Terrific book. ( )

first-rate Regency, part of the Walker hardcover series ( )

Not really a romance, but well written. Lady Elizabeth's Comet was much better. 3.5/5 stars ( )

After her husband and baby daughter die within days of each other, Emily Foster decides to take in other people's children, both to supplment her income and provide her son with company. The children she settles upon are Amy and Tommy Falk, whose mother has lately died and whose father is a career officer. Colonel Richard Falk is injured and exhausted when he first meets Emily, and they make poor first impressions on each other. However, she likes Amy and Tommy at first sight, and so agrees to take them on. Their acquaintance grows through his letters, filled with imaginative and funny stories, and Emily's letters back about his children. But there's a war on, and Richard's half-brothers seem to be trying to kill him, and so Richard and Emily meet only rarely, often when Richard is desperately ill.

This is a story that takes its time, covering three years of Emily's quiet domestic life and Richard's dangerous one. I enjoyed the length of it, but was annoyed at what seemed to me an uneven plot. The first third is all Emily, and then there are long stretches where she doesn't appear at all, or is mentioned off-handedly, as Ricard tries to survive the lurid melodramas his half-brothers and Napoleon are enacting. In fact, I was a little impatient that so much time was spent on the surrounding characters. We get whole chapters of Richard's friend Tom Conway (hero of [b:Lady Elizabeth's Comet|2908100|Lady Elizabeth's Comet|Sheila Simonson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1257779204s/2908100.jpg|2935256]) or his sister Sarah and her husband. I like Sarah and Robert, but I'd have much rather had a few more conversations between Richard and Emily in place of them. As it was, Richard and Emily only talk in person a few times "on page", with the remainder of their relationship relegated to a summary of afternoons together and correspondence we never see. I didn't get much of a feel for what they knew about each other, or liked about each other.

Still, what I got, I liked. There's a good deal of plot here, although too much of it happens off-page (Richard is repeatedly attacked, but we never see it happen and only hear about his injuries afterward; an odd narrative choice). The dialog is natural, the characters understated but well-drawn. It's nowhere near as good as Simonson's first two books, but those were excellent, and this is just enjoyable. ( )

A widow with a young son to raise, Emily Foster was determined to maintain some independence in the face of her well-meaning but rather controlling father, Sir Henry Mayne. When Captain Richard Falk, himself a widower with two children, responds to her advertisement offering to care for young children, she overcomes her distaste at his brusque manner. After all, not only will the added income be most welcome, but young Emilia (Amy) and infant Tommy will make the ideal companions for her own son, Matt.

As Capt. Falk heads back to the Peninsular Wars, Emily settles into a new routine, gradually coming to love her charges and - through the letters they exchange - their father. But a surprise visit from Lady Sarah Ffoulke-Wilson reveals that Richard is the illegitimate son of the dowager Duchess of Newsham, and Emily is soon caught up in the current Duke of Newsham's nefarious plots against his half-brother, and his children...

Although I enjoyed the reappearance of characters like Thomas Conway and Lord Bevis, first seen in Simonson's Lady Elizabeth's Comet, I found that overall I wasn't that impressed by The Bar Sinister. A number of characters felt rather like types - the bastard son of nobility, the diabolical duke, and so on - while some of the plot developments were improbable. I understand that Simonson had to find a way to bring the hero and heroine together, but I just wasn't convinced that a woman as comfortably situated as Emily, would need to take in other children. I was also disappointed that there was so little interaction between Emily and Richard, who spends most of the novel off at war, and wasn't really convinced by the romantic conclusion, which feels like nothing so much as a tacked on afterthought.

I'll probably still read Simonson's fourth and final Regency, Love and Folly - which completes the three-book story arc begun in Lady Elizabeth's Comet and continued here - but I have to say that this one was a disappointment. ( )