned them all down. So Annis and her companion live on their own in the resort town of Bath. That is until Annis encountered a young couple in trouble on the side of the road after their gig lost a wheel. 

Lucy and her good friend Ninian are escaping from their families who are putting pressure on the two to get married. Lucy is very young, pretty, and wealthy and she and Ninian, who lives next door, grew  up together and have no romantic inclinations toward each other. Lucy's parents are dead and she has been living with her aunt, but her guardian is Oliver Carleton, a notorious member of London society. 

After Annis rescued Lucy and Ninian, she felt sorry for Lucy's situation and invited her to stay with her at her home in Bath. And that is how Oliver Carleton entered Annis' life and turned everything upside down for her.

I have read this novel three or four times in the past and it was never one of my favorites. But that was when I was a lot younger. When I read it again this time, I enjoyed it more than I did previously. It's the humor that I probably didn't notice so much when I was younger. Oliver Carleton is not mealy mouthed and his pursuit of Annis is quite enjoyable and often amusing. 

Here is a review by Elizabeth Hanbury on Austenprose.

Sylvester or the Wicked Uncle

 

By Georgette Heyer

A Regency Romance

Phoebe Marlow's mother died when she was quite young. Her father remarried and he and his new wife had several more children. Phoebe did not enjoy a close or loving relationship with her stepmother, who was an overbearing and stern parent to Phoebe. After years of bullying by her stepmother, Phoebe lived in fear of displeasing her in any way and yearned to escape from the woman's oppressive control. 

Phoebe had the required coming out for a girl of her social standing in London, but it hadn't been successful. She was too thin, too shy, too awkward to gain any admirers. But she did have a keen eye and her observations of society ended up in a thinly-disguised novel about a cruel man trying to deprive his infant nephew of the nephew's rightful inheritance. And once her novel was published, it was an instant success, as members of the upper class recognized their fellows in the caricatures in the pages of the novel.

The villain of the piece was based on Sylvester, the Duke of Salford, whom Phoebe had meet a couple times at parties when in London. He did not make a favorable impression on her, as she judged him to be cold and arrogant. And he had a very recognizable face because of his rather unusual eyebrows, which, of course, she included in her novel. 

In the novel, the heroine struggles to save her child from his uncle's evil machinations. What Phoebe didn't know when she based her villain on Sylvester was that he was also the guardian of a young boy and that Sylvester was at odds with the boy's mother because she was trying to remove her child from Sylvester's guardianship. 

In Phoebe's novel, the mother frees her son from the wicked uncle's captivity and they flee together to freedom. So the mother of Sylvester's nephew, upon reading the book and seeing the wicked uncle based (loosely) on her brother-in-law Sylvester, views it as a roadmap to freeing her child from his guardianship. So she kidnaps her son and takes him to France.

Phoebe, the anonymous author of the novel that has high society talking and wondering who wrote the book, has meanwhile come to know Sylvester and realized that her caricature of him was cruel and unjust and has caused him considerable embarrassment. They have a huge fight in public and Phoebe's reputation is ruined. So her grandmother decides to take her and travel to France to give society time to get over the scandal. But while waiting to board a ship, Phoebe encounters Sylvester's sister-in-law with her young son, Sylvester's ward, preparing to flee to France. By now, Phoebe knows that Sylvester is not the monster portrayed in her novel, but a caring and loving uncle to his young ward. And she also has come to understand that the boy's mother is selfish, shallow and irresponsible and that Sylvester is actually the better guardian for the boy. Phoebe, on board the ship, tries to reason with the mother, but ends up being taken to France when the woman's husband sneakily orders the ship to set sail.

This was a good story, spoiled by its heroine, who is probably one of the weakest and most feebleminded heroines that Heyer ever created in her romance novels. Oh, Phoebe is supposed to capture her hero's heart, but how he could ever fall for such a weakling is rather hard to understand. We are supposed to admire Phoebe, but instead we end up just wishing she would show a little gumption and stand up to her overbearing stepmother instead of trembling in fear at the mere thought of that woman's bad temper. And once Phoebe is part of London society, she shows the same lack of spine when her authorship of the notorious novel becomes widely known. Instead she agrees to run away to France and hide from the criticism and curiosity. And yet Sylvester decides this is the woman for him? Hard to believe.

Here is a review by Laurel Ann Nattress on Austenprose.