I wanted to enjoy this book more than I did. For me not as good as her other historical novels that I have read ( )

Holly is woken up in the middle of the night by a phone call from her tearful and frightened young niece — it seems her brother had gone out and never came home. Immediately upon her arrival in Ashdown Park, where their family owns a summer property, Holly can sense that something is not right; Ben would never knowingly leave his six-year-old child alone. It isn't long before her brother's mysterious disappearance appears to be connected to two centuries-old artifacts once in the possession of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia.

Initial DNF review, October 2022: I detected pretty quickly that the writing wasn't as polished as I would like, but I thought I'd give it a few chapters to see if it grew on me. Alas, it was not to be. Two early characters were egregiously one-dimensional, and an accumulation of unrealistic character interactions finally annoyed me so much that I had to abandon the book during chapter four.

Second attempt, April 2023: I thought I had washed my hands of this book, but one of the Read Harder categories for 2023 was "a book you DNFed." In looking over the short list of books I had abandoned in recent years, I deemed this one likely still most palatable, and I attempted to be more forgiving the second time around. Clearly Holly needed to break up with Guy in order to free her to move to Ashdown, but what makes it problematic as a plot device is that Holly having been with (engaged to!) someone like Guy in the first place suggests she had colossally poor judgment. Luckily, both Guy's and Tasha's presences are short-lived. The writing was passable, the story was just okay. I'm not really into mystical objects in what is otherwise a perfectly normal, non-fantasy setting, and I'm really not into magical realism. ( )

This book suffers horribly from tell-itis, which happens when a writer forgets that trusty adage: show, don't tell. As a consequence, the whole story falls flat. Which is a shame cause it sounded like an interesting story, but the telling is truly torturous.

I was sent this book free by Harlequin via Goodreads.

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I am SO Much a fan of dual timeline books, and this one did not disappoint. (In fact, this one had a third timeline running through the latter part of it, so *ding-ding* winner!)

Of course, like many multiple timeline stories, one might be stronger than the other(s) and for me this held true -- I found the story of Elizabeth, the Winter Queen to be the one I was ready to come back to, even though the present day tale was intriguing.

I'm definitely a fan of Nicola Cornick and this story was sweeping and sucked me in. It was the perfect beach read for my Spring break trip.

Disclaimer: I was provided an advance reader copy by the publisher via NetGalley, and I thoroughly regret not getting to this gem sooner. ( )

Can not say enough about how much I enjoyed this book. Great book for mystery and historical fiction fans. I enjoyed the three time periods and could not put this book down as I wanted to know what was going to happen in each.
I would recommend this book to friends and looking forward to the next book by this author. ( )