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Books : reviews

Isabella Barclay.
A Bachelor Establishment.
Accent Press. 2015

rating : 4 : passes the time
review : 11 July 2017

Elinor Bascombe, widowed and tied to an impoverished estate, has learned to ask little of life. With no hope of leaving, the years have passed her by.

Lord Ryde, exiled abroad after a scandal, has returned to strip his estate and make a new start in America.

A chance encounter changes their plans, plunging Elinor and Lord Ryde into adventure and not a little peril until, finally, they are forced to confront the mystery of what happened on That Night, all those years ago.

Are they both so entangled in the riddles of the past that they are about to miss this one last opportunity for future happiness?

Mrs Elinor Bascombe, impoverished widow, and Lord Ryde, impoverished rake, are both past the first blush of youth. But chance throws them together, and in this kind of book, chance will provide.

I bought this because it is by Jodi Taylor, who writes the excellent St Mary’s historical time-travel romance intrigue comedies. It has the same kind of feisty passionate damaged protagonists, but, without the time travel, a rather more linear plot.