A theft of antique lace and an American student visiting England feature in this tale of time travelling ghosts and romance. Samantha, who has a degree in textiles due to her domineering mother wanting Samantha to follow her and help her with antiques, manages to escape the family home and go to England to house-sit. Unfortunately for her Theodore, an annoying young man of her acquaintance, has followed her and insists on giving her a guided tour with Samantha paying for the taxis. Samantha doesn't seem in any hurry to take up her house sitting job which is not the usual.Scottish ghosts who travel through time feature, and a man named Derrick who works with them (rather than Interpol) to restore stolen antiques to their owners. There are a lot of characters from previous books, and they have long rambling conversations about actors and previous exploits, and not very much is explained. Not having read the earlier instalments I was unable to get into this aspect and I also could not work up much excitement about some stolen lace. Samantha tours the historic castle in the centre of Newcastle, which is in northern England, and notices a man dressed as an Elizabethan re-enactor - only nobody else can see him, and he gets up to mischief with Theodore. For some reason not really explained Derrick thinks Samantha is a textile thief and follows her around as she visits York, then heads for London.Samantha is not only a doormat for her pushy parents, she has taken degrees in subjects and time periods that don't interest her and wears polyester although she claims to like textiles. I don't know anyone who wears unpleasantly scratchy polyester and she doesn't even seem to have cotton underclothes. When Derrick speaks to her in broken German, she replies in better German. She's spotted him following her (he's got a disguise kit but come on! He initially makes himself noticeable with green hair) and she doesn't know what to do about it; breaking the cardinal rule of shadowing he's followed her by himself for three days. That's creepy but not against the law, is it? I'd have told the police and I can't see why she didn't.Lynn Kurland has written several well-received time-travel romances and this book may delight her fans, but doesn't read well as a standalone. Her settings are filled with detail and she gets into the minds and motivations of her characters, however there is little action, just conversations and wandering for long stretches, and she refers to unhackable phones and other gimmicks. I liked some of the concepts and I might read it again after trying her earlier works. I normally love Lynn Kurland books, which is why it's a shame that this one fell flat for me. There are a lot of the usual elements - of romances in general, and of Kurland's stories in particular. The hero is tall, dark, and handsome, with a past he doesn't like to talk or think about - and is obviously upset when Samantha ferrets it out. As heroes go, he was...okay. There were certainly things to like about him, but I had two main issues: 1) He is apparently perfect at EVERYTHING (save, perhaps, German), and that kind of thing just drives me nuts. Super spy, super lover, has more money than Bill Gates, can break into - or hack into - anything he wants. He has a person on his team who is, by his own right, a security genius and tries his best to break through Derrick's security and gets a raise or something when he manages it. Derrick is just THAT good at what he does. 2) His "tortured past" was, I'm sorry, a little ridiculous. Is it a sad story? Sure. Does it explain why Derrick may have some family issues? Absolutely. Is this the kind of "dark and tortured past" that warrants him trying to run from it, not think about it, and get visibly upset when Samantha finds out about it? Please. I've met puppies with more justifiable angst.Samantha is smart (I guess), pretty (enough - not at first, but her looks apparently improve over time), and...well, not funny. Or charismatic. Or particularly memorable. In fact, she's something of a wet blanket. In her mid-twenties (26?) she's pretty spineless, living at home with parents who railroad her, make her work for room and board, monitor every aspect of her life (she has to hide money to have any and Mommy Dearest monitors what she reads, picks her boyfriends, and picks out her clothes). Her brother, we are told, does love her but heaven help me if I can see any proof of that. On the one hand, I thought, "Perhaps that will be shown in another book?" On the other hand, I thought, "PLEASE tell me he's not the star of his own book." There's nothing I read in this book that outlines him as a "hero" I'd ever want to read. Samantha's trip to England is her first real "rebellion" in her life and even that is kind of "meh." If it weren't for the intrigue she gets caught up in, I'm sure she'd have gone home and married the boy picked out for her and let her parents run her life. It takes her a great deal of time to manage to say, "Go to hell" with anything approaching conviction. Heaven help her if she were to ever ACTUALLY have to tell