Second of two I tried by this author.Not to my taste. Too much goofy introspection by the characters. Very wordy. Kind of silly. There was a lot of here and thereing and not much romance with the main characters. Nothing particularly wrong with it I suppose if these things don't bother you. I read the first half and skimmed the second half. ( )

This is a clean, charming Regency Romance. I have always enjoyed Lansdowne's humor and characters. They usually have some issues that they are dealing with, which makes them feel more real. In this case, the widowed Duchess of Berinwick is haunted by some of her parenting choices and the damage she is afraid it caused her son. The Reverend Richard Dempsey comes to assume his position at the vicarage only to find out that the Duke is recently dead, and the vicarage is falling apart. To his surprise, he knows the widowed Duchess and loved her long before she was married. Yet this is not just a romance, there is also some mystery and danger that threatens the Berinwick family. I wasn't sure what to expect since the main characters are middle aged, but the way the story unfolds fits them well and yet keeps a nice romance feeling. My one complaint is there was some excessive inner dialogue as the characters think to themselves, which was a little awkwardly written. The secondary characters are strongly developed and I am looking forward to reading about them in the next two books. ( )

This mystery based love story is set in 1795 Shropshire, near the Welsh border. It has a swashbuckling 50-ish parson, a widowed duchess, and her two children, a 14-year-old daughter, and the current Duke of Berinwick who is a disfigured, one-eyed curmudgeon.

Shortly before his untimely death, the old duke had given a living (which he had left vacant for 20 years) to the Reverend Mr. Richard Dempsey. Why? Because both were deeply interested in antiquities and each were fellows in the Royal Society. There was a artifact that the duke wanted Dempsey's help in discovering. Alas, before Dempsey took up his post, the old duke had been killed in a tragic coach accident. ...And so the story begins.

I have recently become a fan of Judith Lansdowne's work. Her stories are unusual, include a very nice dose of humor, and tend to have ensemble casts of characters. In this novel, the young duke's role is on a nearly equal footing with Dempsey and Berinwick's mother. Another very strong positive for me is that the central love story concerns a couple of middle-age. To add to the originality is the detail that the duchess is seven years older than the pastor. Finally I find it greatly refreshing to find a pastor cast in a heroic mold. ( )