Blurb
Not every Regency lady is looking for a husband…
Meet Lila Marleigh.
As the daughter of an English earl and his Indian mistress, impulsive Lila Marleigh has already broken the rules of society into tiny pieces.
When a face she never thought she would see again appears and begs for help, Lila must court notoriety once more and pit her wits against the annoyingly handsome aristocrat, Ivor Tristram.
But does she risk opening her heart to the one person who can break it…?
The start of a fun, fiesty new series featuring the Marleigh sisters
My Review
Thanks to Anne for organising this blog tour and to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book.
Firstly, I sat and read the first 194 pages of this novel in a single sitting, then had to take a break. It was getting a bit…intense. I got back to it a couple of days later, when I’d recovered.
I liked Lila; she’s witty, hardworking, kind and intelligent. She cares for the people who work for her and tries to help those less fortunate. She knows she has no reputation so has nothing to lose in becoming a society hostess, but struggles with the abuse in her childhood at the hands of a narcissistic step-mother and half-brother. Her relationship with Ivor is complicated by multiple misunderstandings and lust. Their mutual attraction, and the development of their relationship beyond it, is well-written.
Ivor is a complicated man, who clearly has a story of his own, and he sees things in Lila that connect with his own past. His cousin Tiffany is clearly a worry for him, although he understands what she needs is the attention of her distant father, not all the unsuitable types who keep taking advantage of her. He has more insight into other people than he thinks and it helps him build a rapport with Millie, Mehta and Lila, even though he is suspicious of them at first. He sees past his prejudices to form real friendships with them.
Jonathan, Lila’s half-brother and the scoundrel taking advantage of Tiffany, is an utter bastard. We see hints, in Lila’s memories, that he sexually and mentally abused Lila and her sisters when they were children (he’s ten years older than Lila, the eldest sister), encouraged by his mother. As we see more of him in the book I found myself hoping Ivor would help Lila off the git. Not going to tell you what does happen to him, you’ll have to read the book and find out.
Maisie Quinn and Sunil Mehta, the young working class couple whom Lila and Ivor help are representative of the any people of colour in 18th century England, especially port towns. Lascars were sailors from the colonies who were often left in England without work if their ship sailed and they weren’t need as crew because European sailors took their places. There is a long history of Indian and African sailors marrying working class woman in English ports and building lives here.
Equally, prior to the abolition of the slave trade, African and Afro-Caribbean people came as servants to Britain from slave holding countries and were freed on arrival (sometimes, it was a bone of contention – since slavery wasn’t legal in England, could someone enslaved elsewhere still be considered enslaved in England?). Once in England, they might remain with their enslaver – now employer – or they might be cast off on to the streets, required no more.
This is the story of Maisie’s mother Annie. Part of the drama in the plot comes from Lila’s feelings of guilt about Annie and Maisie, and Maisie’s resentment of Lila’s inaction in the past. They have to work through those feelings to be able to help Sunil.
What happened to cast off formerly enslaved people or free Africans who found themselves in England by some other route? They found work where they could. Unfortunately they were subject to discrimination and abuse. Working people were automatically assumed to be criminals, working class women were assumed to be sex workers (see the way the women killed in Whitechapel in 1887-1890 were treated – only one of the ‘Canonical Five’ women was actually a sex worker and she was a high class professional. The others engaged in occasional survival sex work or didn’t do sex work at all). No one would listen if a working person complained about abuse by an employer, the wealthy had all the power, and people of colour were always a notch down the social ladder than their white (theoretically) social equals. See the story of Dido Bell, the daughter of a naval officer brought up in the household of an aristocrat, for a fairly well documented example. For stories about working class women of colour, I recommend some of the chapters in Queens of the Underworld by Caitlin Davis which cover a few and the changing ways in which race and ethnicity were discussed and treated over several centuries.
You know I’m not really into romance, but I do enjoy historical fiction and a good historical mystery. The balance between historical mystery and historical romance is quite hard to pull off, in general, and there were times when the balance was more towards the romance than the mystery. It was occasionally jarring to go from a meeting about finding the man who assaulted Tiffany to a sex scene, but that didn’t happen too often.
Overall, I enjoyed this book, it was fun, had a diverse cast of characters, a decent mystery, and was ever so slightly sexy.
Amita Murray lives in London. Just to keep things interesting, she writes in two genres: Regency romance and contemporary mystery. Her Arya Winters mysteries are published by Agora and are under a TV option. Her mystery novel Thirteenth Night won the Exeter Novel Prize in 2022. A collection called Marmite and Mango Chutney won the SI Leeds Prize in 2016 and her short story “A Heist in Three Acts” comes out in Ellery Queen Magazine in 2022
Everything Is Better With Dragons 
Thanks for the blog tour support x