The whole series was ok good, but I really thought that the overall trilogy arc was going to be about Liv's Aunt Sophie and Alex's mother. I thought when the letters that Sophie brought forth was going to be in code to discover how Alex was doing throughout his life. Since Harry was a code breaker I really thought that would have been a nice touch instead of reinforcing to Alex that his mother really left him behind with his dad. So now I don't know what the point of the letters were. Alex already had proof that Sophia was his mother and he didn't need reinforcement of his parental situation. Now of course this book was the 3rd in the trilogy and was a good read and was happy to get an epi. Aurelia Farnham, whose husband perished in the Battle of Trafalgar, is the third of the ladies of Cavendish Square. Her two friends, Liv and Nell, are happily married, and Aurelia is house-sitting the Cavendish Square manor while Liv is in confinement. She's busy with a very active young daughter, and fretting a bit about what she's going to do with her own future. She has almost no means, and is dependent on tight-fisted relations to keep her and her daughter clothed and housed.Enter Colonel Sir Greville Falconer, bearing a letter for Aurelia--from her husband, who, it turns out, was not really killed in Trafalgar after all, but has been alive and well all this time. Until more recently. Now he really is dead. And as I said, Greville has a letter from her. The letter basically says pretty much what I just said, along with a lot of patriotic and sentimental blah, blah, blah.Turns out Greville recruited Frederick into the spy business, and for reasons that are never made plain, he "had" to fake his own death (oddly, his partner, Greville, for some reason, did NOT have to do so, which makes no sense). Frederick blathers on about meaningful life and etc., and he knows Aurelia's going to be hurt, but he hopes she'll understand. The rest of the story is how Greville, who engineered this thing Frederick did, now needs a new partner to help him zero in on some Spanish spies. And Aurelia, of course, is his choice of recruits. He sweetens the deal by offering her the pension she SHOULD have ALREADY gotten from Frederick's death (which sounded a little blackmaily to me), and a little more into the deal if she helps out. The idea of being financially independent, and the idea of exploring what it was that made Frederick do what he did, brings Aurelia into the fold. After five days (!) of training, she's thrown into the society of the suspected spies, which, Greville quickly realizes, appears to include someone who was Inquisition trained (in other words, a really dangerous SOB). The story unfolds more or less as you'd expect, and in many ways it's very satisfying. However, here's the rub. I never could get over what Frederick did at Greville's behest to his wife and child. By making Aurelia believe she was a widow, he opened the door for her to remarry. Exactly what did he expect would happen if he survived the war? Oh, we're told he didn't expect to, but that didn't really wash with me. The dude was a mapmaker, for Pete's sake. Hardly a dangerous profession, and after all, Greville didn't have to take his own advice and fake his own death, and he hardly seems surprised that he's returned alive. Basically these two men set Aurelia up to be a bigamist. They set up Franny, her daughter, to grow up without ever knowing her father. They set up Nell, Frederick's sister, to mourn his death and never learn the truth. I'm sorry, but I hated them both too much to really root for Aurelia to hook up with Greville. He was too much of a heartless user. And yes, that was supposedly part of his character and he supposedly reforms by the end, but I didn't see anything worth waiting around to redeem. This man could have totally destroyed Aurelia, making her a social outcast, unacceptable to society, and that scorn would have fallen on to Franny also. And we're never given a decent reason why it had to happen, if there could possibly be such a reason. None of this ever occurs to Aurelia, so she never really holds Greville and (by proxy) Frederick to account for it, and I needed her to do that before I could really get into the romance part of it. So I'm not pleased with this one.
Do You like book A Husband's Wicked Ways (2009)?
Sam picked out 2 romance novels for me for my bday, and this was one of them! Ha, Jason loved that.
—lee24
Enjoyed the beginning, nearly didn't read the rest but decided to perservere and did enjoy the end.
—Kaitlyn
Was very enjoyable. If you love olden day romances this bookset is a must read. :)
—anyb0021
This one is my favorite of this series. I just devoured it...
—MInchi