someone off! As a reader who enjoys strong, independent female characters, this one didn't appeal to me at all. People (Derrick and Emily, for example, but not the only examples) seem to want to rescue her, help her, take her under their wing, etc. I would say I don't understand why, but I guess there's something appealing for some about her extreme form of helplessness. It's like a bird with a broken wing - it certainly can't take care of itself, so you just can't help but want to rescue it, since you know it would be cat chow within ten minutes, left to its own devices. Samantha seems a lot like that.Which isn't to say I detested her. I just found her...bland. I'm told she's smart and wonderful and all those things, but I don't feel that I was particularly shown why she's so amazing. I think Derrick makes a list at some point, of things he likes about her. I can only remember the author mentioning one point on that list. I can only imagine it's because even she couldn't find much to say about Samantha.However, the flaws in the characters, taken by themselves, would have probably made this book an okay-for-the-bathtub-but-generally-forgettable read and would have gotten it three stars. It fell to two for me because of the issues with the characterization, combined with some weakness in the setup and plot.While I think Kurland has done some phenomenal time travel romance in the past, if that's an aspect of the plot that has you reaching for the title, I have to say you'd be better served by picking a different of her works. Time travel is such a minor plot point in this book, I think the entire thing could have been done just as well without it. (The characters literally stumble into the past in the beginning, pop into the past for a few minutes (maybe half a chapter) in the middle, and then finally have something approaching a significant scene in the past at the very end.) It seems like it's in there more because it's Kurland's "thing" so she has to find a way to justify the characters traveling to the past than because the plot organically required them to be there.There was also something a little redundant about the plot. Samantha is (unwittingly) embroiled in intrigue - and I mean this when I say that she is the absolute LAST person you'd expect it of, so I guess in that sense it was believable she'd be such a "babe in the woods" about it all. That's resolved, and then she finds she's in ANOTHER of pretty much the EXACT kind of intrigue. And she's SHOCKED to find that she'd be unwittingly used as a courier the second time around! Shocked, I say! (Not shocked that it happened for a second time, immediately after the first. Shocked that someone would use her that way. She's a bit of an idiot.) Things happen that aren't really explained. Characters are introduced that serve no purpose, disappear shortly thereafter, and are never mentioned or made relevant again. (Is Dory annoying to you? Don't worry; he's a completely superfluous character and disappears fairly early in the book.) And a lot of the plot hinges on huge, glaring coincidences.This book isn't a terrible addition to the series, but it certainly isn't a strong one. I actually think Kurland should consider writing her next book about an entirely new family, unconnected to the Cameron or de Piaget clans. I could probably have overlooked the weaknesses in the plot and characterization, but the biggest flaw in the book is that it really lacked the magic and wonder of some of her other titles. Even in time travel, and that's where I think Kurland could benefit from branching into another family, wholly disconnected (at least for some time) from the usual families she writes about. There was admittedly some short-lived disbelief, but there was no sense of awe or wonder about time travel in this book - for Derrick, it was old hat, and for Samantha, there was some disbelief at first but there was no significant sense of wonder from her in time traveling. (The first time, she doesn't even know she's really done it; the second time, they're in and out and she has other things on her mind. The third time, we're at the end of the book, so who really cares anymore?) At the point she COINCIDENTALLY runs into a member of her family who ALSO travels to the past like it's some kind of hobby, I can't help but 1) feel that's some heck of a coincidence and 2) wish I could get the feeling again that time travel is something amazing and incredible to do...not like it's just another way to kill a Saturday night. Readers can't really get a sense of wonder and enchantment from characters who are so hum-drum about it, so it would be nice to get into the heads of characters for whom this is all new.It's an okay way to kill a few hours, but if you want to read a great book about time-travel, romance, or even just to get a sense of Kurland's usual style, I'd probably skip it.
Do You like book Roses In Moonlight (2013)?
I prefer the medieval-based books in this series, but this was a good read, too.
—frenda97
Good mystery, fun couple and quirky characters. Kurland never disappoints!
—Mightydoll
